<p> The purpose of this study was to evaluate the effects of a social participation based aphasia treatment called conversational coaching. Conversational coaching involves teaching individuals with aphasia and their communication partners (e.g., spouses/caregivers) strategies to facilitate more efficient and meaningful conversation. Two dyads participated in a multiple baseline experimental design across subjects. During baseline sessions, the individual with aphasia watched a videotaped story and then attempted to communicate the story&rsquo;s content to his/her spouse. During treatment sessions, the same general procedure was used, but the investigator coached both participants in the use of selected communicative strategies to facilitate transmission of information and improve the quality of their conversations. The primary dependent variable was the percentage of main concepts successfully co-constructed during conversations. In addition, social outcome measures were used to evaluate the treatment&rsquo;s impact on communicative confidence and quality of life. Positive outcomes were obtained for both dyads</p>

<p> ABSTRACT Augmentative and alternative communication (AAC) is defined as &ldquo;all forms of communication (other than oral speech)&hellip;used to express thoughts, needs, wants and ideas&rdquo; (&ldquo;Augmentative and Alternative Communication (AAC),&rdquo; 2012). Working memory is a temporary cognitive process, which briefly maintains and manipulates information while it is being encoded as a part of long-term memory (Engle, Nations, &amp; Cantor, 1990; &ldquo;Introduction to Working Memory&rdquo;, 2007). It has been suggested that based upon the unique skill set and needs of users of AAC systems, the design of these systems should reflect knowledge gleaned from the cognitive sciences (Light &amp; Lindsay, 1991) with training and implementation of AAC incorporating an understanding of the cognitive processes impacting memory, learning, and visual processing (Light &amp; Lindsay, 1991; Wilkinson &amp; Jagaroo, 2004). This study sought to examine how users of AAC managed and perceived the cognitive load associated with working memory demands while communicating and what specific strategies and/or design features users of AAC perceived they used during conversation when using AAC. Results revealed an overall large amount of variability in participants&rsquo; responses. Length of symbol/word sequences, word prediction, seeing the message as it is being created, attention to the conversational topic, and attempting to remember what their conversational partner said appeared to be judged as having the highest degree of importance for the use of a speech generating device and success and message completion in conversation. Errors in conversational while using a speech generating device and stressors during the conversational process appeared to be most closely related to reported lack of time to create messages and the time it takes to create messages. Users of AAC did not report high frequency of actives attention to the working memory processes and design features.</p>

<p> <i>Purpose:</i> The current study sought to investigate the relationship between two metrics of sentence intelligibility in adults with Parkinson&rsquo;s Disease (PD), Multiple Sclerosis (MS), and healthy controls. An objective measure of intelligibility, orthographic transcription, and a subjective measure of intelligibility, Visual Analog Scaling (VAS), were the two metrics of intelligibility examined. Areas of interest included 1) comparisons of the pattern of intelligibility change in transcription and VAS, 2) strength of the relationship between these two types of intelligibility measures, and 3) differences in intralistener and interlistener reliability between the two metrics. </p><p> <i>Methods:</i> 78 speakers and the speech samples reported in Tjaden, Sussman, and Wilding (2014) and Kuo, Tjaden, and Sussman (2014) were used in the current study. The pool of 78 speakers consisted of 32 healthy control speakers, 16 speakers with PD, and 30 speakers with MS. Speakers read Harvard Psychoacoustic Sentences in habitual, clear, fast, loud, and slow conditions. In Tjaden et al. (2014) and Kuo et al. (2014), 50 naive listeners used a VAS on a computer to estimate how much of the speaker&rsquo;s message was understood (e.g., from &lsquo;didn&rsquo;t understand anything&rsquo; to &lsquo;understand everything&rsquo;). In the current study, 50 naive listeners heard the same stimuli, but were instructed to type exactly what they heard. Responses were scored to obtain a percentage of key words transcribed correctly for each stimulus. Results from the current study were compared to results from the VAS task studies (Tjaden et al., 2014; Kuo et al., 2014) using descriptive statistics (e.g., mean, standard deviation, etc.), parametric statistics (e.g., multivariate linear model fit to the data in this repeated measured design), correlation analyses (e.g., between the two metrics), and metrics of reliability. </p><p> <i>Results and Discussion:</i> Results revealed that the pattern of transcription intelligibility scores was very similar to scaled intelligibility derived from VAS. However, transcription scores were higher in magnitude than the VAS scores. In addition, correlation analyses showed the two intelligibility measures were highly correlated. Last, both interlistener and intralistener reliability were marginally higher for the VAS reported in Tjaden et al. (2014) and Kuo et al. (2014) than for the transcription data in the current study. These results suggest that a less time-consuming task, such as the VAS task, may be a viable substitute for a more time-consuming transcription task when documenting intelligibility in a clinical population to obtain an overall metric of severity for tracking disease progression and/or treatment progress. </p>

<p> This dissertation, employing a social constructivist orientation, investigated the socialization behaviors employed by school age children with Autism Spectrum Disorders (ASD) in the context of meaning-based writing activities. A qualitative investigation, this study used ethnographic methods to describe and interpret the social behaviors of the individual participants throughout the writing events. Data in the form of audio and video recordings, participant observations, artifacts, and parent interviews for three participants with ASD were collected over the course of one academic semester during group social, literacy-based intervention. The manifestations of socialization evidenced during micro analysis of a primary data set were described in detail and triangulated via multiple secondary data sources. Findings demonstrate that all three participants oriented uniquely to socialization within the writing events.</p><p> Though the participants all evidenced unique manifestations of socialization, their behaviors could be conceptualized into broad patterns. Results of this study describe five patterns of the manifestations of socialization across all three participants; these included employment of social compensatory strategies, conceptualization of shared writing process as a social interaction, social monitoring behaviors, conceptualization of writing as something to be shared, and using writing as an opportunity to socialize/affiliate. Three additional patterns noted include participants being more successful with clinicians than peers, clinician mediation of peer-peer interactions, and breakdowns in coherence.</p><p> Clinical research implications drawn from the results include the importance of a strengths-based, contextualized approach to assessment and intervention and the value of the peer group, and the unique opportunities meaning-based writing intervention s can provide for addressing socialization. Research implications address the notion of social impairment as a distinct category of impairment as problematic.</p>

The thesis titled Role of speech therapist in the rehabilitation of patients with neurological disorders characterizes the role of speech therapy intervention as an integral part of the multidisciplinary team taking care of a patient with a neurological diagnosis in the process of comprehensive rehabilitation care. The theoretical part of the thesis is based on professional literature, it defines the terminology related to communication and communication disability in general, then it focuses on neurological diseases and patients with neurogenic communication disorder. The main part is focused on speech therapy intervention in the process of comprehensive rehabilitation of patients with neurological diseases. The practical part of the thesis presents results of a survey, carried out on neurological departments of hospitals in the Czech Republic in October 2016 to obtain information on whether and how the speech therapy intervention is provided at neurological departments in hospitals in the Czech Republic. Key words: Communication, neurogenic communication disorders, neurological department, speech disorders, speech therapist, speech therapy intervention