Treatment for adulthood stuttering traditionally focuses on some combination of stuttering management and fluency management and may also target emotional and cognitive reactions to stuttering. However, long-term gains are often limited, and there is a need for continued development of approaches for mitigating impacts of stuttering. We know of no evidence-based therapy approaches designed to target functional communication in adults who stutter (AWS), despite widespread interest in improving functional communication in members of this speaker group. Script training is an intervention approach designed to improve accuracy and automaticity in functional communication. Script training was originally designed for use with adults with aphasia and was also recently applied successfully with adults with apraxia of speech. The aim of this study was to determine effects of script training in AWS. Three males participated, one who stuttered mildly, one moderately, and one severely. Using a single-subject, multiple-baseline design, treatment and maintenance performance was compared to baseline performance on three dependent variables: Script accuracy, percentage of syllables stuttered, and speaking rate. Results indicate that script training may benefit AWS. Script accuracy increased and percentage of syllables stuttered decreased in all three individuals. Speaking rate increased for one participant, whose pre-treatment stuttering was rated as mild in severity. All participants reported a self-perceived increase in confidence communicating. These effects indicate that additional research is warranted to continue investigating effects of script training in people who stutter.

Smell plays a vital role in our daily lives and influences the way we perceive the world around us. People have the excellent ability to detect and distinguish odors, but they usually have difficulty in identifying individual odors. Olfactory abilities (olfactory identification, olfactory detection and olfactory discrimination) also differ significantly interindividually. In general, however, women achieve better results. While a number of studies point to sex differences in olfactory perception, especially in the identification of odors, we need to understand sex only as an overarching concept that includes specific factors such as hormonal influences or different odor experiences that can actually influence olfactory abilities. One of them could be verbal fluency, which allows us to recall information from memory, as there are studies showing the link between the ability to identify odors and verbal fluency. The main aim of the thesis was to test whether the difference between males and females in the identification of odors is mediated by a sex difference in verbal fluency. The secondary aim of the thesis was to explore whether the connection of odor identification and verbal fluency varies according to which form of verbal fluency is tested (phonetic or semantic), and whether these tests can be...

Essential factors, such as vocabulary knowledge and fluency, directly impact students’ overall reading comprehension and achievement. This session highlights one school’s eff orts to address the students’ needs in reading by focusing on fl uency. Benton Elementary, a rural high-poverty K-5 school, implemented a variety of schoolwide innovations, such as the Quick Reads program, repeated reading, Fluency Oriented Reading Instruction (FORI) strategies, while also incorporating the study of the 2,500 morphological word families. These word families account for 90 percent of words found in every book listed in appendix B of the Common Core State Standards (CCSS). Because of these targeted eff orts, students demonstrated signifi cant growth in TCAP reading profi ciency.

This study examines the immediate and chronic effects of physical activity (PA) breaks on reading fluency. While many teachers recognize the value of PA for increasing engagement and focus (getting the wiggles out) in academic endeavors, these results reveal increases in academic achievement in reading fluency are also possible.This study examines 384 second and third grade students with low income backgrounds from the Rocky Mountain region. A two-way analysis of variance (ANOVA) was used to examine the effects of chronic and acute brain breaks via GoNoodle© (McQuigg, 2013) on reading fluency and physical activity (steps). Between group differences were further examined using a series of Bonferroni adjusted one-way ANOVAs. A significant acute main effect was evident for (a), and (b) WR (F(1, 380) = 14.54, p < .001). Also, there was a trend toward a significant acute main effect on WPM (F(1, 380) = 4.02, p = .046) and chronic effects on WPM (F(1,380 = 3.13, p = .078) and accuracy (F(1, 380) = 4.45, p = .036).Correlational analysis reveals relationships among selected variables were in the anticipated direction. Analysis reveals significant, positive correlations between free and reduced lunch (FRL) status and reading fluency scores. Moving off free and reduced lunch status is related to small to moderately higher fluency scores: WPM (r = .34), accuracy (r = .14), WR (r = .22), and WIDA (r = .35). Dynamic Indicators of Basic Early Literacy Skills (DIBELS) fluency indices show strong positive correlations among themselves and share significant and strongly positive correlations with WIDA scores. Data suggests that higher SES are positively related to higher levels of reading fluency on both the DIBELS and WIDA measures. Also, as anticipated, the DIBELS and WIDA appear to share a strong relationship in measuring reading fluency.In today's educational landscape of high stakes testing perhaps the value of frequent PA breaks such as GoNoodle© have merit. Reading fluency (WPM, accuracy, and WR) and PA are linked and PA has been found to have a positive impact on the reading culture in the classroom.

Previous studies have examined the effect of atypical speech pause on conversational fluency and how the conversational listener perceives the speaker. The present study investigated the effect of pause duration of increasing length and in differing sentential locations on listener perceptions of communicative effectiveness and speaker likability. One neurotypical male and one neurotypical female speaker recorded three sentences from the Quick Aphasia Battery, and artificial pauses of varying lengths (250 ms, 400 ms, 550 ms, 700 ms, 850 ms, and 1 sec) were inserted before the subject, verb, and object of each sentence. The six baseline (unmodified) sentences were also included among the stimuli. These samples were randomly interspersed among foil samples that consisted of 30-second recordings of six people with fluent and nonfluent aphasia of mild to moderate severity. Forty adult participants (24 females and 16 males) listened to and rated the modified and foil samples for communicative effectiveness and the perception of likability of the speaker. A review of the data revealed that pause location may negatively impact speaker likability depending on the gender of the speaker. However, due to the small sample size of speakers (one male and one female) and factors that were not controlled for in this study (e.g., speaker pitch, speech rate, resonance, articulation patterns), these results require validation through further research that utilizes a larger sample. As pause duration increased, both speaker likability and communicative effectiveness ratings decreased. These findings suggest that monitoring pause duration and location in preliminary fluency samples could be beneficial to assess fluency severity and determine appropriate treatment goals. Wordfinding treatment may want to focus on vocabulary words that serve the function of subjects and objects in sentences. Although there are limitations in the methodology and results of this preliminary study, it is hoped that this study combined with future research can help to inform assessment and treatment of people with aphasia and other neurophysiological disorders that lead to atypical pause.

This study aimed to provide information about the quality of the evidence on reading fluency instruction for at-risk students and students with reading/learning disabilities as a way to evaluate whether an instructional strategy is evidence-based and has potential for classroom use. An extensive search process with inclusion and exclusion criteria yielded a total of 18 studies to be included in the present study: 12 group design studies and six single-subject design studies. The quality indicators proposed by Gersten et al. (Except Child 71:149–164, 2005) and Horner et al. (Except Child 71:165–179, 2005) were applied to evaluate the quality of selected fluency intervention studies. Results revealed that (a) most group design studies provided little information about the intervention and agent for the comparison group, (b) internal and social validity were not clearly stated in single-subject design studies, and (c) procedural fidelity in assessment and intervention implementation was inadequately addressed in both group design and single-subject design studies. Lack of methodological rigor, which hampers determinations of the effectiveness of fluency instruction, the current status of intervention studies, and future directions are discussed.

Dynamic written corrective feedback is a strategy that raises student awareness of the patterned errors they make in their writing. Teacher feedback provides the location and type of error made in the form of error codes. Multiple studies have shown it to significantly improve the grammatical accuracy of student writing. This research examines the effects of the frequency of teacher feedback, on student written accuracy, fluency, and complexity whether daily or every-other-day. The total number of minutes students write for is also questioned since it is directly related to the amount of feedback students receive. This is done to make the process more manageable for teachers, as well as determine the optimum volume and feedback frequency that can be processed and benefit students. Findings suggest that 20 minutes of writing a week has the potential to significantly improve accuracy no matter how the time is divided. Fluency also has the potential to improve significantly if students are writing for 5 minutes and receiving feedback daily. As previous research on daily 10-minute writing has suggested that only accuracy will improve, this study is instrumental in highlighting specific modifications that can be made to the DWCF process that increase the potential for development of both accuracy and fluency.

A synthesis of the research literature was conducted from 2004 to 2014 on interventions designed to build oral reading fluency for elementary students with learning disabilities (LD). An extensive search yielded a total of 12 intervention studies. Among the 12 studies, the majority (n D 9) implemented repeated reading with or without a model. Findings from this synthesis indicate that there may be no differential effects between repeated reading with or without a model for improving oral reading fluency of elementary students with LD. In addition, findings suggest that elementary students with LD may benefit from video modeling or word/phrase-based practices that provide opportunities to repeat misread words or phrases with words incorrectly read during the initial reading.

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