Book Summary: This one-of-a-kind resource presents a wide range of expert opinions about phonological disorders in children, allowing readers to understand and compare diverse approaches to assessment and intervention, choose the ones that will work best, and use their new knowledge to make decisions during clinical interventions. For each of the book's three sections—Assessment and Classification, Goal and Target Selection, and Intervention —the editors pose important "frequently asked questions" for each contributor to answer, such as Which diagnostic classification system do you find useful? How does your assessment differ for children of different ages, developmental levels, or linguistic backgrounds? How do you integrate language goals with phonological goals? What factors influence your selection of treatment goals and targets? When should a child receive individual therapy as opposed to group therapy? What do you do when your intervention plan is not working? Through the theoretical insights and practical experience each contributor shares— and a helpful conclusion that comments on all the approaches discussed — readers will have the broad and balanced knowledge they need for informed clinical decision making. Speech-language pathologists, graduate students, audiologists, and educators will use this comprehensive, accessible resource to shape their practices and improve the lives of children with phonological disorders. Phonological Disorders in Children is a part of the Communication and Language Intervention Series

Book Summary: This book was written for more than 50 million Americans who experience tinnitus - some 2 million disabled by it. Just some of the helpful ideas and simple treatment options in this book that readers can effectively accomplish at home include altering medications or changing diets, using sound therapy such as music, learning techniques for improving concentration through use of positive imagery, and improving sleep patterns by controlling middle-of-the-night thinking. The enormous advantages of this book over other titles on this topic come from the 17 renowned scientists who have contributed to this invaluable consumer resource, one that will make a difference in the lives of readers who suffer from this unfortunate malady.

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The McGurk effect is an illusion that occurs when an auditory /ba/ is combined with a visual /ga/. The two stimuli fuse together which leads to the perception of /da/, a sound in between /ba/ and /ga/. The purpose of this study was to determine whether music performance and visual arts majors process mismatched auditory and visual stimuli, like the McGurk effect, differently. Nine syllable pairs were presented to 10 native English speakers (5 music performance majors and 5 visual arts majors between the ages of 18 and 28 years) in a four-forced-choice response paradigm. Data from event-related potentials were recorded for each participant. Results demonstrate that there are differences in the electrophysiological responses to viewing the mismatched syllable pairs. The /ga/ phoneme in the music performance group produced more differences while the /da/ phoneme produced more differences in the visual arts group. The McGurk effect is processed differently in the music performance majors and the visual arts majors; processing begins in the earliest latency epoch in the visual arts group but in the late latency epoch in the music performance group. These results imply that the music performance group has a more complex decoding system than the visual arts group. It also may suggest that the visual arts group is better able to integrate the visual and auditory information to resolve the conflict when mismatched signals are presented.

While there is a clear and immediate need for reliable speech audiometry materials to evaluate the speech recognition threshold (SRT), these recorded materials are not available in Cebuano, a language of the Philippines with 15.8 million speakers. The purpose of this study was to develop, digitally record, evaluate, and psychometrically equate a set of Cebuano trisyllabic words for use in measuring the SRT. To create the SRT materials, common Cebuano trisyllabic words were digitally recorded by a male talker of Cebuano and presented for evaluation to 20 native speakers of Cebuano with normal hearing. Based on psychometric performance, a set of 21 trisyllabic words with a psychometric function slope >7%/dB that allowed threshold adjustments to the pure tone average were selected and digitally adjusted. The resulting mean psychometric function slopes at 50% for the 21 SRT trisyllabic materials was 10.2%/dB. The results of the current study are comparable to those found in other languages. Digital recordings of the trisyllabic words are available on compact disc.

This study examined the effect of intervention involving a humanoid robot on challenging or tantrum behaviors of four children with low-functioning autism spectrum disorders (ASD). The current work was part of a larger study involving the effect of the robot on functional communication skills on a variety of different interactions with different communication partners. All participants took part in a single-subject, multiple-baseline design with various session types including baseline, traditional play-based treatment, treatment including the robot, and follow-up sessions. For the purpose of this study, only the sessions including treatment with the robot where the robot interaction occurred at the beginning or the end of a 50-minute session were analyzed. Six different categories of tantrum behaviors were analyzed during the sessions including: crying/screaming; self-distracting behaviors; biting, hair pulling, squeezing or pinching; throwing/shoving; and hitting/kicking. Results indicate that for 3 out of the 4 children, tantrum behaviors decreased when the robot interaction came at the beginning of the session. The fourth child showed minimal change in tantrum behaviors. To improve understanding of the influence of a robot on children with ASD, future research should be conducted to determine what aspects of the robot interaction would be most effective on reducing these behaviors.

The purpose of this study was to develop, digitally record, evaluate, and psychometrically equate a set of Arabic monosyllabic word lists to use in the measurement of the word recognition score. Familiar Arabic monosyllabic words were digitally recorded by a native male talker from Jordan who was judged to have a standard Arabic dialect. Twenty native Arabic participants with normal hearing were used as subjects to determine the percentage of correct word recognition for each word at 10 intensity levels ranging from -5 to 40 dB HL in 5 dB increments. The monosyllabic word data were analyzed using logistic regression. The words producing the steepest psychometric function were included in the final word lists. Four lists of 50 words each were created and eight half-lists (25 words each) were created from the four lists. A Chi-square analysis was performed, revealing no statistical differences among the lists and half-lists. The mean monosyllabic psychometric function slopes at 50% for lists and half-lists were 4.8%/dB.

Recent studies and literature regarding children with language impairment (LI) indicate that these children have difficulty with social communication skills. This study assessed the effect of a social communication intervention on teacher perceptions of withdrawal in six elementary school age participants with LI. The social communication intervention included story sharing, identifying pictures of facial expressions, and journaling to target emotion understanding. The Teacher Behavior Rating Scale (TBRS) was utilized to measure teacher perception of withdrawal. The TBRS examined three subscales of social withdrawal: solitary-active withdrawal, solitary-passive withdrawal, and reticence. Following treatment, teacher ratings of withdrawn behavior decreased for all six participants on some of the subscales. Solitary-active behavior decreased for four of the six participants, solitary-passive behavior decreased for five participants, and reticent behavior decreased for three participants. Teacher ratings of withdrawal for two participants increased on a single subscale, however. These changes suggest positive post-treatment outcomes with regard to withdrawn behavior in children with LI.

This project examined the story generations of five children with language impairment (LI) between the ages of 5;11 and 10;1 across the treatment sessions of a narrative-based intervention program designed to improve social communication. These stories were analyzed to find whether the participants would approach the task by describing the stimulus pictures or if their stories would reflect an episodic structure containing cause and effect relationships. Additionally, the stories were analyzed for inclusion of emotion words to discern the participants' awareness of the characters' emotions. There was a high degree of variability in the participants' performance; however, the majority of the stories were composed of picture descriptions, and most of the participants generated short stories with few episodic elements in response to the probes over the course of treatment. In terms of emotion word use, two of the participants increased their use of emotion words in later sessions. Overall the participants' performance on the story generation probe did not reflect their performance in other treatment tasks including shared book readings, story enactments, and journal writing. This was likely due to their disinterest or fatigue in the story generation task and stimuli, as well as their continued need for the clinician modeling that was present in the other treatment tasks. Future research is needed to determine effective treatments that help school-aged children with LI recognize goal-directed behavior and emotional content in stories.

Research has shown that children with language impairment (LI) exhibit difficulties with both social communication and syntax. This study analyzed the effect of a social communication intervention on syntactic development, focusing on grammatical complexity in three children with LI when enacting stories. The intervention included reading and enacting stories, playing games with picture emotion cards and journaling. Each child's mean length of terminal unit (t-unit), the number and type of subordinate clauses they produced per t-unit, and the grammaticality of their complex sentences was analyzed. While none of the children increased their mean length of t-unit or the grammaticality of their sentences, one participant showed a slight increase in the number of subordinate clauses she used and another participant changed the basic format with which she enacted stories to a more mature format. The results of this study did not support the claim that a single intervention could target both social communicative and syntactic goals simultaneously. There were limitations to this study that, if addressed, could potentially support this claim.