The relationships between different types of adult-support inferential book reading strategies and young children’s language and literacy competence were examined in 18 studies that included 1134 study participants. van Kleeck’s (2006) descriptions of two levels of inferencing and different types of inferential strategies at each level were used to code and analyze the patterns of correlations between the book reading strategies and the child outcomes. Results showed that parents’ and teachers’ use of different types of inferencing strategies were related to variations in the child outcomes, and that the effects of inferencing were conditioned on the children’s ages. Implications for practice are described.

No description available.

No description available.

No description available.

No description available.

There are no data available in the literature that have specifically evaluated differences in adaptation to unilateral conductive or sensory changes. However, based on clinical experience it may be postulated that changes of outer or middle ear function appear to be tolerated more easily than those of cochlear origin. Very often, patients seen in the clinic are unaware of a slight conductive hearing loss. By contrast, patients are immediately disturbed by a minor decline of cochlear function. One of several complaints of these patients is a change in their spatial orientation or difficulties in understanding speech in a noisy environment . The goal of the study was to determine if binaural performance tested psychoacoustically using a lateralization task is influenced differentially by short-term induced unilateral conductive or sensory changes. Lateralization performance was evaluated in seven normal-hearing subjects during induced auditory periphery asymmetry resulting from: l. exposure to noise presented for 5 minutes at 115 dBA SPL or 2. bilateral occlusion with earplugs of unequal attenuation for 48 hrs. An adaptive procedure was used to detenmine hearing thresholds of a 4-kHz narrow-band noise (NBN). In a lateralization task subjects indicated the positions of intracranial images created by the same NBN pr esented binaurally at SO dB SL with interau ral level differences ( I LDs) varying within plus/minus 12 dB. The tests were performed over a one-hour period post-exposure, immediately prior to and following plugging the ears, and at 24 and 48 hrs post-plugging. Immediately after the exposure or after plugging, there was a shift of lateral ization towards an unexposed side or the side blocked by the plug with a smaller attenuation, respectively. After a few minutes post-exposure, signals with I LD=0 were lateralized at midl ine. Within 30 minutes post -plugging, those signals were gradually lateralized closer to midline but remained off center for the rest of the plugging period. Thus, subjects showed fast adaptation to induced unilateral sensorineural changes and incomplete adaptation to induced asymmetrical conductive changes. Those rather unexpected r esults can be explained using a qualitative model assuming that: 1. a conductive impainment reflects a loss of sensitivity and 2. a cochlear impairment reflects both a loss of sensitivity and of the compressive nonlinearity on the basilar membrane. Recently, there has been an increase in the number of psychoacoustical studies on hearing-impaired listeners with a majority of them directed toward revealing deficits in monaural processing. However, in most acoustic environments encountered in everyday life, there are multiple sounds originating from different sources, and hearing-impaired people often display less binaural advantage than do normally hearing persons. The results of the cu rrent study support the view of the lack of a simple relationship between monaural and binaural processing, which is often r eported in studies on hearing-impaired people. This is an important issue in the process of fitting hearing aids binaurally.

No description available.

No description available.

Comparisons were made between changes in the audibility of bone-conduction stimuli to differences in the sound pressure present in the external auditory canal when ears were occluded. Fifteen listeners with normal middle ear function were tested using pure tones of 250, 500, and 1000 Hz, delivered via a bone-conduction oscillator placed on the mastoid process and the frontal bone. At all three frequencies, and both sites of stimulation, ear canal sound pressures were greater in the occluded than in the unoccluded conditions. Concurrently, the test signals were detected at lower intensities, although the changes in audibility and external canal sound pressure levels were not unity. The occlusion effect was attenuated slightly when the skull was vibrated from the frontal bone.

Fortunately, there are others, most notably Rosenthal (see http://class.csueastbay.edu/commsci/ASHAStudRes.htm), who provided an impetus to our own design and implementation of the research methods course in the department of communicative disorders at East Tennessee State University. Rosenthal described a graduate research course in which students designed and executed a research project within an 11-week quarter. At the completion of the course, the top student projects were selected for publication in a departmental student research journal and submitted to the California State University Student Research Competition.