Children with childhood apraxia of speech (CAS) are likely to experience severe and persistent spoken and written language disorder. There is a scarcity of intervention research, however, investigating techniques to improve the speech and literacy outcomes of this population. The series of 5 experiments reported in this thesis investigated phonological awareness and early reading development in children with CAS and trialled a new intervention designed to advance the spoken and written language development of those affected. In the first experiment (presented in Chapter 2), a comparison of 12 children with CAS, 12 children with inconsistent speech disorder (ISD), and 12 children with typical speech-language development (TD) revealed that children with CAS may be particularly susceptible to phonological awareness and reading deficits. There was no difference in the articulatory consistency and speech severity of the CAS and ISD groups, and no difference in the receptive vocabulary of the CAS, ISD, and TD groups. The children with CAS exhibited poorer phonological awareness scores than the comparison groups and had a greater percentage of participants performing below the expected range for their age on letter knowledge, real word decoding, and phonological awareness normative measures. The children with CAS and ISD performed inferiorly than the children with TD on a receptive phonological representation task. The results showed that the children with CAS had a representational component to their disorder that needed to be addressed in intervention. In the second experiment (presented in Chapter 3), a follow-up pilot study was conducted to examine the long-term effects of a previously conducted intensive integrated phonological awareness programme (7 hours of intervention over 3 weeks) on 2 children with CAS. The children aged 7;3 and 8;3 at follow-up assessment had previously responded positively to the intervention. Results showed that the children were able to maintain their high accuracy in targeted speech repeated measures over the follow-up period. One child was also able to maintain her high accuracy in phonological awareness repeated measures. The children performed superiorly on a standardised phonological awareness measure at follow-up than at pre-intervention. Non-word reading ability showed a sharp increase during the intervention period, while minimal gains were made in this measure over the follow-up period. The findings suggested that an integrated intervention was a potential therapeutic approach for children with CAS. In the third experiment (presented in Chapter 4), the effectiveness of an integrated phonological awareness programme was evaluated for the 12 children (identified in the first experiment) aged 4 to 7 years with CAS. A controlled multiple single-subject design with repeated measures was employed to analyse change in trained and untrained speech and phoneme segmentation targets. A comparative group design was used to evaluate the phonological awareness, reading, and spelling development of the children with CAS compared to their peers with TD over the intervention. The children participated in two 6- week intervention blocks (2-sessions per week) separated by a 6-week withdrawal block. Seven children with CAS made significant gains in their production of trained and untrained speech words with 7 of these children demonstrating transfer of skills to connected speech for at least one target. Ten children showed significant gains in phoneme awareness, and 8 of these children demonstrated transfer of skills to novel phoneme awareness tasks. As a group, the children with CAS demonstrated accelerated development over the intervention period in letter knowledge, phonological awareness, word decoding, and spelling ability compared to their peers with typical development. In the fourth experiment (presented in Chapter 5), the speech, phonological awareness, reading, and spelling skills of children with CAS and TD were re-evaluated 6- months following completion of the intervention programme. A measure of reading accuracy and reading comprehension in a text reading task was administered to the children with CAS. There was no difference in the performance of the children with CAS in post-intervention and follow-up assessments. The children with CAS and children with TD presented with similar relative change in phonological awareness, reading, and decoding measures over the follow-up period. The connected reading performance of children with CAS mirrored their phonological awareness and decoding skills. The findings demonstrated that children with CAS were able to maintain gains achieved during the intervention but may need further support to promote sustained development in written language. In the fifth experiment (presented in Chapter 6), the long-term effects of the integrated phonological awareness programme for identical twin boys who participated in the research intervention at pre-school were examined. The study examined Theo and Jamie's spoken language, phonological awareness, reading, and spelling development during their first year of schooling. The results pointed to the benefit of providing phonological awareness within a preventative framework for children with CAS. Theo and Jamie experienced continued growth in speech and phonological awareness skills. They exhibited age-appropriate reading and spelling development during their first year of formal literacy instruction. It was concluded from this series of experiments that children with CAS are particularly vulnerable to phonological awareness and early reading difficulty, and that an integrated phonological awareness intervention is an effective means of developing speech, phonological awareness, reading, and spelling skills in most children with CAS. The intervention appears to target processes underlying spoken and written language development in this population. The results are discussed within a phonological representation deficit hypothesis of CAS and clinical implications of the findings are highlighted.

The assessment of consumer awareness is important to : l) identify awareness needs of adults, 2) design programs to meet those needs, and 3) assess changes in consumer awareness as a result of participation in such programs. A search of the literature failed to identify an instrument using recall rather than recognition to assess adult consumer awareness of sources of product/service information, existing consumer protection laws, and possible channels of recourse. The purpose of this research was to develop a reliable and valid instrument to measure the consumer awareness of adults. The test development study involved 32 respondents from one pre-existing adult group in Northern California, and the construct validation study involved 168 respondents from ten other groups. The complete Test of Consumer Awareness for Adults (TCAA) includes twenty-eight mini-case studies and requires 84 responses . Each mini-case is based on one or more of the 30 consumer problems identified by a national panel of fifteen consumer educators and advocates as being most troublesome to consumers. Respondents were asked to list sources of product/ service information, tell how consumers are protected by law, and identify local channels of consumer recourse for each mini-case. Multiple matrix sampling was used to form four sub-tests, with seven mini- c as e s and 21 responses each, to avoid problems of examinee fatigue and hostility , and t o reduce the time required to administer the test. No significant difference was found between m e an scores on the complete test and estimated total mean scores based on sub-test scores. Two reliability coefficients w ere computed. A measure of internal consistency produced a coefficient alpha of. 95, and a test-retest, over four weeks, with alternate test forms produced a Pearson r correlation coefficient of .73. Information, law, and recourse scores were summed to produce total scores. Low total scores were predominant. From a possible total score of 21, the mean score was 6. 33. Five respondents scored 15 or higher (two standard deviations above the mean), while 94 respondents scored 6 or less. Nine hypotheses were tested for evidence of a relationship between scores on the TCAA and: 1. Having taken a consumer education class; 2. Level of education attained; 3. Level of annual income; 4. Occupation; S. Having filed a consumer complaint; 6. Marital status; 7. Length of time married; 8. Current labor force attachment of women; 9. Population level of place of residence. Analysis o f variance was used to determine whether the re was a significant difference in mean consumer awareness scores when scores were categorized into appropriate subgroups for each variable. There were significant differences (p < .01) in mean consumer awareness scores among the subgroups for four variables: 1. Having taken a consumer education class; 2. Level of education attained; 3 . Current labor force attachment of women; 4. Population level of place of residence. Each student in a university consumer course investigated three consumer problems so that the influence of teaching method on consumer awareness scores could be evaluated. With the TCAA used as a pretest and posttest, a statistically significant increase in the group's mean score was noted. Students in the class participating in the investigations had significantly higher TCAA scores than those students in a similar class which had not participated in the investigations . The TCAA is unique among available instruments in that it relies on recall rather than recognition to assess consumer awareness. It is posited that the reliance on recall makes the test a closer approximation of consumer behavior in an actual marketplace situation than a test that only requires a respondent to recognize the correct solution to a problem.

<p>This paper intends to describe the work and result of the design project Meet App. Meet App lets users interact around their current locations in a direct manner. The user experience is evaluated to get an understanding of the usefulness and interaction with this type of design. The project is related to the context-awareness research field where findings put the project in a greater whole. The result indicates usefulness and enjoyment interacting with the application, but because of the low number of participants the findings cannot be validated.</p>

This paper intends to describe the work and result of the design project Meet App. Meet App lets users interact around their current locations in a direct manner. The user experience is evaluated to get an understanding of the usefulness and interaction with this type of design. The project is related to the context-awareness research field where findings put the project in a greater whole. The result indicates usefulness and enjoyment interacting with the application, but because of the low number of participants the findings cannot be validated.

This quantitative study has been derived from a five-year federal experimental research project entitled English and Literacy Acquisition (ELLA- R305P030032) which targeted Spanish-speaking English Language Learners (ELLs) receiving services in English immersion and bilingual program models. The purpose of this study was to investigate the predictive power of Spanish phonemic awareness in kindergarten on Spanish reading ability in first grade among Spanish-speaking ELLs. Fifty-five students from typical practice bilingual classrooms were included in this study. Phonemic awareness skills were measured using blending phonemes and segmenting words, two subtests from Comprehensive Test of Phonological Processing (C-TOPP). Reading ability was measured using letter-word identification and passage comprehension, two subtests from Woodcock Language Proficiency Battery-Revised (WLPB-R). Data of phonemic awareness skills were collected at the beginning and end of kindergarten and data of reading ability were collected at the beginning and end of first grade. Correlation analysis and multiple regression analysis were performed to address the research questions. The data from this study present a picture of a predictive power of phonemic awareness skills on reading comprehension in Spanish. Results from this study suggest that both skill areas of phonemic awareness in kindergarten have a moderate predictive effect on reading ability at the beginning of first grade. However, phonemic awareness skills in kindergarten did not show a statistically significant relationship to Spanish literacy at the end of first grade. Theoretical and practical implications were discussed.

ABSTRACT Users¡¦ opinions and needs of the underlying products and services are allowed to gather at the Internet communities. Thus, Internet communities play information sharing roles in modern society. This thesis serves laptop computers as the object being studied and asks consumers¡¦ opinions about Internet communities and their purchase behaviors. In addition, brand awareness and risk of awareness played major roles in consumers¡¦ purchase decisions. As a consequence, this research took the three dimensions into consideration and examined the relations between the dimensions and consumers¡¦ purchase decisions for the sake of providing suggestions to laptop firms. The questionnaire answerers are generally students whose age between 20 and 30. The outcomes show that the Internet group bears the greatest loading while the other two dimensions reported significant results as well. Gender, on the other hand, showed no significant differences in dimensions except the male value brand publicity more. Thus, this study gave suggestions to firms based on the results.

This dissertation is an examination phonemic awareness and its relationship to reading ability in literate adults. Phonemic awareness is an indisputable predictor of reading ability in children, but whether the same relationship between phonemic awareness and reading exists in adult readers is unknown. All alphabetically literate adults are understood to be phonemically aware to a certain degree. Moreover, adults pay attention to sound/symbol relationships when reading. Yet, the relationship between phonemic awareness and reading ability in alphabetically literate adults has not been explicitly studied, even though phonemic awareness is understood to be a key component of reading strategy and proficiency. A study was conducted on phonemic and syllabic awareness in adults. The results indicate that adults, despite years of alphabetic reading experience, are differentiated with regard to phonemic awareness and are more syllabically aware than phonemically aware. Additionally, the study demonstrates that phonemic awareness is associated with reading ability in adults, though syllabic awareness is not. Implications and directions for future study are discussed.

Children with childhood apraxia of speech (CAS) are likely to experience severe and persistent spoken and written language disorder. There is a scarcity of intervention research, however, investigating techniques to improve the speech and literacy outcomes of this population. The series of 5 experiments reported in this thesis investigated phonological awareness and early reading development in children with CAS and trialled a new intervention designed to advance the spoken and written language development of those affected. In the first experiment (presented in Chapter 2), a comparison of 12 children with CAS, 12 children with inconsistent speech disorder (ISD), and 12 children with typical speech-language development (TD) revealed that children with CAS may be particularly susceptible to phonological awareness and reading deficits. There was no difference in the articulatory consistency and speech severity of the CAS and ISD groups, and no difference in the receptive vocabulary of the CAS, ISD, and TD groups. The children with CAS exhibited poorer phonological awareness scores than the comparison groups and had a greater percentage of participants performing below the expected range for their age on letter knowledge, real word decoding, and phonological awareness normative measures. The children with CAS and ISD performed inferiorly than the children with TD on a receptive phonological representation task. The results showed that the children with CAS had a representational component to their disorder that needed to be addressed in intervention. In the second experiment (presented in Chapter 3), a follow-up pilot study was conducted to examine the long-term effects of a previously conducted intensive integrated phonological awareness programme (7 hours of intervention over 3 weeks) on 2 children with CAS. The children aged 7;3 and 8;3 at follow-up assessment had previously responded positively to the intervention. Results showed that the children were able to maintain their high accuracy in targeted speech repeated measures over the follow-up period. One child was also able to maintain her high accuracy in phonological awareness repeated measures. The children performed superiorly on a standardised phonological awareness measure at follow-up than at pre-intervention. Non-word reading ability showed a sharp increase during the intervention period, while minimal gains were made in this measure over the follow-up period. The findings suggested that an integrated intervention was a potential therapeutic approach for children with CAS. In the third experiment (presented in Chapter 4), the effectiveness of an integrated phonological awareness programme was evaluated for the 12 children (identified in the first experiment) aged 4 to 7 years with CAS. A controlled multiple single-subject design with repeated measures was employed to analyse change in trained and untrained speech and phoneme segmentation targets. A comparative group design was used to evaluate the phonological awareness, reading, and spelling development of the children with CAS compared to their peers with TD over the intervention. The children participated in two 6- week intervention blocks (2-sessions per week) separated by a 6-week withdrawal block. Seven children with CAS made significant gains in their production of trained and untrained speech words with 7 of these children demonstrating transfer of skills to connected speech for at least one target. Ten children showed significant gains in phoneme awareness, and 8 of these children demonstrated transfer of skills to novel phoneme awareness tasks. As a group, the children with CAS demonstrated accelerated development over the intervention period in letter knowledge, phonological awareness, word decoding, and spelling ability compared to their peers with typical development. In the fourth experiment (presented in Chapter 5), the speech, phonological awareness, reading, and spelling skills of children with CAS and TD were re-evaluated 6- months following completion of the intervention programme. A measure of reading accuracy and reading comprehension in a text reading task was administered to the children with CAS. There was no difference in the performance of the children with CAS in post-intervention and follow-up assessments. The children with CAS and children with TD presented with similar relative change in phonological awareness, reading, and decoding measures over the follow-up period. The connected reading performance of children with CAS mirrored their phonological awareness and decoding skills. The findings demonstrated that children with CAS were able to maintain gains achieved during the intervention but may need further support to promote sustained development in written language. In the fifth experiment (presented in Chapter 6), the long-term effects of the integrated phonological awareness programme for identical twin boys who participated in the research intervention at pre-school were examined. The study examined Theo and Jamie's spoken language, phonological awareness, reading, and spelling development during their first year of schooling. The results pointed to the benefit of providing phonological awareness within a preventative framework for children with CAS. Theo and Jamie experienced continued growth in speech and phonological awareness skills. They exhibited age-appropriate reading and spelling development during their first year of formal literacy instruction. It was concluded from this series of experiments that children with CAS are particularly vulnerable to phonological awareness and early reading difficulty, and that an integrated phonological awareness intervention is an effective means of developing speech, phonological awareness, reading, and spelling skills in most children with CAS. The intervention appears to target processes underlying spoken and written language development in this population. The results are discussed within a phonological representation deficit hypothesis of CAS and clinical implications of the findings are highlighted.

Dissertation (Ph.D.)--Auburn University, / Abstract. Vita. Includes bibliographical references.

Emotional awareness is a basic skill underlying emotional intelligence and forms a critical part of the holistic development of children. This skill is described as a person?s capacity to be in contact with his/her emotions and to effectively express emotions. Emotional awareness can enhance the social skills, academic performance, interpersonal relationships, and positive behaviours of children in middle childhood. Middle childhood is the life stage when children enter the formal school system. The school system primarily emphasises the academic performance of children. However, children also need psychosocial skills in order to adapt to the demands of school and effectively function within the school system. Emotional awareness can thus benefit children within the school environment. Emotional awareness is regarded as a cognitive skill that can be taught to children, for example by means of an emotional awareness programme. The goal of this study was to evaluate the effectiveness of an emotional awareness programme that was developed for children in middle childhood within the school context. For this purpose, the programme was presented to a sample of 55 children in middle childhood in a public school in the Free State Province. A quantitative research approach, based on a quasi-experimental comparison group pre-test post-test research design, was followed. Data was collected and analysed by means of a standardised measuring instrument, the Levels of Emotional Awareness Scale for Children (LEAS-C). The research findings indicate that the respondents that attended the emotional awareness programme, showed enhanced levels of emotional awareness. Thus, it could be stated that the emotional awareness of children in middle childhood can be enhanced through their exposure to an emotional awareness programme. Based on the research results, it is recommended that public schools in South Africa consider the implementation of similar programmes in the school environment. It is further recommended comparative studies are conducted in other public and private schools in South Africa. / Emosionele bewustheid is n vaardigheid onderliggend aan emosionele intelligensie en vorm n kritiese deel van die holistiese ontwikkeling van kinders. Emosionele bewustheid word beskryf as n persoon se vermoë om in kontak met sy/haar emosies te wees en emosies effektief uit te druk, en kan kinders se sosiale vaardighede, akademiese prestasie, interpersoonlike verhoudings en positiewe gedrag bevorder. Die middekinderjare is die lewensfase waarin kinders die formele skoolsisteem betree. In die skoolsisteem word daar hoofsaaklik klem gelê op kinders se akademiese prestasie. Suksesvolle aanpassing en funksionering in die skool vereis egter ook dat kinders oor genoegsame psigososiale vaardighede beskik om by die eise van die skoolomgewing aan te pas. Emosionele bewustheid kan dus voordele vir kinders in die skoolomgewing inhou. Emosionele bewustheid word beskou as n kognitiewe vaardigheid wat aan kinders geleer kan word, byvoorbeeld deur middel van n emosionele bewustheidsprogram. Die doel van hierdie studie was om die effektiwiteit van n emosionele bewustheidsprogram wat vir kinders in die middelkinderjare in die skoolomgewing ontwerp is, te evalueer. Vir hierdie doel is die betrokke program oor n tydperk van twee maande aan n steekproef van 55 leerders in n openbare skool in die Vrystaat aangebied. n Kwantitatiewe kwasi-eksperimentele navorsingsbenadering, gebaseer op n vergelykende groep voortoets natoets navorsingsontwerp, is gevolg en data is ingesamel en geanaliseer deur gebruik te maak van n gestandardiseerde meetinstrument, die Vlakke van Emosionele Bewustheidskaal vir Kinders (LEAS-C). Die navorsingsbevindinge dui daarop dat die respondente wat aan die emosionele bewustheidsprogram deelgeneem het, verhoogde vlakke van emosionele bewustheid getoon het. Derhalwe kan dit gestel word dat die emosionele bewustheid van kinders in die middekinderjare verhoog kan word deur hul blootstelling aan n emosionele bewustheidsprogram. Op grond van die navorsingsresultate word daar aanbeveel dat openbare skole in Suid-Afrika die moontlikheid oorweeg om soortgelyke programme in die skoolomgewing aan te bied. Daar word voorts aanbeveel dat vergelykende navorsingstudies in ander openbare- en privaatskole in Suid-Afrika herhaal word. / Mini Dissertation (MSW)--University of Pretoria, 2016. / Social Work and Criminology / MSW / Unrestricted