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No description available.

No description available.

The production of contrastive stress was studied in normal-hearing and severely and profoundly hearing-impaired children. A picture description task was used to elicit utterances. Contrastive stress was assigned by changing one element in the second and third pictures in sets of three pictures. Stress production was assessed perceptually and acoustically. The normal-hearing and the severely hearing-impaired children were judged to have consistently stressed the element that was changed in the pictures. Some of the profoundly hearing-impaired subjects were judged to have stressed the changed element more often than chance but some did not perform above chance. Acoustic measurements indicated that only the normal-hearing speakers significantly varied both duration and fundamental frequency when stressing words while some of the hearing-impaired children varied only duration. These findings were interpreted as indicating that profoundly hearing-impaired speakers had difficulty producing recognizable contrastive stress and showed deviations in the duration and fundamental frequency of their utterances.

The influence of bolus volume and viscosity on the distribution of anterior lingual force during the oral stage of swallowing was investigated using a new force transducer technology. The maximum force amplitudes from five normal adults were measured at anterior, right and left lateral tongue margins during ten volitional swallows of 5-, 10-, and 20-ml volumes of water, applesauce, and pudding. Results indicated significant increases in peak force amplitude as viscosity increased. Volume did not significantly influence maximum lingual force amplitudes. Individual subjects demonstrated consistent patterns of asymmetrical force distribution across the lingual margins tested. The results suggest bolus-specific properties influence the mechanics of oral stage lingual functioning. This finding has important clinical implications in the assessment and treatment of dysphagic individuals. Applications of the force transducer array in future research are addressed.

Two experiments were designed as a preliminary exploration of how stress is used by language-impaired children in the comprehension of spoken language. Response time was measured as subjects decided whether a probe word given immediately after a sentence had been present in the sentence. The results of the first experiment indicated that the probe latency technique was sensitive to the effects of word category (content versus function words) and word position on the response times of children with normal language in the kindergarten, first, third, and sixth grades. In the second experiment, the probe latency task was used to study the effects of stress in relation to word category, word position and sentence meaningfulness in a group of language-impaired children to whom control groups were matched for language ability and chronological age. The response times of the age-matched group were not affected by stress, word category or word position variations. The language-impaired and language matched groups responded to variations in stress and word category, and to sentence meaningfulness in similar ways. Response times to function words were increased significantly by the addition of stress. It was concluded that the absence of sensitivity to stress appears not to be a major causative factor of language impairment.

Remediation of phonological awareness (PA) deficits in preschool age children is essential to the prevention of delayed acquisition of reading abilities. The purpose of this research was to develop and assess the efficacy of a program to teach PA to preschool-aged children with delayed PA. Ten preschoolers with articulation disorders participated in 8 training sessions focusing on phonological awareness (PA) and phonemic perception. These children made significant improvements in their PA abilities such that their post-treatment PA test performance was not significantly poorer than that of normally developing children, but was significantly better than that of children with an articulation disorder who did not receive the PA training program. The clinical and theoretical implications of the results are discussed. Future research directions are proposed to confirm these results using an experimental design and to isolate the impact of phonemic perception on PA.

<p> The purpose of this study is to specifically look into one businesses website and online efforts to engage potential new hires in providing them with valuable company information. The research questions focused on how effective the company's online advertisements were, as well as the interaction and involvement of the online advertisements. The researcher of this study utilized communication theories based on Todd Gitlin's media torrent theory of oversaturation and Joseph Walther's social information processing theory to conduct research. To conduct the research a survey was given to 20 prospective job seekers and five face-to-face interviews were conducted. The participation in the survey was anonymous and no tracking information was kept. The interviewees that participated in the interview were current employees that were only asked about their application process and the role that social media played in their online job search. The study concludes that most of the prospective job seekers and current employees find social media platforms to be an easy way to find open positions because these online advertisements direct the applicant to the company website for further information. However, many employees also preferred to learn about the company face-to-face, rather than online. </p>

When listeners are presented with stimuli from multiple speakers versus single speakers in a perception experiment, decreased speech recognition accuracy and increased response time results. These findings have been demonstrated in studies that have employed normal (Creelman, 1957; Mullennix & Pisoni, 1990; Nygaard & Pisoni, 1998) and accented speech (Bradlow & Bent, 2008). It is thought that perceptual normalisation processes are, in part, responsible for this perceptual cost (Bladon, Henton, & Pickering, 1984; Johnson, 2009; Magnuson & Nusbaum, 2007; Mullennix, Pisoni, & Martin, 1989). Interestingly, studies are yet to examine whether these same findings occur when listeners encounter dysarthric speech – a naturally degraded speech signal associated with neurological disorder or disease. It has also been found that when listeners are exposed to multiple speakers with dysarthria, they generally adapt to the dysarthric signal over time; resulting in an improved ability to decipher the signal (Liss, Spitzer, Caviness, & Adler, 2002; Tjaden & Liss, 1995a). However, the rate of this adaption when listeners are exposed to a single speaker is yet to be examined. This study aimed to determine: (1) whether the intelligibility of dysarthric speech (in this case, hypokinetic dysarthria associated with Parkinson‘s disease) varied across single versus multi-speaker conditions; and (2) whether intelligibility increased over time when a listener was exposed to a single speaker with dysarthria. To answer these questions, sixty young healthy listeners were randomly allocated to one of four experimental conditions, one multiple speaker and three single speaker conditions. Each listener transcribed 60 three to five word phrases over one session and the results were examined for percent words correct. Contrary to expectations, there was no significant difference in percent intelligibility scores of the listener group who transcribed in a multi-speaker versus transcriptions from the single speaker listener conditions. In addition, perceptual learning effects across the rating period were identified for two out of the three single speaker listener groups only. The absence of significant findings in the multi-speaker versus single speaker transcripts may be explained by further analysis of within speaker variability. Acoustic analysis of the speakers may also shed light on the reduced perceptual learning that occurred in one of the single speaker groups. Greater numbers of speakers and experimental phrases would be beneficial in expanding trends seen in intelligibility of the single speaker groups.

There is substantial heterogeneity within the population of children with language impairment (Bishop, 1998; Leonard, 2014). This heterogeneity has led the research community to consider the possibility of subtypes of language impairment (Bishop & Rosenbloom, 1987; Dollaghan, 2011; Rapin & Allen, 1983; Tomblin et al., 1997). But, previous research on language impairment subtypes is inconclusive (Dollaghan, 2011; Leonard, 2014). This study utilized the EpiSLI database (Tomblin, 2010) to empirically examine the possibility of subtypes by applying statistical analyses designed to detect and classify clusters. Further, this study addressed three key gaps from prior work by: (a) using continuous variables without a priori number of clusters, (b) including cognitive variables, and (c) evaluating subtype models. The EpiSLI database was spilt into two datasets based on clinical status: Typically Developing and Language Impaired. Language and cognitive measures within the datasets were used for clustering analyses. The study included two methods of cluster analysis: Wards and K-means. The results indicated that both the Typically Developing and the Language Impaired datasets did meet the a priori criteria for detecting structure, but this structure did not aggregate into interpretable clusters. Principal components analysis was then applied and reduced the variables to eight components, but did not improve results in terms of yielding interpretable clusters. These results support previous research that argues against subtyping in language impairment (Dollaghan, 2011; Leonard, 2009) while replicating a previous cluster analysis using the EpiSLI data (Tomblin & Zhang, 1999). Because consistent subtypes cannot be demonstrated empirically despite theoretical justification for subtyping patients with SLI, clinicians should focus on individual strength and weaknesses in assessment rather than attempting to subtype patients. Future work should seek to replicate these methods in other databases and with additional measures in order to further explore the possibility of language impairment subtypes.