The purpose of the current study was to examine the effects of a multi-tiered oral narrative language intervention on kindergarteners’ oral and written narrative and oral expository skills. The participants included 686 kindergarten students from four school districts in the upper Midwest. They were randomly assigned at the classroom level to a treatment or control condition. The treatment group received large group (tier-1) oral narrative language instruction led by classroom teachers and followed the Story Champs procedures. Students whose oral narrative retell skills did not improve after one month of large group instruction were placed in small groups and received more intense oral narrative language instruction in addition to Tier 1 instruction. Tier 2 instruction followed the Story Champs small groups producers and was administered by speech-language pathologists. At posttest, students’ narrative retell, personal story generation, narrative writing, and expository retell scores were analyzed. The treatment and control groups were compared across all measures. The Tier 2 treatment group was also compared across all measures to matched samples of at-risk, average, and advanced students in the control group. The results indicate that the treatment group made significant improvements across all measures when compared to the control group. Tier 2 students consistently performed similarly to or significantly outperformed their at-risk, average, and advanced peers across all measures with the exception of expository retell. This study demonstrates the effectiveness of a multi-tiered oral narrative language intervention in improving the narrative and expository language skills of kindergarten students. Future research is needed to determine the effects of implementing an explicit expository oral language intervention on kindergarten students’ language skills.

This cross-validation study investigated the extent that a Spanish narrative language dynamic assessment accurately identified students with and without language disorder across three separate samples of bilingual and monolingual Spanish-speaking students from Guatemala, Mexico, and the U.S. Students with language disorder and students with typically developing language were administered a narrative dynamic assessment in Spanish. A test-teach-retest format of dynamic assessment was followed and student modifiability, or learning ability, was rated directly following the teaching phase of the assessment. Results indicated that the most predictive dynamic assessment variables for the Guatemalan sample were posttest scores combined with two separate modifiability measures (i.e., total modifiability scores and modifiability final judgment scores). These same variables were applied in the cross-validation classification analyses of the Mexico and U.S. samples with good classification accuracy achieved. The results of this study indicate that a Spanish narrative dynamic assessment may be a culturally appropriate diagnostic tool in identifying Spanish-speaking students with language disorder.

Subglottic stenosis (SGS) is a narrowing of the airway below the vocal folds and above the trachea. This narrowing may be idiopathic or caused by scarring in the airway due to prolonged endotracheal intubation, radiation therapy, trauma, or gastroesophageal reflux disease. People who present with SGS often experience respiratory difficulty both at rest and during exertion. Breathing difficulty increases with stenosis severity. SGS is also associated with voice problems. Research has identified relationships among stenosis severity, voice function and certain types of surgical management; however, many aspects of these relationships are not fully understood due to the complexities of studying human phonation in this population. The purpose of the present study was to examine the effects of SGS on aerodynamic features of voice function using an excised larynx benchtop mechanical model. Specifically, this research involved the comparison of excised porcine vocal fold vibration at baseline and under experimental conditions of 50% and 75% stenosed. The dependent variable was phonation threshold pressure (PTP), the minimum pressure needed to initiate and maintain vocal fold vibration. PTP was analyzed for nine excised porcine larynges, sampled three times each, at baseline and the two stenosis conditions. The results of this study revealed no differences in PTP based on within-subjects comparisons. Because airflow changes with airway narrowing, this finding might indicate that other factors are responsible for the voice problems associated with SGS that were not accounted for in the current mechanical model. Vocal fold tone is not easily simulated in a benchtop setup and might be an important consideration for future studies. The quantification and manipulation of vocal fold adduction, as well as the study of high-speed imaging, could be useful in future work involving excised larynx mechanical models for the study of SGS. The results from this pilot work represent an important step toward optimizing the experimental setup for studying aerodynamic features of SGS.

The purpose of this study was to explore the impact of oral narrative intervention delivered in a multi-tiered system of support format on proximal narrative retell outcomes, and more distal personal story generation and expository language outcomes of preschool and kindergarten students. Participants included 241 preschool and kindergarten students. Students were divided into 3 different groups (treatment, alternate treatment, and no-treatment control). The treatment group received Story Champs Tier 1 oral narrative language intervention from their classroom teacher twice a week for 15-20 minutes over 14 weeks. A sub-sample of students from the Story Champs group who did not meet a narrative retell criterion after 1 month of large group instruction were assigned to receive additional, Story Champs Tier 2 small group intervention. Tier 2 narrative intervention consisted of two 20-minute small group narrative intervention sessions each week for 14 weeks. The students assigned to the alternate treatment group participated in Tier 1 shared storybook reading intervention with their classroom teacher twice a week for 15-20 minutes over 14 weeks. Students in the no-treatment control group participated in classroom activities that were in place at the outset of the school year. Narrative retell and personal story language samples were elicited and scored using the CUBED Narrative Language Measures (NLM) subtest, and an expository language sample was elicited and scored using a researcher-generated protocol. Students in the Story Champs group had significantly higher posttest narrative retell scores with large effect sizes compared to the shared storybook and no-treatment control groups. Students in the Story Champs and shared storybook reading groups performed to a similar degree in their ability to generate a personal story at posttest. Expository retell posttest results were not significantly different between all of the different conditions. This study contributes to previous research suggesting that brief multi-tiered oral narrative language intervention can improve the receptive and expressive academic language of young children, as measured using narrative retelling. This study provides evidence that multi-tiered systems of support (MTSS) for language can be successfully delivered by teachers and speech-language pathologists working in the schools. It is also evident that both oral narrative language intervention and shared storybook interventions can improve personal story generations. However, the narrative-based interventions applied in this study did not appear to significantly impact expository language.

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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.

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