Thesis (M. Communication Pathology)--University of Pretoria, 2005. / Summary in English and Afrikaans. Includes bibliographical references.

Doctorat en sciences psychologiques / info:eu-repo/semantics/nonPublished

Responses of six severely language delayed (SLD) children were obtained on three measures of central auditory processing and one measure of language proficiency. The results of these measures were compared to the results obtained from six normal-hearing children, matched in age and Performance IQ on the WISC-R. The 12 children were tested with the Pitch Pattern Sequence Test (PPST), the Dichotic Digit Tests (DDT), and the Pediatric Speech Intelligibility Test (PSI). Differences in the central auditory abilities as well as the history of each child were presented in .a case study format. The results of the history information demonstrated no unusual problems among these 12 subjects. Ten out of 12 subjects demonstrated abnormal results on at least one measure of the central auditory battery.

D.Ed. (Educational Psychology) / This study is concerned with the acquisition of language skills by the learning disabled child. A thorough literature survey was conducted, in which the acquisition of both the oral language and the written word were investigated. The survey reveals the importance of certain prerequisites for the mastering of language skills. The research also identifies the causes for and consequences of delay in language development. As a result of this survey, the importance of auditory perceptual skills in the acquisition of reading and spelling performances is emphasized in the design of a model for language acquisition. This survey was conducted to design a model for the acquisition of language skills, with special emphasis on auditory perception. Auditory perception skills are used as aids in the reading process to acquire the necessary skills to decode unfamiliar words in the text to be read. In the design of the model attention was given to the relevant and important matters as described in the literature, as well as to some didactical principles in the teaching of the learning disabled. The design of the model is based on the guidelines as deduced from the description as found in the literature, as well as the investigator's own empirical experience for a number of years in the teaching of identified learning disabled children in an aid class of the TED. This model was applied with great success on a group basis in an aid class at a primary school. It was also successfully applied on a great number of children in need of individual remedial teaching. The applicability and value of the model are verified by an ideographic survey conducted on the pupils in the aid class. A case study on six pupils is described in the thesis and the expected improvement in reading and spelling performance is verified.

Please read the abstract in the section 00front of this document / Dissertation (M (Communication Pathology))--University of Pretoria, 2006. / Speech-Language Pathology and Audiology / unrestricted

Please read the abstract in the section 00front of this document / Dissertation (MA (Communication Pathology))--University of Pretoria, 2006. / Speech-Language Pathology and Audiology / unrestricted

The purpose of this study was to investigate the effects of three different levels of skill training in musical timbre discrimination on alphabet sound discrimination in pre-kindergarten and kindergarten children. The findings of prior investigations indicated similarities between aural music and language perception. Psychoacoustic and neurological findings have reported the discrimination of alphabet quality and musical timbre to be similar perceptual functions and have provided, through imaging technology, physical evidence of music learning simultaneously stimulating non-musical areas of the brain. This investigator hypothesized that timbre discrimination, the process of differentiating the characteristic quality of one complex sound from another of identical pitch and loudness, may have been a common factor between music and alphabet sound discrimination. Existing studies had not explored this relationship or the effects of directly teaching for transfer on learning generalization between skills used for the discrimination of musical timbre and alphabet sounds. Variables identified as similar from the literature were the discrimination of same- different musical and alphabet sounds, visual recognition of musical and alphabet pictures as sound sources, and association of alphabet and musical sounds with matching symbols. A randomized pre-post test design with intermittent measures was used to implement the study. There were 5 instructional groups. Groups 1, 2,and 3 received one, two and three levels of skill instruction respectively. Groups 4 received three levels of skill training with instruction for transfer; Group 5 traditional timbre instruction. Students were measured at the 5th (Level 1), 10th (Level 2), 14th (Level 3), and 18th (delayed re-test), weeks of instruction. Results revealed timbre discrimination instruction had a significant impact on alphabet sound-symbol discrimination achievement in pre-kindergarten and kindergarten children. Different levels of timbre instruction had different degrees of effectiveness on alphabet sound discrimination. Students who received three levels of timbre discrimination instruction and were taught to transfer skill similarities from music timbre discrimination to alphabet sound discrimination, were significantly more proficient in alphabet sound symbol discrimination than those who had not received instruction Posttest comparisons indicated skill relationships were strengthened by instruction for transfer. Transfer strategies had a significant impact on the retention of newly learned skills over time.

Listening, as a communication skill, is an essential factor in the normal language development of the' child. Until recently, however, there has been very little research conducted concerning the linguistic parameters that influence the ability to listen. Thus, this investigation was designed to study the effects of two linguistic parameters, construction and semantic constraints on the verbal responses of preschool children in a dichotic listening task. Fifteen children, between the ages of 5-3 to 6-8, were presented with four dichotic listening tasks consisting of 80 stimuli, (40 sentences and 40 pseudo-sentences). The children were asked to report the message delivered to their right ear. The performance of the children was analyzed according to the F-Test and the Test of Least Significant Difference. The results showed that construction errors were the only statistically significant errors (P < .05) among the six types of error types counted in the listening tasks. There were fewer construction errors made when there was a meaningful message to report than when there was a non-meaningful one. Although the semantic parameters were not statistically significant in this study, other investigations have demonstrated their influence on the report of subjects in a dichotic listening task. Therefore, a future research project should be conducted placing a greater emphasis on the semantic parameters. Additionally, a three level listening hierarchy was found. It was based upon the number of construction errors that occurred among the four dichotic listening tasks. This writer feels that future research should pursue the question of an existing hierarchy among dichotic listening tasks. Such an investigation, however, should utilize a larger population than the population tested in this study.

A computer program which pairs auditory stimuli with visual stimuli was developed for the purpose of providing auditory training for the hearing impaired. It utilizes a Texas Instruments 99 /4A computer and Extended BASIC programming language which allows considerable graphics and sound capability. The lessons make full use of the sixteen colors available and the sound is provided three ways: Texas Instruments speech synthesizer, the computer itself (musical tones and noise), and by tape recorder which is controlled by the computer. Focus of the lessons, which are designed for children ages three to five, is awareness of sound, environmental sounds, discrimination of changes in pitch and duration of sound, recognition of rhythm, and early language learning. At this beginning level, the program is primarily teaching by pairing the stimuli repeatedly, but there are some higher level tasks requiring input from the child to identify a stimulus.

Auditory sensitivity was associated with speech perception which influenced Chinese word reading mainly through morphological awareness and rapid automatized naming. In contrast, for English word reading, the best model required an additional direct path from suprasegmental sensitivity (in Chinese) to English word reading on the basis of the proposed model. To be specific, auditory sensitivity was fully mediated by segmental and suprasegmental speech perception which further impacted English word reading mainly through phonological awareness; in addition, suprasegmental perception or speech prosody (in Chinese) was directly associated with word reading. Third, stress sensitivity in English was highly associated with speech prosodic sensitivity in Chinese. Hierarchical regressions also showed that suprasegmental speech perception failed to account unique variance for English word reading beyond phonological awareness when stress sensitivity was further controlled, suggesting that Chinese suprasegmental speech sensitivity may influence English word reading at least partly through its overlap with stress sensitivity. / This study investigated the associations of auditory sensitivity, speech perception, Chinese reading as a first language (L1) and English reading as a second language (L2) in Hong Kong Chinese children. Participants were 180 second and third graders (98 boys and 82 girls, mean age=98.6months). Apart from auditory sensitivity (both temporal and rhythmic processing measures), English stress sensitivity and English word reading, children were also tested on Chinese tasks of speech perception (both segmental and suprasegmental tasks), phonological awareness, rapid automatized naming (digit), verbal short-term memory, morphological awareness and Chinese word reading. I proposed a four-stage model, in which auditory sensitivity is fully mediated by speech perception at both the segmental and suprasegmental levels. These further impact word reading through phonological awareness, rapid automatized naming, verbal short-term memory and morphological awareness. A series of nested model comparisons were conducted to test this model for both Chinese and English word reading using structural equation modeling. For Chinese word reading, the proposed four-stage model was demonstrated to be the best model. / Zhang, Juan. / Advisers: Catherine A. McBride-Chang; Him Cheung. / Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 73-06, Section: B, page: . / Thesis (Ph.D.)--Chinese University of Hong Kong, 2011. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 103-118). / Electronic reproduction. Hong Kong : Chinese University of Hong Kong, [2012] System requirements: Adobe Acrobat Reader. Available via World Wide Web. / Electronic reproduction. [Ann Arbor, MI] : ProQuest Information and Learning, [201-] System requirements: Adobe Acrobat Reader. Available via World Wide Web. / Abstract also in Chinese.