Typescript (photocopy) / xxi, 543 leaves : ill. ; 30 cm / Title page, contents and abstract only. The complete thesis in print form is available from the University Library. / Thesis (Ph.D.)--Dept. of Psychology, University of Adelaide

Thesis (M.S.L.T)--University of Canterbury, 2007. / Typescript (photocopy). Includes bibliographical references (leaves 84-105). Also available via the World Wide Web

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Oregon, 2002. / Typescript. Includes vita and abstract. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 147-169). Also available for download via the World Wide Web; free to University of Oregon users.

Research paper (M.A.) -- Cardinal Stritch College -- Milwaukee, 1980. / A research paper submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts in Education (Reading Specialist). Includes bibliographical references (p. 40-44).

During his twelve years of life, T., a gifted boy who was born with severe cerebral palsy, achieved the ability to communicate with "the rest of the world" at an advanced level, though he used facilitated and augmentative communication. The author of this narrative and interpretive study is T.'s father, who maintained a unique dialogue with his son. T. himself volunteered to contribute actively to the study by helping to plan and to edit, and by supplying a number of autobiographical sketches. The pedagogical relationship that existed between T. and his father is prominently featured. The study explores T.'s individual case through thirteen narrative "scenes" (beginning with his birth and ending with his twelfth year), which address various particulars of his lifeworld and his language development. Each narrative scene is followed by two, three, or four interpretive passages, each of which interprets one of seven themes that emerged from T.'s life. The seven themes are: memory, observation, scientific/technological assessment, not foreclosing on the future, integration, communication, and growth. The interpretive passages treat the seven themes at four levels of interpretation: the literal level, the moral level, the allegorical level, and the anagogic level. The attempt is to revive an exegetic practice common in the days before the Enlightenment, Cartesian doubt, and the "mathematical project" (Heidegger, 1993c, p. 293). Following the dictum that "the hermeneutic imagination is not limited in its conceptual resources to the texts of the hermeneutic tradition itself" (Smith, 1991, p. 201), the study borrows from a variety of sources, including Astrology, Waldorf education, and Zen. The reader is offered a direct experience of "the fecundity of the individual case" (Gadamer, cited in Jardine, 1994, p. 143). Emerging, through the thirteen scenes, the seven themes, and the four levels of interpretation, is a unique picture of an exceptional boy's language development. / Education, Faculty of / Language and Literacy Education (LLED), Department of / Graduate

The purpose of this study was to assess the relative effectiveness of a program of speech therapy in the elementary schools by determining the difference between two urban school populations, one having provided a program of speech therapy for ten years previously, and the other lacking such a program, in terms of: 1. pupil performance on a speech test 2. ability of teachers to identify misarticulations, and 3. Pupils’ opinions of their speaking ability and their confidence in speaking situations. Administrators in the field of special education should, be provided with information on the effectiveness of speech therapy in the public school program. Review of the literature was made in terms of studies on speech problems, incidence of speech problems, reports on programmes of speech therapy in public schools, and studies undertaken in Canada. A pilot study was undertaken and the judgments of the investigator, who is a qualified speech therapist, and of one other qualified speech therapist were compared. Two hundred and seventy-six Grade Six pupils in each of two Canadian school systems were screened by the investigator by means of an articulation test, and the results reported quantitatively. Teachers were asked to identify all children with speech misarticulations, and to judge the effect such misarticulations had on the children socially and academically. Teachers’ and therapist's identification of speech misarticulations were compared. Pupils were asked to answer a questionnaire containing questions about their speaking ability and confidence in speaking situations. The investigator gave an arbitrary value to the responses to these questions, and surmised that the higher the total score, the more the pupil’s concern about speaking ability. Results of the questionnaire and speech test were collated, summarized and correlated with IBM data-processing equipment. The results showed a statistically significant difference in the mean scores on the speech assessment of the two groups. The children in the school system providing speech therapy made higher scores. More teachers identified children with articulation difficulties in the school system providing speech therapy. Their judgments compared favourably with the judgments of the investigator. In the total group tested, it was found that children with one or more misarticulations scored, significantly higher on the Pupil Questionnaire than did those children with no misarticulations. This same relationship existed between the mean score on the Pupil Questionnaire for the pupils having one or more misarticulations on the speech assessment, in the school system with therapy. This relationship, however, was not found to be present under the same criteria in the school system that did not provide therapy. The investigator suggests that the differences in the two groups tested may be accounted for on the basis of a speech therapy programme or the basis of other factors which are as yet unidentified. It was recommended further that the same type of study be repeated in two school systems providing speech therapy, and in two school systems which do not provide speech therapy. / Education, Faculty of / Graduate

The description of functional or developmental misarticulation in terms of phoneme-specific speech-motor behaviour has been unsatisfactory because of much inconsistency. Some of the inconsistency has been eliminated by postulating phoneme position-in-a-word as pertinent to articulation difficulty. However research tends to point to patterns of basic speech-motor behaviour larger than phoneme-specific units. Two such supra-phoneme motoric parameters are hypothesized and tested in the responses of a group of 65 normal kindergarten children, using test items selected from the Templin-Darley Diagnostic Test of Articulation. These test items were dichotomized as hypothetically easy or difficult in terms of the two proposed parameters, namely range of anterior-posterior tongue movement and number of lingual constrictions of the buccal cavity, required in the response to each test item. Also, in each instance of misarticulation, the substituted response was analysed for changes with respect to the hypothesized parameters. Responses were electronically tape recorded and phonetically analysed under controlled conditions. Results indicated some evidence for range of anterior-posterior tongue movement as an independent parameter of speech-motor behaviour of kindergarten children. However this was not the case for number-of-lingual-constrictions of the buccal cavity. / Education, Faculty of / Educational and Counselling Psychology, and Special Education (ECPS), Department of / Graduate

Non-crying utterances of six 5- to 16-week-old infants recorded in their home environments are analyzed spectrographically for fundamental frequency (F₀) and duration. Biographical and perceptual data are used qualitatively to suggest reasons for intra- and inter-subject variability. Three major statistical analyses were performed: (1) regressions of acoustic features on age, (2) relationship of F₀ and duration, and (3) contrasts of the child's fundamental frequency in different contexts. Not all regressions of acoustic features on chronological age were significant. However, two trends were evident: (1) exponential increase of duration on age and (2) linear increase of within-utterance range on age. With chronological age as a basis for analysis, inter-subject variability was noted even for these trends. Since neither development nor environment are completely uniform within or among children, developmental and social data might provide a firmer basis for analysis in future. The result that children of the same chronological age vocalized differently simply by number of utterances further supports the need for quantitative developmental and social data as analytical criteria. Analysis of fundamental frequency by duration generally showed that frequency range was dependent on amount of fluctuation and duration of utterance. A more complex analysis of the F₀-contour than can be provided spectrographically might yield more definitive information about this relationship. The child's vocal interaction with his environment was analyzed both qualitatively and quantitatively. A frequency count of the number of utterances in different contexts revealed that most children vocalized more when alone than in the presence of an object or person. Hotelling's T² tests of fundamental frequency in different contexts showed further that children did not alter the F₀-contour or within-utterance range of their vocalizations as a response to different objects or situations. However, the fact that twenty percent of the T² tests were significant -- particularly for the most advanced subject -- demonstrates that these children are at least capable of altering their fundamental frequency according to different situations during the early weeks of life. Further research is indicated in this as well as in the other areas. All trends noted in this study will have to be reviewed in the context of the larger project from which the present sample of six subjects was drawn. / Medicine, Faculty of / Audiology and Speech Sciences, School of / Graduate

Fifteen predominantly English-speaking, and nine predominantly French-speaking kindergarten and grade one children served as subjects in an experiment designed to investigate discrimination learning of distinctive features. Stimuli were presented aurally and consisted of (a)meaningful non-linguistic sounds, (b)four Non-Nasalized Vowels, (c)Nasalized equivalents of the Non-Nasalized Vowels. Subjects were required to press one of four response buttons on each trial. Feedback was provided. Testing continued until all subjects had achieved asymptote across all Tasks. Mean probability of a correct response by session was compared for (a) linguistic versus non-linguistic Tasks, (b)Non-Nasalized versus Nasalized Vowels, and (c)the distinctive features characterizing the vowels. Confusion matrices were obtained for inter-vowel confusions. Results shewed that: (a)linguistic stimuli were not as well learned as non-linguistic stimuli, (b)Nasalized Vowels were learned significantly less well than their Non-Nasalized equivalents, and (c)only the distinctive feature ±nasal appeared to correlate with discrimination learning scores. The other features,±round and ±back , did not appear to operate independently in vowel perception. No evidence was obtained to support the hypothesis that one feature is more easily learned than other features within a discrimination learning task, or that a hierarchy governing the perception of distinctive features exists. The youngest children, however, were observed to perform linguistic tasks significantly less well than the older children. The mains effect for linguistic background of subjects was not significant, although significant interactions between this variable and particular tasks were obtained. Vowels best learned by the children were found to be those that elicited the largest number of verbally mediated responses; these were usually onomatopoeic in nature. Analysis of the discrimination learning results was found to be more amenable to interpretation in terms of traditional parameters of the vocal tract than in terms of distinctive features. No one theoretical framework, however, served consistently to explain the perceptual results obtained. / Medicine, Faculty of / Audiology and Speech Sciences, School of / Graduate

Spontaneous production. Imitation, and Comprehension procedures were used to (a) investigate the acquisition of the adjectival relative clause and descriptive adjective, and (b) to examine the predictive adequacy of two performance models, the Yngve Depth Hypothesis and Transformation Hypothesis. Average mean depth and number of transformational operations were used as predictive indices. Subjects were 20 nursery school children, divided into two groups of 10 each, Group 2-3 (mean age 3.6 years) and Group 4-5 (mean age 5.0 years). Subjects were individually tested in three to five sessions on all three procedures and on two tasks within each procedure. Stimuli consisted of two sets of sentences and pictures, Task 1 and Task 2. Task 1 consisted of 36 sentences which varied according to three criteria: Syntax (relative or simple); Embeddedness [end-(2 levels) or self-embedded]; and Pronoun Use (subject, object or object of preposition). Task 2 consisted of 96 sentences which varied according to three criteria: Syntax (adjective, relative or simple); Type of adjective (base or derived); and Embeddedness [end-(3 levels) or self-embedded]. Corresponding to each sentence content was a set of four pictures (Task 1) or pairs of pictures (Task 2) which served as response alternatives during the Comprehension Procedure. Sixty of the pictures were also used as stimulus materials for Spontaneous Production. Dependent measures were number correct (Imitation and Comprehension), latency (Comprehension), number of responses in three error categories (Task 1 Comprehension), and percentage of responses in 12 error categories (Imitation). Spontaneous production results were presented by examples. Age was found to be a highly significant factor in all analyses of number correct for both tasks and procedures, Group 2-3 performing poorer than Group 4-5. On Tasks 1 and 2, Syntax and Embeddedness were significant factors for Imitation but not Comprehension (number correct). On the Task 1 Imitation Procedure, a Simple > Relative ordering of Syntax means was obtained which was consistent with predictions from both models. On Task 2, however, the obtained Adjective > Simple > Relative ordering of Syntax means was consistent with the predictions made from the Depth Hypothesis but not those made from the Transformation Hypothesis. Adjective sentences were expected to be more difficult than Relative according to the latter hypothesis. The finding of poorer performance on self-embedded Relative sentences than on end-embedded or control Simple sentences on Tasks 1 and 2 for Imitation was also consistent with only the Depth Hypothesis, the Transformation Hypothesis predicting no differences since the sentences did not differ in type or number of transformations. Results of the Comprehension and Imitation Procedures allowed for ordering of means according to difficulty but revealed little about the early form of knowledge of single- or multiple-word modifiers. Qualitative analysis of imitation errors and spontaneous production data proved more fruitful. It was found that (1) the Noun Phrase + with + Noun Phrase and Noun Phrase + participle phrase were earlier occurring forms of multiple- word noun modification than the relative clause; (2) the relative clause did not precede the descriptive adjective in production as would be expected on the basis of the Transformation Hypothesis; (3) even the oldest Ss showed little differentiation of the relative pronoun in imitation or spontaneous production; and (4) self-embedded relative clause sentences never occurred in the spontaneous production protocols. Few errors were made in imitation of Adjective sentences or in spontaneous production; all Ss used adjectives in the nominal productively. It was concluded that neither performance model allowed for adequate description or prediction of performance. The Yngve model ignores the relationship between sentences of differing structure and the Transformation model fails to take into account the sequential nature of production and comprehension. Features of a more adequate model were discussed. / Arts, Faculty of / Psychology, Department of / Graduate