The purpose df this paper was to evaluate the effectiveness of the Home Auditory Program of Project SKI*HI on the listening skills of its students during the years 1972-1975. The scores of two groups of children, as measured on the SKI*HI Listening Skills Scale were compared. The statistical evaluation indicated that: 1. Significant improvements in listening skills were demonstrated by one group of children during three to eleven months of treatment, and 2. The scores of this treated group were significantly superior to the non-treated group, despite a similarity in age and degree of hearing loss between the two groups.

The present study was designed to investigate the perceptual and spectrographic features of vocal effort in the speech of severely to profoundly hearing-impaired children and their normal hearing agemates. Recorded vowel and speech samples were obtained from ten normal hearing children, ten severely to profoundly hearing-impaired children attending Oral/Aural educational programs, and eight severely to profoundly hearing-impaired children attending Total Communication programs. The degree of perceived vocal effort for vowels and speech was evaluated, using a nine point equal-appearing-interval scale. In order to obtain a physical measurement for vocal effort, a digital wave analyzer was used to produce vowel spectra, and the amount of in-harmonic (noise) components in each spectrum was indexed as spectral noise level.

The purpose of this study was to investigate the development and use of certain grammatical morphemes, i.e., the English inflections for plural, possessive, present progressive and past tense in the speech of educable mentally retarded (EMR) adolescents. The performance on two grammatical tasks of EMR subjects was compared to that of normal control subjects matched by mental age scores. The first task was to produce, verbally, the required inflection for a novel (nonsense) word on a modified version of Berko’s Test of English Morphology (BTEM) (Berko, 1958). Secondly, subjects responded to grammatical contrasts in lexical or real words at levels of imitation, comprehension and production on a modified form of the Imitation, Comprehension and Production Test (ICP) (Fraser, Bellugi and Brown, 1963). The results of this study revealed statistically significant poorer performance in the use of English inflections by EMR adolescents when compared with control subjects of similar mental age, specifically in the use of less common allomorphs for plural, possessive and past tense.

Garner Ted Armstrong is fast becoming a well known religious and political commentator. The purpose of this thesis was to describe and discuss the techniques and characteristics of Mr. Armstrong's rhetoric. The question to be answered was "What are the characteristics of a successful religious broadcaster?" The method used-in the selection of the speeches to be used in this study consisted of selection a number of speeches (56), then breaking them down into theme categories. After analysis, there were eleven categories. One speech was selected from each category, and these eleven speeches were the speeches that were used in the study. The results of my study showed that Mr. Armstrong uses various forms of persuasive techniques, among them, for-example, the simile. The logical development of Mr. Armstrong's speeches leaves a great deal to be desired. He does not support his assertions and leaves the audience to supply a great deal of the support and verification for his arguments. His greatest attribute is his voice and personality. He has a very pleasant voice and his personality is similar to that of an entertainer. Possibly his inventory of subjects is one of the main attractions of his broadcast. He speaks, generally, on social problems such as pollution, crime, and drugs. He is a successful broadcaster, and quite possibly it is the combination of these characteristics that make him so successful.

In order for the hearing handicapped child to derive maximum benefit of language acquisition through maturation, a method of receptive communication is essential at the earliest age possible. It is felt that speechreading is this method. The need for a method of training speechreading cues to prelingual, aurally handicapped children is based on the fact that most visual speechreading methods require the use of language. If speechreading can be regarded as a learning process involving the discrimination of visual cues that maybe disassociated from language expression then training the child to discriminate various facial expressions may actually enhance speech-reading ability. If such a training method proved to be highly connected with speechreading learning, then it also might prove useful in helping the deaf pre-school child acquire the necessary attentive and discriminitive behaviors consistent with speechreading. Ten pre-school, normal hearing children participated in an oral-gestural training program which was carried out in three parts: 1) Administration of the revised Children's Speechreading Test, 2) Training for discrimination of oral-gestural pairs as "same" or "different" until a 100 percent correct response criterion had been obtained, 3) Evaluation of the oral-gestural training through readministration of the revised Children's Speechreading Test. A t-test of the difference between the baseline mean and post training speechreading mean revealed significance beyond the .05 level of confidence. This supported the original proposal that speechreading skills for propositional words can be acquired by means of visual discrimination training in oral-facial movements. It is thus proposed that such training will prove useful in helping the hearing handicapped preschool child acquire the necessary behaviors consistent with speechreadlng, namely attention and visual discrimination. This study involved normal hearing subjects in which language was already established. Since the Oral-Gestural Training program is designed for the hearing handicapped prelingual child, further investigation with such a population appears necessary to confirm the findings of this investigation. Other questions that arose during the study such as sex and age differences of a larger sample, and the significance of the number of oral-gestural training sessions as related to the post-training test score, are other related areas that need consideration before a final conclusion can be drawn. Although no formal data was obtained on attention span, it was observed subjectively that this capacity improved markedly among these subjects. This is a clinical observation and should be subjected to further investigation. In conclusion, it appears through the findings of this study, that such a training method may be highly related with speechreading training and may indeed prove useful in helping prelingual, aurally handicapped children acquire the necessary behaviors consistent with speechreading.

Recently, there have appeared in the literature treatment approaches for the disorder of developmental apraxia of speech in children. These treatment approaches make use of the visual modality, and specifically use reading stimulus materials to improve articulation skills. Several authors have endorsed this use of reading materials in the treatment of developmental apraxia of speech in children including: Morley (1965); Rosenthal (1971); Rosenbek and Wertz (1972); and Rosenbek et al. (1974). These treatment approaches have been offered via the literature without the benefit of empirical verification that children with DAS will make fewer articulation errors while reading aloud than they would speaking spontaneously. The primary purpose of this investigation was to provide empirical support for the treatment approaches to DAS in children which make use of reading stimuli to improve the articulation performance of these children. A secondary purpose was to present a possible treatment approach through the increasing of oral reading speed in children with DAS.

The purpose of the present study involved the investigation of the significance of wind noise as a contributing factor toward temporary threshold shifts among a select sample of motorcycle riders. Five ' normal-hearing, helmeted, female subjects were administered pure-tone air-conduction hearing tests immediately before and within 2 minutes after exposure to three noise-related aspects of motorcycle riding. The amount of ,hearing loss present at 3k, 4k and 6k Hz after each 20 minute exposure condition was recorded as the TTS for that subject. The three conditions consisted of motorcycle noise only, wind noise only and motorcycle and wind noise combined. A statistical analysis of the data revealed that motorcycle noise alone produced significantly less TTS than the wind only or the wind and motorcycle noise. These findings support the hypothesis that wind noise is a significant factor in the production of TTS and possible noise-induced hearing loss among motorcycle riders.

The purpose of this study was to determine the amount, type, and content of training acquired by SLPs presently working in dysphagia management, as well as their level of involvement. A questionnaire was sent to 97 Oregon SLPs. Of these, 77 (80%) responded, and 52 met criteria. The resulting data indicated that SLPs involved with dysphagia work in a variety of settings, including hospitals, nursing homes, home health agencies, and private practice. Seventy-two percent of the subjects have been involved with dysphagia management for less than 10 years; 79% treated between 1 and 10 patients for dysphagia the month prior to filling out the questionnaire; and 81% have provided other staff in their settings with in-service on dysphagia.

The purpose of the present study was to investigate the presence or absence of a phonological recoding strategy in the mentally retarded population by using a memory matching exercise with visual stimuli. Pictures of common objects were divided into eight pictures with names that sound alike (homophonous) and eight with names that do not sound alike (non-homophonous). The null hypothesis tested was: No statistically significant difference will be found between mentally retarded and normal subjects in the development and use of a phonological recoding strategy for a short-term memory task, when the subjects are matched for receptive vocabulary age.

In order to assess a component of communication in interpersonal relationships, an instrument was developed to determine the correspondence in relational perceptions between partners in a marital dyad. The current study focuses on the levels of awareness spouses exhibit regarding phenomenological perceptions of themselves, their partners and the status of their dyadic system.