Literature supporting the use of informational texts with preschool children has increased in recent years. However, many preschool classrooms still focus on narrative text, and teachers are often unsure how to provide support for children's comprehension of informational texts. An assessment addressing preschool children's informational text comprehension will help teachers understand what children can do with informational texts and point out demands or tasks that children should be able to handle. A comprehension assessment for preschool children focusing on text purpose, text features, text retell, and comprehension of text structures has not been available. To fit this need, recent effort has focused on developing The Early Expository Text Comprehension Assessment (EECA), which previous studies have found to be reliable and valid. However, the latest iteration, developed in 2016, identified multiple problematic items based on a many-facets Rasch analysis, and problems with administrator consistency were noted. To further develop the EECA, changes were made to problematic items and the assessment was fully digitized. This pilot study tested a beta version of the next iteration of the EECA on twelve participants at the BYU preschool to identify additional changes that could be made before submitting the revised assessment to a more comprehensive full-scale study for analysis of reliability and validity. Results identified additional changes to apply to the assessment including suggestions for improving child engagement and responsiveness to the digitized format, administrator prompts, technical errors with the assessment program, and improvements to individual test items.

This study examined the effect of context on the association between formant trajectories and tongue and lip kinematics in the American English diphthongs /aɪ/ and /aʊ/. Seventeen native speakers of American English had electromagnetic sensors placed on their tongue and lips to record kinematic signals that were time-aligned with the corresponding acoustic recording. Speakers produced the diphthongs in isolation, in a single word rVl context, in a phrase hVd context, and in a sentence context. Kinematic data and the F1 and F2 trajectories were extracted from the middle 50% of each diphthong production. To allow direct comparison of signals with different units of measurement, all data were converted to z-scores. The z-score records were plotted together on common axes. For each tracked sensor from each diphthong production, an absolute difference between the kinematic and acoustic variables was calculated. Average z-score difference sums were calculated for each speaker's /aɪ/ and /aʊ/ production in each context, and this measure was called the Acoustic Kinematic Disparity Index (AKDI). A repeated measures ANOVA was used to test for main context effects on the AKDI, with concurrent contrasts to test for differences between the baseline (isolated diphthong) condition and the more complex phonetic contexts. The results revealed that context has a significant impact on acoustic and kinematic relationships. The sentence context resulted in the highest number of significantly different AKDI values when compared to the isolated condition, the single word rVl context resulted in the second highest number, and the phrase level hVd context resulted in the least differences. These findings suggest, therefore, that more complex phonetic contexts have a greater effect on the acoustic and kinematic relationship. These findings imply that caution is warranted in relying on acoustics to draw inferences about articulator movements in complex phonetic contexts. These results further indicate that the investigation of sounds produced in one context does not necessarily allow a straightforward generalization to other contexts.

The purpose of this thesis was to evaluate the efficacy of an intervention to increase the production of emotion words in five children with language impairment. Participants were between the ages of 5;11 (years; months) and 11;3 (at the onset of enrollment in treatment) and had been identified with language impairment. Each participant completed between three and six baseline sessions, 20 twenty-minute intervention sessions, and three follow-up sessions. Tasks included story reading, story enactment, and journaling. Each session was recorded and then coded for emotion category (sadness, anger, fear, and surprise), errors made, type of production, and valence agreement. Total emotion word production per category is reported along with percentage of non-overlapping data calculations to determine the effectiveness of treatment for each participant for each emotion word category. Based on percentage of non-overlapping data calculations, treatment was moderately effective for four of the five participants in at least one or more emotion word category. Treatment was mildly effective for all five participants in at least one emotion category. Each participant was observed to make between one and five valence errors throughout the intervention. The errors made by participants often involved the substitution of a simple emotion word category for a more complex emotion word category. Participants were more successful with intervention tasks when provided increased support from the clinician, as seen by most productions being made in response to a question or in response to a cue. While results from this intervention were variable, participants generally made improvements from their participation in this intervention. Utilization of a similar intervention framework with a few alterations based on the limitations observed would be beneficial in future research.

A recent dramatic increase in the availability of early literacy applications (apps) for mobile devices has led teachers to incorporate them into their educational programs. This study explored teachers' perceptions and opinions regarding three early literacy apps: Endless Reader, Preschool Matching Game: Rhyming Words, and Hideout: Early Reading. The study consisted of 15 preschool teachers who interacted with each app and answered questions regarding their opinions about the apps and the use of digital devices in the classroom in general. Teacher responses were analyzed and categorized based on common topics that emerged from the data set. The results of the study imply that teachers prefer apps that include sound pedagogical principles as well as game-like features to keep students engaged in learning. Future research should explore the processes and guidelines teachers use when selecting apps for classroom use as well as investigating what students actually understand from early literacy apps and other apps used in the classroom.

The purpose of this study was to examine the potential differences in selected acoustic measures of speech as a function of age, across sexes, and between families. The data used in this study were previously collected for a larger project on voice production at the University of Utah. Participants included 169 individuals, 79 men and 90 women, from 18 Utah families, ranging in age from 17 to 87 years. All participants had no history of articulation disorders, stroke or active neurologic disease, or severe-profound hearing loss. Participants were recorded reading two passages aloud in a sound booth. These two passages were selected as connected speech tasks from which to extract the following acoustic metrics: fricative spectral measures (center of gravity, standard deviation, skewness, and kurtosis), mean fundamental frequency (F0), semitone standard deviation (STSD), speaking time ratio, and cepstral peak prominence smoothed (CPPS). Results indicated significant aging effects on spectral center of gravity and skewness, mean F0, and STSD. There was a significant sex effect for spectral center of gravity and kurtosis, mean F0, speaking time ratio, and CPPS. Familial relationship had a significant effect for spectral skewness, STSD, and CPPS. Findings from the current study indicate that certain speech and voicing features point to a decline with age and that aging affects the speech of men and women differently. Additionally, these data suggest that related speakers may demonstrate similar patterns for prosody, voicing, and articulation behavior, although the statistical testing did not allow us to draw specific inferences about such similarities. These findings describe some normal variations in the speech production of persons of differing age, sex, and familial background. An understanding of these normal speech differences in healthy individuals is valuable for differentiating between typical and pathological speech patterns in a clinical setting.

The purpose of the present study was to assess the effectiveness of phonological awareness (PA) training with typically developing preschool children in a classroom setting. The PA training incorporated a range of PA skills and the training outcomes were assessed along a broad spectrum of PA abilities, pre-literacy skills, and general language abilities. This study consisted of 21 children (11 Experimental, 10 Control). The classroom PA training program was conducted with the Experimental class in one large group for 5 weeks with 20 minute sessions conducted three times a week. A variety of fun, play-based PA activities were used with the class that incorporated the spectrum of PA skills. No main effects were observed for any of the test measures, with the exception of the Experimental group’s statistically significant gains for total number of words, number of different words, and a negative effect on the Phonological Awareness Literacy-Pre-Kindergarten

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The presence of digital mobile applications (apps) designed to promote early literacy skills has surged in the last few years. This study explored children's affect and engagement as they interacted with three apps: Endless Reader, Hideout: Early Reader, and Preschool Matching Game: Rhyming Words. The study consisted of 12 children, age 4 to 5, who interacted in pairs with each of the apps while their classroom teacher facilitated the experience. The researchers examined videos and transcripts of the children's actions and nonverbal expressions as they encountered the apps. Transcripts included verbal and nonverbal information with codes assigned to represent child behaviors. Descriptive analysis of the data led to characterizing behaviors children exhibited in light of the different apps' design features and with respect to group dynamics. The researchers found that all three apps had relatively equal proportions of positive and negative child behaviors. However, the types of behaviors varied according to the demands and constraints of each app. The researchers also observed differences in child behavior depending on the dynamics that occurred as children interacted with each other and with their teacher. The results of the study imply that parents and teachers seeking to choose quality apps must consider a variety of factors, including the type of child engagement that the app tends to elicit and the instructional value of the content. Future research should explore the extent to which different types of positive and negative behaviors are related to design and pedagogical features of apps in order to aid parents and teachers in choosing apps that are engaging as well as instructionally sound.

Many have argued for more informational text to be incorporated into the curriculum, even in the earliest grades. However, it has traditionally been thought that narrative text should precede informational text when introducing children to literacy. Still several studies have demonstrated that preschool children are capable of learning from these texts. Because informational texts are being introduced even in the earliest grades, preschool teachers are in need of ways to assess their students' ability to handle early forms of informational texts. The Early Expository Text Comprehension Assessment (EECA) was developed to help teachers understand the comprehension abilities of their preschool children across several informational text structures. As part of a larger study, the third iteration of this assessment measure, called the EECA-R3, was examined for concurrent validity with the Test of Story Comprehension (TSC), a subtest of the Narrative Language Measure (NLM). Data came from 108 preschool children between the ages of four and five who were attending one of six title one preschools or one of four private preschool classrooms. Correlations that were run between the TSC and the EECA-R3 to determine concurrent validity were positive and significant, suggesting that the EECA-R3 is valid.

Previous models of language acquisition have had partial success describing the processes that children use to acquire knowledge of the grammatical categories of their native language. The present study used a computer model based on the evolutionary principles of adaptation and selection to gain further insight into children's acquisition of grammatical categories. Transcribed language samples of eight parents or caregivers each conversing with their own child served as the input corpora for the model. The model was tested on each child's language corpus three times: two fixed mutation rates as well as a progressively decreasing mutation rate, which allowed less adaptation over time, were examined. The output data were evaluated by measuring the computer model's ability to correctly identify the grammatical categories in 500 utterances from the language corpus of each child. The model's performance ranged between 78 and 88 percent correct; the highest performance overall was found for a corpus using the progressively decreasing mutation rate, but overall no clear pattern relative to mutation rate was found.