Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 2006. / Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 67-11, Section: B, page: 6356. Adviser: Ruth Watkins. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 105-113) Available on microfilm from Pro Quest Information and Learning.

Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 2006. / Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 67-11, Section: B, page: 6357. Adviser: David P. Kuehn. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 80-87) Available on microfilm from Pro Quest Information and Learning.

The purpose of this study was to gather normative data regarding the phonological system of bilingual Creole-English children ages three and five and to compare performance to norms for English speaking children. The forty participants lived in Miami and represented low socio-economic groups. Participants were assessed using the Goldman-Fristoe Test of Articulation-2 and a Haitian Creole Picture Naming Assessment. The results indicated that the percentage of correct phonemes in Creole (M=91.6) were not significantly different when compared to the correct production of the same phonemes in English (M=92.8). Further analysis revealed that the accuracy of all phonemes was higher for the five-year (M= 90.8) as compared to the three-year-olds (M= 85) in Creole. In English, the five-year-olds performed better than the three-year-olds participants. These findings revealed patterns of phonological development in bilingual Creole/English Children similar to patterns reported in other bilingual children. This information is essential in the evaluation and treatment of this population.

Fourteen native Spanish-speaking adults participated in a study on tense and aspect in Spanish. Subjects viewed videos that depicted completed events or videos that ended with an ongoing event and chose a sentence in the past tense that best described the event. One condition included adverbial cues and the other condition did not. Subjects also read paragraphs describing bounded and unbounded events and chose a past tense verb that best fit the context. It was found that subjects consistently chose preterit responses for completed event videos in both the adverb and non-adverb condition, but responses varied more in the videos that ended with ongoing events. The majority of subjects selected preterit verbs for bounded events and imperfect verbs for unbounded events. Implications and further directions of research are discussed.

Traumatic brain injury (TBI) is a global health epidemic that has deleterious consequences for the individuals with the brain injury, their families, and society. The development and validation of effective treatments is imperative. The current study was inspired by Ylvisaker's collaborative intervention approach with individuals with TBI and draws on a line of work by Duff and colleagues (e.g., Duff et al., 2006; Gupta et al., 2011) documenting patterns of spared and impaired learning abilities in individuals with various types focal brain damage (e.g., hippocampus) and selective neuropsychological impairment (e.g., declarative memory) using a collaborative referencing paradigm. This study extends this line of work by examining the ability of individuals with mild to moderate traumatic brain injury to develop and use referential labels for novel picture cards across repeated interactions with a familiar partner as they complete a collaborative referencing task. Five TBI participant pairs (an individuals with TBI and their partner) and five healthy comparison pairs completed 24 trials (6 trials in each of 4 sessions) of the collaborative referencing task across two days. As a group, the performance of four of the five TBI pairs did not differ from healthy comparison pairs on the primary dependent variables of card placement accuracy, time to complete each trial, and reduction in communicative resources across trials. That is, despite having TBI, these individuals were able to develop and use unique and concise labels to reference the novel cards in collaboration with a familiar partner. The fifth TBI participant pair (3591) differed from the other TBI and healthy comparison pair on both quantitative and qualitative measures. Speculating that 3591's husband may have contributed to their poor performance, a follow-up study was conducted whereby 3591 was brought back to lab several months later and she complete one session of the collaborative referencing task with a new partner. The results of the follow-up study were striking. 3591 and her new partner were as successful as other pairs on all measures of learning in the study. Given the complex nature of cognitive, neurological, behavioral, personality, and communicative impairments associated with TBI, the findings here, that all participants with TBI were successful in the task, are surprising and provides further evidence that these interactive sessions are potent learning environments. The results of the study support the idea that use of a social and collaborative interaction paradigm facilitates learning in adults at least one year time post injury with mild to moderate brain injuries. Aspects of the collaborative referencing task that exemplify Ylvisaker's contextualized invention approach are completion of a goal-directed task, working with a partner who was relevant to the participant's everyday life, supports were provided by the partner as needed, the task was repeated many times in order to increase chances of the pair's success, and skills were taught through collaboration rather than explicit instruction. Although this was not an intervention study, these findings provide further evidence supporting the use of Ylvisaker's social, interactive, and collaborative approach for individuals with TBI. This study is the first to our knowledge to investigate learning during a collaborative referencing task with individuals with TBI and the positive results obtained here suggest that this may be a fruitful way to deploy Ylvisaker's contextualized intervention approach in more controlled research settings.

In order to verbally communicate successfully, people need the ability to retrieve a desired word. However, the inability to do this, called “anomia,” is a common impairment for people with aphasia, and frequently persists into the chronic stage of recovery. Strategies that facilitate verbal expression may reduce or compensate for instances of anomia. Verbal strategies, such as Semantic Feature Analysis (SFA) have been researched extensively and shown to be effective. Nonverbal strategies, such as drawing and gesture, have research on their effects as a substitution for verbalization, but less on their facilitative effects. However, the research suggests they may work in a similar manner to verbal approaches, by activating semantic networks. Thus, the facilitative effects of nonverbal strategies should be explored further. The aim of this experiment was to determine the facilitative effects of drawing and gesturing during a picture naming task in one participant with chronic aphasia. Results revealed that all conditions evaluated, drawing, gesture, and wait (control), produced improvements in the picture naming task. However, contrary to expectations, the facilitated conditions (i.e. drawing and gesture) did not create more effects than the unfacilitated condition (i.e. wait). This finding may indicate the benefits of a factor common to all conditions. Further results of this study and directions for future research are discussed.

The purpose of this study was to further investigate the effects of articulation errors on perceptual ratings of nasality in speakers with repaired cleft palates, specifically looking at the effect of varying magnitudes of articulation errors and education on perception of nasality. A group of expert listeners, speech-language pathologists with significant clinical experience in the area of cleft palate and resonance disorders, first rated the articulatory proficiency and nasality of a number of utterances produced by children with repaired cleft palates, on separate 6-point scales. Their ratings were then used to categorize stimuli into a three-by-three matrix (mild, moderate, severe) using articulation deficit and nasality as the two dimensions of interest. Untrained listeners (undergraduates and graduate students in a speech-language pathology training program) were then asked to rate the level of nasality on a 1 (normal) to 6 (severe) scale. Listener group ratings were compared to each other and to the expert listeners. Significant differences (p=0.004) were found between the undergraduate and graduate students' ratings when compared to the expert listeners. Graduates, had lower inter- and intra-rater reliability compared to the undergraduates. For both undergraduates and graduates, the difference between their ratings and those of the expert listeners was significantly lower for stimuli with mild articulation errors compared to those with moderate (p<0.0001) and severe (p<0.0001) articulation errors. No significant differences (p=0.416) were found between difference scores for stimuli with moderate versus severe articulation errors. The results were interpreted to suggest that the magnitude, and perhaps type, of articulation errors affects perceived nasality, and that there are group differences between perceptual nasality ratings. These findings support the importance of articulation therapy for children with repaired cleft palates to both decrease articulation errors and decrease perceived nasality. Further, this study highlights the need for including awareness of this interaction in the training of speech-language pathologists in order for the “gold standard” of perceptual judgements to remain a valid and reliable measure.

"Professional Research Project Presented to the AuD and SLP.D. Programs in Communication Sciences and Disorders in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Audiology."

Professional Research Project Proposal Presented to the Au.D. and SLP.D. Programs in Communication Sciences and Disorders in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Audiology.

Professional Research Project Proposal (Report) Presented to the Au.D. and SPL.D. in Communication Sciences and Disorders in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Audiology.