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No description available.

This research examined the relationship between the degree of maintained fluency improvement and the type of language used to respond to questions directly and indirectly related to speaking behavior. The subjects included sixteen former Portland State University stuttering clients who had participated in the Ginter (1979) study on fluency maintenance. The subjects responded to a thirteen item questionnaire dealing with themselves and their speaking behavior. Responses were recorded on the Modified Thematic Analysis Form developed by this examiner and analyzed according to guidelines set down by Stone and Casteel (1975) and this examiner.

Development of fluency has always been an important focus of stuttering research. However, to date there are no standardized norms on the development of fluency. Reliable and valid information regarding the normal development of fluency is necessary in order to deferentially diagnose normal disfluency from incipient stuttering. Establishment of norms for part-word repetitions is especially important since this type of disfluency has traditionally been considered an indicator of early stuttering. The present study sought to contribute to the investigation of the development of fluency by examining the frequency of occurrence of repetitions in 30- to 36-month-old males.

In this study, five deaf individuals with cochlear implants were presented with noise that was manipulated systematically, to test the hypothesis that deaf persons using cochlear prostheses will demonstrate intensity regulation of their vocal output that is more appropriate when their implants are turned on than when turned off. The intensity of their vocal output was measured to determine if they demonstrated a Lombard response, that is, a systematic increase in vocal intensity with increasing intensity of background noise. Results from the study were mixed. With implants on, three subjects made systematic increases in vocal intensity with increasing background noise, while two subjects did not make such increases. In addition, the relation between intensity of vocal output and background noise was closer to the normal function for the three subjects who demonstrated a Lombard response. The "normal function" was defined by measuring the vocal intensity responses of five normal hearing control subjects who performed the same tasks as the experimental subjects.

The purpose of the present study was to determine the influence of situational cues on a standardized speechreading test in order to assess an individual's natural speechreading ability. The widely used, standardized Utley Lipreading Test was selected to which photoslides of message-related situational cues were added. The Utley Lipreading Test consists of two relatively equivalent test lists, containing series of unrelated sentences.

The purpose of this investigation was to determine if public school children with moderate and severe articulation disorders exhibit dyspraxic characteristics on a standardized developmental dyspraxia screening test.

In 1971, Lee and Canter developed a systematic tool for assessing children's expressive language: Developmental Sentence Scoring (DSS). It provides normative data against which a child's delayed or disordered language development can be compared with the normal language of children the same age. A specific scoring system is used to analyze children's use of standard English grammatical rules from a tape-recorded sample of their spontaneous speech during conversation with a clinician. The corpus of sentences for the DSS is obtained from a sample of 50 complete, different, consecutive, intelligible, non-echolalic sentences elicited from a child in conversation with an adult using stimulus materials in which the child is interested. There is limited research on the reliability of language samples smaller and larger than 50 utterances for DSS analysis. The purpose of this study was to determine if there is a significant difference among the scores obtained from language samples of 25, 50, and 75 utterances when using the DSS procedure for children aged 6.0 to 6.6 years. Twelve children, selected on the basis of chronological age, normal receptive vocabulary skills, normal hearing, and a monolingual background, were chosen as subjects.

Background: A social network is made up of the people with whom individuals make communicative contact throughout their lives. The socioemotional selectivity theory predicts that older adults selectively prune their social networks to make them more intimate and satisfying (Carstensen, 1992). Aphasia, a disorder that affects mostly older adults, has been found to reduce social network size. Prior research does not adequately address satisfaction with that change. Aims: The current qualitative study investigates the hypothesis that aphasia reduces social participation and satisfaction with social participation. Methods: Four people with aphasia and five people without aphasia were interviewed about their social network size, frequency of communication, satisfaction of communication, frequency of activity participation, and satisfaction of activity participation. We investigated the impact of factors hypothesized to affect these indices of social participation: aphasia severity, hearing loss, mobility status, and communication modalities. Results: The aphasia group reported smaller social networks, and less frequent social communication and individual and social activity participation. Social isolation was also reported by the aphasia group. Satisfaction of communication was roughly the same between groups. The aphasia group was more dissatisfied with activity participation than the control group. Conclusions: Individuals with aphasia had smaller social networks and less frequent activity participation than controls. This contributed to a perception of social isolation. Socioemotional selectivity theory may apply to the social communication changes in people with aphasia because results indicated equal dissatisfaction when compared to the control group. However, alternative hypotheses cannot be discounted. The aphasia group’s increased dissatisfaction with activity participation indicates an undesired change.

Young children who stutter have shown the capability of developing an awareness of stuttering as early as age two (Ambrose & Yairi, 1994; Yairi & Ambrose, 2005; Boey et al., 2009; Ezrati-Vinacour, Platzky, & Yairi, 2001). The child's awareness of both his communication difficulty and the response of listeners to his speech has the potential to adversely affect his cognitive and social-emotional development, as well as his self-perception of overall competence. The purpose of this study was to examine self-perceived general competence and social acceptance in children who stutter (CWS) and children who do not stutter (CWNS), and to assess the extent to which temperament, speech disfluency, expressive and receptive language abilities, and home environment both co-vary and predict children's perception of their own competence. Participants included 16 CWS and 16 CWNS between the ages of 4;0 and 5;10. Results of the MANOVA revealed no significant between-group differences in perceived competence or social acceptance, language abilities, temperament, or home environment between the two groups; because stuttering severity and time since onset of stuttering were not calculated for CWNS, these two values were not included in the MANOVA. Results of the backwards linear regressions revealed that the best two-regressor model for predicting perceived general competence in all subjects included the temperament constructs of surgency and negative affectivity; in CWS only, surgency and expressive language together were the most predictive of perceived general competence. The best two-regressor model for predicting perceived social acceptance in all subjects included negative affectivity and receptive language; in CWS only, receptive language and stuttering severity together were most predictive of perceived social acceptance. However, none of these relationships reached significance. Taken together, results suggest that as a group, CWS present with similar temperamental profiles as CWNS, and that a child's speech and language skills are linked to his perception of peer acceptance, while a tendency for risk taking and a generally positive view of new situations may be more important for self-perception of overall competence in the world. Theoretical and clinical implications are discussed.