Test and measurement bias in special education diagnosis has been well documented. Boys, linguistic and ethnic minorities, and children with behavior problems are among those overrepresented in several handicap categories, including speech impairment. Recent evidence indicates that variables associated with test interpretation or diagnostician background (non-measurement factors) may be better predictors of diagnostic bias. This study investigated the ability of non-measurement factors to predict the diagnostic decisions made for 345 speech impaired children enrolled in Head Start. Computer Assisted Telephone Interviews and Case File Review were used to collect data about (1) child characteristics, (2) diagnostic criteria, and (3) diagnostician background. Hierarchical regression procedures were used to test the predictive power of these three blocks of variables and of specific variables within each block. The diagnostician's rating of articulation severity was the criterion variable. The test score was the best predictor of articulation severity rating; non-measurement factors were not found to be effective predictors of the articulation component of speech diagnosis. There was some indication, however, that non-measurement factors may be related to the language component of speech assessment. Further investigation of the language severity rating and of other non-measurement factors was suggested. / Ph. D.

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The purposes of this investigation were to identify, via the Pragmatic Protocol, the incidence of pragmatic disorders within public school articulation and language caseloads and a control group of normal students and to specify the pragmatic areas, i.e., utterance propositional, and/or illocutionary/perlocutionary act categories in which deficits occur.

Language delay and phonological delay have been shown to coexist. Because they so often co-occur, it is possible that they may interact, sharing a relationship during the child's development. A group of children who were "late talkers" as toddlers, achieved normal development in their syntactic ability by the preschool period. Because their language abilities are known to have increased rapidly, data on their phonological development could provide information on the relationship between phonological and syntactic development. The purpose of this study was to compare the percentage of phonological process usage of the eight most commonly used simplification processes in four-year-old expressive language delayed (ELD) children, children with a history of slow expressive language development (HX), and normally developing (ND) children. The questions this study sought to answer were: do ELD children exhibit a higher percentage of phonological process usage than ND children, and are HX children significantly different in their percentage of phonological process usage than ND and/or ELD children.

The purpose of this study was to determine if single-word elicitation procedures used in the assessment of phonological processes would have highly similar results to those obtained through connected speech. Connected speech sampling provides a medium for natural production with coarticulatory influence, but can be time-consuming and impractical for clinicians maintaining heavy caseloads or working with highly unintelligible children. Elicitation through single words requires less time than a connected-speech sample and may be more effective with highly unintelligible children because the context is known, but it lacks the influence of surrounding words. Given the inherent differences between these two methods of elicitation, knowledge of the relative effectiveness of single-word and connected-speech sampling may become an issue for clinicians operating under severe time constraints and requiring an efficient and effective means of assessing phonological processes.

Highly unintelligible children may mistakenly be assumed to have difficulty only with the misarticulation of consonants. Expressive language concerns may be ignored while the primary focus of intervention becomes the correction of misarticulated speech. Questions have arisen regarding the possibility of both speech and expressive language difficulties contributing to unintelligibility. Shriberg and Kwiatkowski (1982) developed an ordinal means of rating severity of involvement. One of the constructs of the severity scale was intelligibility. The metric percentage consonants correct (PCC) was developed to identify severity of involvement of disorders of phonology.

Two preschool males who presented with the characteristics of developmental verbal dyspraxia were enrolled in a phonological cycles intervention approach. Initially, each child's deviant phonological processes were analyzed by the CAPD and target patterns and words selected for remediation. A continuous speech sample was obtained and analyzed to measure intelligibility by percentage and rating on a seven point scale. A time-space probe was developed based on targeted and non-targeted phonemes and administered prior to the first intetvention session. Using the selected targeted patterns and words, an individualized remediation plan was developed, and the phonological process cycling approach used. Each subject participated in 60 minutes of intervention for each targeted pattern to complete the first cycle in approximately 10 weeks. The time-space probes were administered approximately every two weeks.

Researchers have long been concerned with the effects of otitis media on speech and language acquisition because of the high correlation of a mild to moderate hearing loss during the time period that fluid (effusion) may be in the middle ear. Middle-ear effusion would prevent many of the auditory messages from accurately reaching the nervous system (Zinkus, 1986). Deprived of the ability to discern the subtle acoustic differences that provide information for phonetic contrasts, a child's speech acquisition may differ from children who do not experience such losses.

When the primary mode of communication is speech, the crucial ingredient for successful communication is intelligible speech. The speech of children with disordered phonologies is often unintelligible. Accurate and reliable measurement of speech with compromised intelligibility is essential if appropriate treatment procedures are to be chosen and implemented. The focus of this investigation was the measurement of speech intelligibility in young children. The purpose of this study was to investigate the relationship between the subjective method of trained ear estimation and the objective method of orthographic transcription when measuring the speech intelligibility of young speakers with a wide range of phonological profiency. For this study, the standard measurement of intelligibility was operationally defined as the percentage of words understood in a continuous speech sample derived from orthographic transcription of the sample. The secondary purpose was to investigate the accuracy of the speech-language pathologists' estimates as compared to the standard measure for each of the three groups: (a) the children with the most intelligibility, (b) with average intelligibility, and (c) with the least intelligibility. Data were collected from 47 children, aged 4:0 to 5:6, who comprised three groups with varying levels of intelligibility. Two groups of listeners who were unfamiliar with the speakers, but familiar with the topic, rated the children's percentage of intelligibility from continuous speech samples via orthographic transcription or trained ear estimation. The two methods of measuring speech intelligibility investigated in this study were found to correlate highly (£ = .96). However, there was a significant difference between the percentages derived from orthographic transcription and those derived from trained ear estimation for some speakers. The 1-test analyses revealed significant differences between the two measures for the two most intelligible groups, and no significant difference for the least intelligible group. It appears that the subjective method of estimating speech intelligibility with trained ears correlates with the objective method of orthographic transcription, but yields a different percentage score for some speakers.

One of the most common articulation errors made by children is on the phoneme Ir I. Treatment techniques for this sound have varied and have included the stimulus approach (Van Riper, 1972), phonetic placement techniques (Scripture, 1923), the sensory-motor approach (McDonald, 1964), the motokinesthetics approach (Young & Hawk, 1938), and sequential programming approach (Shriberg, 1975; Wood, 1988), to name a few. An integral part of many of these treatment methods is the use of the auditory stimulation. An innovative technique using a prosthetic device to facilitate the production of Ir I was used by Leonti, Blakeley, and Louis (1975), in the treatment of a 9.8 year old male. A follow-up study was conducted by Clark, Schwarz, and Blakeley, (1993) in which a prosthetic device, the R-appliance, was used to facilitate the production of Ir I at the word level. The results of the study indicated that the appliance facilitated the production of Ir I in isolation, in words, and in spontaneous speech. The present study investigated the use of the R-stick appliance as a facilitative device for the production of the Ir/ phoneme at the word level. It was hypothesized that the experimental group (R-stick) would have higher mean scores at the word level than the control group (no R-stick). This hypothesis was not supported by the data. Both groups showed significant improvements in their Ir I word productions, but no difference was shown between the two treatment approaches. There are several possible reasons for these results: (a) insufficient training with the use of the R-stick and the treatment protocol, (b) lack of probes during the course of the study, (c) length of treatment, (d) the small number of subjects participating in the study, and (e) the R-stick appliance is a clinician-manipulated tool.