Service delivery and the access to specialized instructions to consumers, encounters many barriers within the profession of speech-language pathology. This state of affairs is largely due to the disparate distribution of speech language services (ASHA, 2005). This restricted access, or an inability to access services, is a result of a number of factors, which include lack of clinicians, insufficient number of facilities in geographic area, and transportation issues (ASHA, 2004e). As a result, students who require specialized reading instruction are not afforded the opportunity to access the necessary treatment. It is essential that the literacy needs of all children be addressed, including those who require specialized instruction (Foorman & Torgesen, 2001; Allington, 1994). Technology, specifically telepractice, is a potential solution to address this dilemma. The purpose of this study is to investigate the reliability and validity of systematic multisensory reading treatment for students who have been identified with a delay in foundational reading skills, addressing foundational reading skills via an internet-based video conferencing system. The results will establish the groundwork for the efficacy, reliability, and validity of internet-based video conferencing as a means of service delivery for foundational reading skills. The foundational reading skills targeted in this study are letter naming knowledge (LNK), letter sound knowledge (LSN) and decoding.

There have been several studies of the Black English (BE) copula. The majority of BE copula studies, however, have focused on production patterns within older child, adolescent and adult speech. Few have concentrated on the copula production patterns of younger BE child speakers, particularly preschool-aged speakers. This has resulted in a general lack of information about the developing grammar of BE child speech. The purpose of the present study is to provide an in-depth analysis of copula production within early BE child speech using a variable rule analysis framework. Thirty 30-minute spontaneous conversational samples from ten 3 to 5 year old BE child subjects were examined for the presence of the following six copula variants: the standard agreeing copula, zero copula, standard non-agreeing copula, go copula, ain't and invariant be. The primary purpose of the analysis procedure was to determine the relative ranking of targeted linguistic constraints with respect to nonstandard copula use. All variants were therefore coded according to the following information: utterance context (i.e., declarative, wh-questions, etc.), type of variant (i.e., standard agreeing, zero copula, etc.), preceding linguistic context (i.e., pronoun, noun phrase, etc.), adjective following linguistic context (i.e., adjective, noun phrase, etc.), person/number context (i.e., third person singular, second person singular, etc.) semantic context (i.e., nomination, attribution, etc.), speech act context (i.e., comment, report/inform, etc.), and discourse function context (i.e., response, initiation, etc.). Nonstandard copula production patterns were then identified for five major utterance types: non-negative declarative, negative declarative, wh-questions, yes/no questions, and embedded clauses. Results revealed similar profiles of zero copula use within the preceding subject, following predicate and person/number environments of non-negative declaratives as has been noted for older speakers in other investigations of the BE copula. In addition, results revealed additional findings relative to zero copula use within negative declaratives, questions and embedded clauses; invariant be, go copula, nonstandard agreeing copula and ain't use across all utterance types; and pragmatic constraints on copula production. The clinical and theoretical implications of these findings are discussed with regard to existing theories of developing BE child grammar, adult BE grammar, and speech/language assessment for the BE child speaker.

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Purpose: To examine pulse oximetry (PO) levels in healthy adult subjects across the adult age span, and to examine the same in a sample of individuals with severe and very severe chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD), and to compare their results. Method: PO levels were recorded via the BIOPAC Systems, Inc. (Goleta, CA) computer based data acquisition unit in conjunction with the Acqknowledge version 4.1 software. Subjects for this study were drawn from a sample of 60 healthy young men and women between the ages of 18 to 38 (30 males and 30 females) and a sample of 60 healthy older men and women (30 males and 30 females) aged 60 years and over. A clinical population of 11 COPD subjects (3 males, 8 females) with an age range of 43 to 82 also participated in the study. Each subject swallowed 10 ml of water three times, 10 ml of applesauce three times, and three small individual pieces of diced pears three times. Results: In the healthy adult group, a 2 (age) x 2 (gender) repeated-measures ANOVA revealed no statistically significant main effects for within-subject factors of bolus type or the interactions of bolus x gender, bolus x age or bolus x gender x age. For between-subject variables there was no main effect for gender but age was significant F(1, 116) = 36.94, p < .001 and the interaction of gender x age was significant F(1, 116) = 5.62, p = .019. For the COPD sample, a Friedman test did not reveal statistically significant differences across the bolus types. For the comparison between the healthy adults and COPD groups a Mann Whitney U test revealed that there were statistically significant differences between the groups for all the of the bolus types: U = 22, p = .011 for water, U = 26, p = .023 for applesauce, and U = 22, p = .011 for pears. Conclusions: Our study contributed information regarding the invariant nature of PO levels in healthy adult swallows across a range of consistencies (for a typical bolus volume). The same pattern was true for individuals with COPD. These results suggest that fluctuations in PO values might indicate respiratory compromise, though additional investigation is warranted to confirm this hypothesis. / A Dissertation submitted to the School of Communication Science and Disorders in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy. / Fall Semester, 2014. / October 24, 2014. / Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease (COPD), Clinical Swallowing Evaulation, Dysphagia, Normal and Abnormal Swallowing, Oxygen Desaturation, Pulse Oximetry / Includes bibliographical references. / Julie A. G. Stierwalt, Professor Directing Dissertation; Leonard L. LaPointe, Committee Member; Richard J. Morris, Committee Member.

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Current methods for assessing African American English (AAE) speaking children's semantic knowledge are seriously flawed. Many AAE-speaking children who do not have language disorders perform poorly on standardized vocabulary tests. However, there is no reason to believe that all of these AAE-speaking children are deficient in their ability to learn a rich and functional vocabulary. Existing vocabulary tests often are culturally biased because lexical items are selected and normed on middle-class Euro-American children. This results in an inherent bias against linguistically and culturally diverse populations. Some African American children have less exposure to the lexical items selected for use on standardized tests than Euro-American middle-class children. These cultural and language differences become exacerbated when these children enter school. Frequently, AAE-speaking children are referred to the school speech-language pathologist (SLP) for language testing. However, the SLP is often ill-equipped to provide an unbiased evaluation due to reasons previously mentioned. The problem for the SLP is to determine what areas of semantics to test and what methods should be utilized in this assessment. This study investigated the processing-dependent measure of fast mapping as an alternative method of assessing semantic knowledge in children. AAE and Standard American English (SAE) speaking children between the ages of four and six were presented with two comprehension tasks involving real verbs and the fast mapping of novel verbs in four different argument structures (intransitive, transitive, transfer, and complement). These tasks were developed to evaluate how children use syntactic bootstrapping to help fix the meaning of new verbs. The participants' performance on the alternative assessment measure was compared to their performance on a commonly used psychometric vocabulary test. Although significant differences were found between AAE- and SAE-speakers in the transitive argument structure for real verbs and transfer argument structure for both real and novel verbs, overall results indicated that both groups were able to fast map novel verbs. A performance gap between AAE and SAE participants on the psychometric vocabulary test was noted in this study. These results suggest the feasibility of fast mapping as a method to reduce test bias in semantic assessment.

The purpose of this investigation was to compare conversational repair strategies of hearing and deaf/hearing-impaired children in response to a partner's indication of communication breakdown. Experimental subjects were eight profoundly deaf children, ages 4 years to 7 years, 6 months, who used total communication. Control subjects were eight hearing children, matched by age and sex to experimental subjects. Each subject was videotaped while individually engaged in two language sample elicitation activities, a structured and an informal communication situation. During the conversation in each experimental condition, the investigator initiated ten stacked clarification request sequences consisting of three neutral queries ("Huh?," "What?," and "I don't understand.") per sequence. The sequences were inserted on alternating items about which the subject spoke, and/or when the subject produced an intelligible utterance of sufficient complexity that a clarification request had validity. The videotaped language samples of the clarification request/repair response sequences were transcribed verbatim. Clarification repairs were coded as repetition, revision, addition, cue, discussion, and inappropriate responses. Variations in the use of total communication by the experimental subjects, and the use of pointing, or other mode variations, by the control subjects were also coded. Frequencies and percentages of occurrence were derived for each request type in each repair category and for each language condition. Chi-square analyses were used to determine the relationships between the variables. Results indicated that while all subjects were aware of the obligatory nature of the clarification requests, experimental and control subjects employed different types of repair strategies. Revision repairs were the most common type of responses, however, deaf/hearing-impaired subjects were twice as likely to revise their utterances while hearing subjects were as likely to repeat as they were to revise their utterances. In addition, hearing subjects were three times more likely to provide cue repair responses as their experimental counterparts. Differences in conversational repair strategies were also evident as the queries in the clarification request sequences progressed. No significant differences were noted within groups when communication conditions were compared. Communication mode variations appeared to have little influence on the coding of repair strategies.

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