In this thesis four children, between the ages of 6 and 7, identified as at risk for language or reading impairment, participated in a bilingual intervention. The bilingual literacy intervention included a grammatical component that incorporated past tense verb, noun phrase, and prepositional phrase instruction. The children completed a sentence repetition test (SRT), which allowed examiners to measure grammatical progress over the coarse of the intervention. Overall SRT results showed that moderate grammatical gains were made during the intervention. The study also provided data on the sensitivity of SRT in targeted grammatical areas. The results showed that the past tense verb and noun phrase portions of the SRT had low sensitivity to progress. These findings suggest that clinicians can use SRT to measure overall progress; however, supplemental tasks should be used to evaluate past tense verb and noun phrase abilities in English-dominant bilingual children with language or reading impairment. / text

The current study investigated the effectiveness of a Literacy Based Intervention (LBI) on English Language Learners (ELLs) with Specific Language Impairment (SLI). Specifically this report focuses on the effects of LBI on vocabulary skills (e.g. naming and defining). Nineteen ELLs (ages 74 to 104 months) participated in the intervention study, which lasted eight weeks and consisted of 50-minute sessions, three times a week. The LBI focused on rich vocabulary instruction of words that were from storybook readings. Vocabulary naming and definition probes were used to assess vocabulary progress. Results revealed that vocabulary increases did not occur until the second half of the intervention (e.g. week six or seven). LBI shows promise to be successful for increasing vocabulary skills in ELLs with SLI. / text

The purpose of the present study was to explore whether the phonological encoding difficulties that have been demonstrated in children who stutter persist in adults whose stuttering persists. This hypothesis was investigated by comparing the phonological working memory of adults who stutter (AWS) and adults who do not stutter (AWNS) using non-word repetition and phoneme elision tasks. Twenty-four adults (age range = 17;9 to 46;11 mean age = 28;2): 12 AWS and 12 AWNS matched on gender and age participated in this study. A total of 48 non-words consisting of an equal number (N = 12 per syllable length category) of two-syllable, three-syllable, four-syllable and seven-syllable non-words were selected for use in the non-word repetition and phoneme elision tasks. In the non-word repetition task, results showed a significant interaction between fluency group and syllable length for the 7-syllable length category only, indicating that AWS require a significantly higher mean number of attempts than AWNS. Results of the phoneme elision task revealed a significant main effect for syllable length with both groups demonstrating a significant reduction in accuracy as the non-words increased in length, but there was no significant interaction between fluency group and syllable class length. Potential implications of these findings are presented along with recommendations for future research. / text

There are data to suggest that the phonological representations of young children who stutter are less specified than their typically fluent peers. The purpose of the present study is to determine if this apparent difference in phonological encoding persists in adults who stutter. Utilizing a false memory paradigm, nine adults who stutter (AWS) were asked to listen to and then recall/produce 12 lists of 12 words each. Each word list was comprised of either semantic, phonological or an equal number of semantic and phonological associates of a single, unpresented, critical ‘lure’ word. Three parameters of recall performance were measured across these three conditions: 1) number of accurately recalled productions, 2) number of lure intrusions and 3) number of other intrusions. AWS produced significantly more accurate recalls in the semantic condition than either the hybrid or phonological conditions, and significantly more lure intrusions in the phonological and hybrid conditions than the semantic condition, but there was no significant difference on measures of other intrusions. These results extend the findings with young children who stutter, and indicate that the phonological representations are less robust than the semantic representations in the lexicon of AWS. / text

There is a documented need for appropriate language assessment measures for Spanish-English bilingual school-age children in the United States. The Bilingual English Spanish Assessment- Middle Extension (BESA-ME), the Test of Narrative Language (TNL), and the Test of Narrative Language- Spanish experimental version (Spanish TNL) were administered to 129 children ranging in age from 7;0 to 8;11. Convergence between the measures was examined. The results indicated a strong correlation between measures, as well as significant correlation between each measure and children’s ability level (i.e. classification as typically developing or with language impairment). These results present the BESA-ME and the TNL in Spanish and English as promising tools to assess language impairment in a population that traditionally has been a challenge to evaluate. / text

No description available.

This thesis studies disfluency in spontaneous Swedish speech, i.e., the occurrence of hesitation phenomena like eh, öh, truncated words, repetitions and repairs, mispronunciations, truncated words and so on. The thesis is divided into three parts: PART I provides the background, both concerning scientific, personal and industrial–academic aspects in the Tuning in quotes, and the Preamble and Introduction (chapter 1). PART II consists of one chapter only, chapter 2, which dives into the etiology of disfluency. Consequently it describes previous research on disfluencies, also including areas that are not the main focus of the present tome, like stuttering, psychotherapy, philosophy, neurology, discourse perspectives, speech production, application-driven perspectives, cognitive aspects, and so on. A discussion on terminology and definitions is also provided. The goal of this chapter is to provide as broad a picture as possible of the phenomenon of disfluency, and how all those different and varying perspectives are related to each other. PART III describes the linguistic data studied and analyzed in this thesis, with the following structure: Chapter 3 describes how the speech data were collected, and for what reason. Sum totals of the data and the post-processing method are also described. Chapter 4 describes how the data were transcribed, annotated and analyzed. The labeling method is described in detail, as is the method employed to do frequency counts. Chapter 5 presents the analysis and results for all different categories of disfluencies. Besides general frequency and distribution of the different types of disfluencies, both inter- and intra-corpus results are presented, as are co-occurrences of different types of disfluencies. Also, inter- and intra-speaker differences are discussed. Chapter 6 discusses the results, mainly in light of previous research. Reasons for the observed frequencies and distribution are proposed, as are their relation to language typology, as well as syntactic, morphological and phonetic reasons for the observed phenomena. Future work is also envisaged, both work that is possible on the present data set, work that is possible on the present data set given extended labeling and work that I think should be carried out, but where the present data set fails, in one way or another, to meet the requirements of such studies. Appendices 1–4 list the sum total of all data analyzed in this thesis (apart from Tok Pisin data). Appendix 5 provides an example of a full human–computer dialogue. / The electronic version of the printed dissertation is a corrected version where typos as well as phrases have been corrected. A list with the corrections is presented in the errata list above.

The purpose of this study was to investigate the different perspectives of familycentered, natural environment early intervention programs. Specifically, the family's perception of early intervention services were compared to that of the speech-language pathologists' (SLPs) perception of these programs. The perspectives of the speech language pathologist and the families receiving early intervention services were explored to determine the overall satisfaction with the current early intervention model and practices, related to the assessment procedures and intervention practices utilized by the SLP. Results of this research study indicated that the parents of children with special needs are generally satisfied with the early intervention services being provided to their child and family. Respondents of the speech-language pathologist survey indicated that the current service model is appropriate and useful when working with the majority of families receiving early intervention services. Strengths and weaknesses of the familycentered, natural environment early intervention program are further discussed. / Department of Speech Pathology & Audiology

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of California, San Diego, 2007. / Title from first page of PDF file (viewed November 7, 2007). Available via ProQuest Digital Dissertations. Vita. Includes bibliographical references.

Diss. Linköping : Univ., 2004.