Is letter information processed in parallel or serially when readers encounter words? Kwantes and Mewhort (1999a; 1999b) addressed this question by introducing the concept of a word's orthographic uniqueness point (OUP). A word's OUP refers to the letter position in a word where that letter pattern uniquely identifies the word. They found faster naming times for words with an early OUP versus words with a late OUP. They argued that the faster naming times for the early OUP words is inconsistent with parallel implementations of models of letter processing. However, the overall letter overlap between the target word and other words that a reader knows was not controlled (Lamberts, 2003) and might account for the differences in naming times rather than for differences in the position of a word's OUP. Readers might be sensitive to any difference in the degree of letter overlap with other words and parallel letter processing accounts could be sensitive to this difference. Two experiments were conducted to extend OUP findings to a more natural reading context by monitoring eye movements while readers read sentences. The first experiment used stimuli with a relatively large difference in the position of a word's OUP. The second experiment matched the early and late OUP words in terms of the overall letter overlap with other words and unconfounded the initial trigram frequency. In both experiments, readers did not benefit from a word possessing an early OUP. The results were discussed in terms of potential serial and parallel letter processing accounts.

The purpose of the dissertation was to investigate how we store and access affixed English words by monitoring participants' eye movements during sentence reading. Previous research (Niswander, Pollatsek & Rayner, 2000) indicated that both the frequency of the root morpheme and the frequency of the whole word affect the fixation time on a suffixed word while reading. The current research findings confirm the effects of both root and whole-word frequencies for prefixed words in English. In addition, the current research indicates that word length plays an important mediating role: for prefixed words, there is clear evidence that for long words the effect of root frequency is dominant, whereas for short words, the effect of word frequency is dominant. This effect mirrors a finding in Finnish (Bertram & Hyönä, 2003) for compound words In contrast, the word length by frequency results were less clear for the suffixed word sets. Finally, the effect of affixal homonymy was investigated. Reading times on words containing homonymic affixes were compared to words whose affixes were not homonymic, and there was some evidence that a homonymic affix interferes in the processing of the word. Models of complex word processing were discussed in the context of the research findings.

Autism affects 1 in 88 children (Center for Disease Control, 2009), approximately 50% of whom will not develop speech (Seal & Bonvillian, 1997). Some researchers hypothesize that these difficulties in developing oral speech reflect underlying motor speech deficits (Prizant, 1996; Seal & Bonvillian, 1997; Szypulski, 2003; Andrianopoulos, Boucher, Velleman & colleagues 2007-2010). This investigation sought to identify the presence or absence of specific motor speech markers in ASD through an innovative best-practice protocol for assessing the speech, prosody, and voice quality of individuals with ASD. The study focused on apraxic-like motor planning/programming features and dysarthric-like motor execution features in imitated, elicited, and spontaneous speech in 15 children with ASD between 4;0 and 12;11 years as compared to 15 children who were NTD. Speech analyses included imitated speech tasks for [f] and [a] prolongation, the short phrase "pea tea key" and AMRs and SMRs; elicited speech tasks for Counting 1-10 and singing Happy Birthday; along with spontaneous speech tasks for telling two stories based on wordless picture stories and discussing a topic of interest. Results indicated that children with ASD presented with significantly decreased Maximum Phonation Times; lower formant values; lower pitch values; decreased rate of speech characterized by increased utterance, pause and vowel durations; reduced number of syllable repetitions in AMR and SMR tasks; variable and/or inconsistent performance across tasks; and a mildly deviant voice, further characterized by mildly deviant levels of roughness and strain, atypical production of prosody and inconsistent nasality. Based on the results of this empirical investigation, an acoustic-perceptual and motor speech profile for a sample population of children with an autism spectrum disorder can be determined by six tasks: prolongation of [f] and [a], articulation of AMRs and SMRs, Counting 1-10, and telling a story based on a wordless picture book. These objective measures can empirically determine the presence, prevalence, and nature of speech, phonatory, and prosodic deficits in this sample population. They support that intervention for children with ASD should not only focus on pragmatics, MLU, and vocabulary, as is often the case. Rather, voice and motor speech intervention protocols should be incorporated as appropriate to individuals with autism.

This exploratory study used the Multicultural Program Survey and the Multicultural Competencies Survey to gain national information regarding the current status of 224 graduate communication disorders programs and the self-perceptions of a census of Graduate Program Directors, faculty, clinical staff and graduate students on multicultural competencies. The Multicultural Program Survey resulted in a 33.4% response rate and indicated highest competencies met in the areas of Curriculum Issues and Research Considerations and lowest in the areas of Racial and Ethnic Minority Representation, Practice and Supervision, and Physical Environment. Three hundred and twenty seven faculty, clinical staff and graduate students responded to the Multicultural Competency Survey. Results indicated that experiencing the following multicultural training opportunities were related to higher levels of perceived competency: a three credit course on multicultural issues in communication disorders, multicultural clinical experiences, multicultural professional experiences, and personal exploration of multicultural issues. Results showed that means of reported self-awareness, multicultural knowledge, and multicultural skills increased with higher levels of perceived multicultural competencies. Areas for future research are included.

Theories of serial-order memory either include specialized mechanisms to represent order or claim that sequences of events are represented in memory by structures that are constructed during encoding. Unfortunately, both approaches have many shortcomings, and neither can explain how the order of arbitrary event sequences (i.e., sequences that are not intentionally learned; e.g., trips to the grocery store) are remembered. This paper presents an alternative approach to serial-order memory, one in which order is not directly represented in memory but is instead reconstructed during retrieval. This reconstructive theory is presented in two parts. The first demonstrates how the components of episodic memory (as implemented in the Search of Associative Memory model of Raaijmakers & Shiffrin's, 1981b) that are necessary to encode, represent, and retrieve information about events in memory are sufficient to account for key aspects of serial-order memory. Several emergent properties of the reconstructive model allow it to explain phenomena that have been problematic for other theories of serial-order memory (e.g., recency effects). The second part of this paper focuses on how contextual information is used to reconstruct memory for order. Four experiments that examine the role of context in serial-order memory are presented. Experiment 1 evaluated three assumptions of the Raaijmakers and Shiffrin (1981b) model; the results support the model and indicate that people (1) attend to and remember the contexts in which items are presented, (2) represent contextual changes in memory, and (3) are better at remembering the contexts of items near the beginnings of sequences and following changes in context. Experiment 2 extends these results by showing that people use contextual information to make judgments about the relative order of two items. Experiment 3 replicates this result using a slightly different paradigm. Finally, Experiment 4 attempted to find out whether or not people use the most general contextual information available to make order judgments. The results of Experiment 4 are less conclusive than those of Experiments 1-3; several sources of this discrepancy are discussed.

In three experiments, subjects read passages containing one or two candidates for an anaphoric reference that differed in their distance from the reference and their strength of association to the categorical anaphor. Eye movements were recorded in Experiment 1. When a distractor was present, readers spent longer on the anaphoric noun when the antecedent was high-typical; however, they spent longer on the words following the anaphoric noun when the antecedent was low-typical. This effect, accompanied by an increase in regressions to the disambiguating adjective for the target region when the antecedent was low-typical and a distractor was present, indicate that, in this condition, the distractor was identified before the antecedent. Recognition probes in Experiment 2 showed that near, high-typical distractors were more available than far, low-typical antecedents; however, a facilitation effect for the antecedents suggest that the anaphor was successfully resolved. Delayed long-term memory probes were used in Experiment 3 to investigate the result of the resolution process. The results from the three experiments are discussed in terms of a general framework for anaphor resolution.

Eye movements during a scene rotation task were measured in two experiments. Two desktop scenes (each consisting of three office objects on a square desktop) were presented consecutively. Participants judged the identity of the two scenes. On same trials, the two scenes were either identical or one was a rotated version of the other. On different trials, the scene frame was as on the same trials, but either the locations or the orientations of some of the objects were changed. Eye movement measures were obtained as real-time indices of information processing. During the task, the eyes dwell on an object region longer when a scene was rotated further (i.e. gaze duration increased) only after the first 900ms of scanning. This result accords to a model in which (a) initial encoding takes place before an alignment process is initiated and (b) alignment is piecemeal and takes place on a gaze-by-gaze basis. As in previous scene rotation experiments, the slope of a mental rotation function differed between conditions. Response latencies increased more strongly with rotation angle in the orientation-change condition than in the location-change condition. This difference was mainly observed for gaze duration. On the other hand, response times in the Y (vertical)-axis rotation conditions were longer than those in the X (horizontal)- and Z (line-of-sight)-axis rotation conditions. This difference corresponds to an increase in the number (rather than the duration) of gazes in the Y-axis rotation conditions. Furthermore, when objects switched their locations, the changed object was fixated earlier than an unchanged object. In accordance with this result, it was assumed that the detection of the location-change is handled not only by foveal vision, but also by parafoveal vision. In Experiment: 2, the desktop was removed from the scene in half of the conditions. In these conditions location-changed objects no longer were fixated earlier than unchanged objects. Another consequence of removing the desktop was that the eyes need to visit objects more often. This means that desktop frame facilitates the piecemeal alignment process. The results were discussed in terms of viewpoint-dependent models of object recognition.

The purpose of the present study was to determine if naturalistic language intervention could be effective in a Child and Youth Care Center (CYCC) in South Africa to prevent and to treat potential impairments in orphan's communication. In the study, the communication styles of Zulu Child and Youth Care Workers (CYCW) were explored. Given the cultural, linguistic, and socioeconomic barriers associated with the intervention, the study also aimed to ascertain the challenges to providing language rich opportunities in residential care programs. A single case, multiple baseline design across participants was employed to determine the effectiveness of coaching on CYCWs' frequency of language facilitation strategy use. Qualitative analyses were employed to identify participant characteristics, barriers to implementation and to assess the study's social validity. Despite barriers to implementation, the CYCWs made changes in their style of communication that have been shown to be more supportive of children's early language learning. Coaching use of language facilitation (LF) strategies was found to be socially valid for use in this CYCC in Durban, South Africa. This study demonstrates the viability of coaching CYCWs to embed LF strategies within daily routines. Key words: orphans, language development, coaching, multiple risks, South Africa, naturalistic language strategie / A Dissertation submitted to the School of Communication in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy. / Summer Semester 2015. / July 9, 2015. / Child and Youth Care Workers, Coaching, Language Interventoion, Multiple Risks, Orphan / Includes bibliographical references. / Carla Wood, Professor Directing Dissertation; Michael Kaschak, University Representative; Leonard L. Lapointe, Committee Member; Stephen McDowell, Committee Member; Shannon Hall-Mills, Committee Member.

An important limitation exists in the literature in that only a few studies have examined the narrative development of children who speak a dialect other than Mainstream American English (MAE). The current investigation comprised two studies, which examined African American English (AAE) and MAE speakers' production of critical narrative features, including reference contrast, temporal links, reference to mental states, and theory of mind explanations when given the Diagnostic Evaluation of Language Variation-Criterion Referenced (DELV-CR) narrative task, and during open-ended narratives. The relationship between AAE dialect density level, narrative organizational style, and grounding was also examined. A total of 78 participants (53 AAE, 25 MAE) were included in Study 1. Results indicated no significant differences (p < .05), between dialect groups in their performance on individual measures or the overall narrative task. There was a significant and equivalent developmental growth within and among groups for the individual narrative measures and overall narrative score. In Study 2, the narrative organizational styles of African American participants ranging in age from 5;9–11;6, with high and low AAE dialect density levels were compared. The relationship between AAE dialect density, backgrounded information produced in open-ended narratives, and the overall narrative score from the DELV-CR was examined. Results indicated that AAE dialect density was not a predictor of narrative organizational style nor amount of backgrounded information in open-ended narratives. Both groups primarily produced topic centered followed by topic associating narratives. There was a trend toward topic associating narratives having more backgrounded information, however quantitative analysis did not yield statistical differences in backgrounded information between the two narratives styles. Neither age nor AAE dialect density level was significantly correlated with the overall narrative score for these participants. Critical narrative features were mostly mastered in this group (average age = 7;8). Findings show that narrative organizational style is not dialect specific and critical narrative features can be successfully assessed in a dialect neutral way for young AAE speakers.

It was hypothesized that the early part of mathematical problem solving, specifically the processes of model integration and analogical mapping, tap spatial abilities. Testing the hypothesis, this study explored the potential for spatial reasoning in both the early and late processes of problem solving. An interference paradigm that employed memory for spatial dot patterns and number sequences demonstrated that the early part of solving a math problem requires more spatial resources than the late portion. Additional data from two spatial tasks offered insight into the specific forms of spatial reasoning that may support mathematical performance.