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Book Summary: The SAGE Encyclopedia of Human Communication Sciences and Disorders is an in-depth encyclopedia aimed at students interested in interdisciplinary perspectives on human communication—both normal and disordered—across the lifespan. This timely and unique set will look at the spectrum of communication disorders, from causation and prevention to testing and assessment; through rehabilitation, intervention, and education. Examples of the interdisciplinary reach of this encyclopedia: A strong focus on health issues, with topics such as Asperger's syndrome, fetal alcohol syndrome, anatomy of the human larynx, dementia, etc.Including core psychology and cognitive sciences topics, such as social development, stigma, language acquisition, self-help groups, memory, depression, memory, Behaviorism, and cognitive developmentEducation is covered in topics such as cooperative learning, special education, classroom-based service delivery The editors have recruited top researchers and clinicians across multiple fields to contribute to approximately 640 signed entries across four volumes.

The process of acquiring language requires children to learn grammatical categories and apply these categories to new words. Researchers have proposed various explanations of this process in the form of algorithms and computational modeling. Recently, adaptation and selection models have been tested and applied as a possible explanation to the process of acquiring grammatical categories. These studies have proven promising, however, the external validity of this approach has not been examined by grammatically coding samples outside the training corpus. The current thesis applies an adaptation and selection model, which pauses the evolution of dictionaries after every thousand cycles to allow the tagging of 30 outside samples, which are then checked for tagging accuracy. The accuracy across the five training corpora by the six thousandth cycle averaged 76.75%. Additional research is needed to explore the effects of altering the parameters in the model.

The purpose of this study was to analyze and quantify the effects of a nebulized saline treatment on speech production in eight females with Primary Sjögren's Syndrome (SS). The duration, formant frequency onset and offset, and slope were measured to determine the quality of participants' production of diphthongal American English vowels. Acoustic data were examined before treatment began, immediately following treatment, and during a one-week follow-up to determine the effects of a laryngeal hydration program that used nebulized saline to increase hydration of structures in the vocal tract. The vowels produced during the initial baseline condition were acoustically relatively similar to the productions of typical speakers not diagnosed with SS. Although some differences in mean vowel duration and formant frequency values were found in the recorded vowel productions, results indicated that the participants' vowel productions remained relatively stable across the different phases of treatment. The absence of large treatment effects, in terms of vowel acoustics, may be due to the possibility that although the dryness associated with SS is an irratant for speakers, it may not affect their ability to produce diphthongal vowels in a significant manner.

Speech reception threshold (SRT) tools have been developed to assist in the evaluation of hearing. This study was performed to develop, digitally record, evaluate, and equate Taiwan Mandarin trisyllabic words which can be used to measure the SRT. Eighty-nine commonly used trisyllabic words were chosen and digitally recorded by native male and female speakers. The words were then presented to 20 normally hearing subjects at 14 intensity levels (-10 to 16 dB HL) with 2 dB increments. Psychometric function slopes were calculated using logistic regression. Twenty-eight words with steep psychometric function were selected and digitally adjusted to match the mean subject pure-tone average (5.0 dB HL). A list of 28 trisyllabic words which were relatively homogeneous in audibility and slope were developed. The mean slopes for the 28 selected male and female trisyllabic Taiwan Madarin words were 11.3 %/dB (male talker) and 11.7 %/dB (female talker), respectively. Digital recordings of the psychometrically equivalent trisyllabic words are available on compact disc.

Over the past several years, research has shown that children with language impairment often have increased social difficulties. The purpose of this study was to take a closer look at the relationship between language ability and emotion understanding by examining the recognition of facial expressions in children with specific language impairment (SLI) and their typically developing peers. As such, this study is a follow-up investigation of the work done by Spackman, Fujiki, Brinton, Nelson, & Allen (2006). Children with SLI and their age- and gender-matched peers were asked to identify the following six facial expressions of emotion in a language-minimal manner: happiness, anger, fear, surprise, sadness, and disgust. Group performance was then compared for each of the emotions examined. This study found significant differences between the groups (SLI vs. typical), with the children without language impairment performing better than those with SLI. There was also a significant difference found for emotion, indicating that some emotions were identified more correctly than others. No significant effects were found for gender, nor were any interaction effects between variables found.

Coarticulation is the kinematic and spectral overlap between adjacent sounds during speech production. Coarticulation patterns in typical adults have been well established; however, the manner in which coarticulation is developed in children is still unclear. Research has provided conflicting views, showing that children exhibit more, less, or an equal degree of coarticulation when compared to adult speakers. Considering the divergent findings present in the literature regarding coarticulation in children, the purpose of the present study is to further investigate anticipatory coarticulation in typically developing young children between the ages of three and six years. This study focuses on the acoustic characteristics of an unstressed vowel, the schwa, prior to a series of real words. Results indicate that children exhibit adult-like patterns of coarticulation even at a relatively young age. However, the degree of anticipatory coarticulation is dependent upon the phonemic context, with greater differences being evident in a fricative context and less when followed by a stop consonant.

Electropalatometry (EPM) has proven to be a useful clinical and research tool for measuring tongue-to-palate contact. The goal of this study was to determine whether the development of a database of standardized palatometric articulation files is feasible by examining the variability which exists within and between speakers. Twenty standard American English dialect speakers were fitted with palatometer pseudopalates. Test stimuli were VCV nonsense words using a schwa in the initial position, the 15 palatal consonants, and three corner vowels, /a/, /i/, /u/. From these palatometric recordings a variability index was created to examine intra- and interspeaker variability. Different aspects of articulation (i.e., place, manner, voicing, coarticulation) were considered. Significant findings for variability were found for place of articulation in the /i/ vowel context and for manner of articulation in the /ɑ/ vowel context. Also in the /a/ vowel context, significant findings were found between the commonly misarticulated /l/, /r/, and /s/. Consonants coarticulated with /a/ were found to be significantly less variable than consonants coarticulated with /u/. Also, speakers who were more variable in one vowel context, tended to be more variable in other vowel contexts. These quantitative findings, as well as qualitative observations, are discussed from theoretical and clinical perspectives. Directions for future research are outlined.