The early diagnosis of hearing loss can be a life-changing event for families. Parents are required to make several prompt decisions where they might be overwhelmed with all the information being shared with them. Patient education materials (PEMs) are often provided by clinical health professionals – yet these materials are often written above the average reading level of adults in the United States, thus presenting an additional challenge to many parents. The purpose of this study was to examine the ease of reading cochlear implant (CI) brochures that are provided to parents who are making informed decisions about the management of their child's hearing loss. The CI brochures analyzed include those from three Food and Drug Administration (FDA)-approved CI manufacturers: Advanced Bionics, Cochlear Americas, and MED-EL. Reading grade levels were analyzed using a commercially-available computer software program, applying six readability formulas commonly used to examine PEMs. Analyses revealed that the readability of the three CI brochures exceed the fifth- to sixth-grade reading levels recommended by health literacy experts. Audiology-focused PEMs continue to be created without full consideration of their reading grade level despite health literacy initiatives. Researchers should consider the health literacy skills of the reader when creating or revising PEMs such as CI brochures.

Vocal fatigue is a frequent symptom and a debilitating condition affecting individuals with voice disorders. In spite of the various attempts to define and quantify vocal fatigue, this complex trait has not been well understood. Mokken scaling was performed on the Vocal Fatigue Index (VFI) to develop a hierarchical understanding of the latent trait of vocal fatigue. Two hundred nine patients with voice disorders completed the VFI and provided the item responses necessary to complete the Mokken scaling. Results revealed a moderately strong Mokken scale and that the VFI presents a hierarchical structure to the underlying trait of vocal fatigue. Mokken scaling contributes to the ongoing investigation to the underlying construct of vocal fatigue and may provide additional information about specific complaints within the population of those with voice disorders.

Research in the area of clinical supervision has historically been limited, especially in the field of speech-language pathology. Furthermore, those few studies that do exist were primarily published during the decade of the 1980's. Clinical supervision, and specifically its critical component of supervisory feedback, is crucial to all clinical training programs. However, supervision research only mentions the topic of supervisory feedback and neglects the relationship between supervisory feedback preferences and actual supervisory practices. This study was designed to identify and compare supervisor and supervisee preferences and perceptions regarding supervisory feedback, to relate these preferences to a continuum-based model of clinical supervision, and to compare the feedback preferences of all participants to actual supervisory practices. Supervisory feedback preferences and perceptions were obtained by using a 31-item Supervisory Feedback Preferences and Perceptions Questionnaire (SFPPQ) developed for this study. Supervisory practices relevant to feedback were examined and described by collecting written feedback from participating supervisors at three different points within a six-week period of supervisory interaction. Participants included 37 speech-language pathology graduate students and 10 supervisors from two ASHA-accredited university training programs. Results revealed that both supervisors and student clinicians prefer verbal, in-person feedback, which is provided immediately and consistently after each treatment session. Additional preferences supported the continuum-based model of clinical supervision; however, actual practices did not reflect adherence to this model. Findings regarding supervisory practices revealed that supervisors gave mainly direct feedback to their supervisees and that this feedback did not change over time, unlike that suggested by the continuum model. Although no link was found between level of supervisory experience and nature of feedback given, clinicians with advanced experience levels received a higher percentage of direct feedback. This finding again contradicts the recommended model of supervision. This research expands and extends the limited amount of supervision literature, delineates areas for future research, and discusses implications for future clinical and supervisory training. These implications include information related to specialized supervisory training and styles of adult learning.

Studies of preschool children have shown early speech and language deficits in children with cleft lip and/or palate (CLP). For some children, the deficits during kindergarten diminish as they begin school while some children continue to show delays. The purpose of this study was to determine if a relationship exists between speech and language skills and early reading skills of phonological awareness, letter identification, and rapid naming in children with and without CLP. The subjects, four kindergarten children with and four without CLP, were administered a battery of speech, language, early reading skills, and nonverbal cognition measures. Two-way analysis of variance for groups and matched pairs and correlational analyses were performed. The results revealed that the cleft group performed poorer than the noncleft group on most of the speech, language, and early reading measures. Significant correlations were found between the speech and grammatical language measures and the early reading measures.

There is little empirical evidence to indicate the efficacy of early intervention approaches used with young children with cleft lip and/or palate (CLP). The positive effects of a focused stimulation approach have been documented with children having speech and language deficits, although an articulation model has predominated in intervention of young children with CLP. This study examined the effects of a focused stimulation language intervention and a modification of focused stimulation that emphasized stop consonants through overaspiration of stops (Golding-Kushner, 2001). Four mother-child dyads participated in the study. Each mother received training regarding the implementation of the two treatments. The two interventions were counterbalanced among the four dyads and spanned a total of eight weeks in length. Results indicated that both of the treatments increased the vocabulary usage and reduced the number of compensatory articulation errors in the speech of the children.

Previous research has shown that parent implemented intervention is effective in increasing the speech and language development of children with cleft lip and palate. To further determine the efficacy of this intervention, this study compared the speech and language development of children with CLP, who received parent implemented intervention, with a group of younger, typically developing children, matched for vocabulary size. This study also evaluated the language differences between the mothers of both groups of children. Speech and language assessments were administered to the typically developing children and their mothers at two times to mirror the time of assessment for the children with clefts who received a three-month intervention, in a prior study. The findings revealed that both groups of children demonstrated the same amount of speech and language growth as well as the cleft group exhibiting a decrease in compensatory articulation errors.

The effects of a multimodality treatment were investigated using a single subject experimental design across behaviors in two patients with different severity levels of Broca's aphasia. We hypothesized that Response Elaboration Training and an oral reading task would improve accuracy of sentence production, information content, and mean length of utterance. Results indicated that this treatment approach elicited significant improvement in the accuracy of sentence production and information content in the participant with very mild Broca's aphasia. Furthermore, the participant with severe Broca's aphasia demonstrated a very significant improvement in information content and mean length of utterance. The improvements support the idea that the same treatment may be used for individuals with various levels of ability as long as appropriate aspects of language are monitored for each client.

The prevailing speech therapy techniques for treating hypokinetic dysarthria in individuals with Parkinson's disease (PD) yields improvements within the clinical setting, however, maintenance and generalization of acquired behaviors continue to be a challenge. The purpose of this study was to investigate the effects of portable therapeutic devices including Ambulatory Phonation Monitor with biofeedback (APM) and auditory masker in maintenance and carryover of improved speech. Our participant was an individual diagnosed with PD for the past 25 years who continued to display speech disturbances despite undergoing several behavioral speech therapy programs and neurosurgical procedures. Speech intelligibility and average intensity measures under automatic, elicited, and spontaneous speech tasks were recorded pre- and postusage of APM and auditory masker for a period of 1 week each. Preliminary findings showed no significant difference in the measures between means (P>0.05) across all tasks for both the devices. Suggestions for future research on therapeutic devices are discussed.

No description available.

The critical bandwidth (CBW) is an auditory phenomenon that has been used to study various aspects of auditory processing, including auditory masking, complex tone processing, and loudness perception. Although the psychoacoustic aspects of the CBW have been well studied, the underlying neurophysiology of the CBW has not been as thoroughly examined. The current study examined the neurophysiology of the CBW in young adults, as well as loudness perception in response to the CBW. Auditory stimuli consisting of complex tones of varying bandwidths were presented to 12 individuals (6 male and 6 female, ages 18-26 years). Complex tones were presented around center frequencies (CFs) of 250, 500, 1000, and 3000 Hz at bandwidths of 2, 5, 8, 10, 20, 50, 100, 200, 500, 1000, and 2000 Hz. Participants made loudness perception judgments while electroencephalography measured and recorded components of the event related potentials (ERPs) in response to the acoustic stimuli. Reaction time (RT) was recorded for each behavioral response, and the latencies of the N1, P2, C3, and C4 components of the ERPs were obtained. The results showed that RT increased with increasing bandwidth followed by a decrease in RT corresponding approximately with the CBW. This indicated that participants perceived a change in loudness at bandwidths greater than the CBW. Significant differences, p < .05, in RT were observed in bandwidths of 5 Hz and greater, although there was not complete consistency in this observation across all CFs and bandwidths. No significant critical band-like behavior amongst ERP latencies was observed. The results indicated that responses to acoustic stimuli originating in the superior temporal gyrus progressed to areas of higher neural function in the mid-temporal lobe. It was observed that each response must be processed temporally and independently to determine if a frequency difference is present for each stimulus. This observation is significant because this type of processing had not been identified prior to the current study.