Purpose: The purpose of this article is to present a detailed description of a family-focused treatment for preschool children who stutter that addresses communication behaviors and attitudinal reactions that children and their parents may exhibit in reaction to stuttering, as well as a preliminary evaluation of the outcomes of that treatment.…

A classic observation in neurology is that aphasics can sing words they cannot pronounce otherwise. To further assess this claim, we investigated the production of sung and spoken utterances in eight brain-damaged patients suffering from a variety of speech disorders as a consequence of a left-hemisphere lesion. In Experiment 1, the patients were…

PURPOSE: To determine empirically which of three frequently observed rules in children with phonological disorders contributes most to difficulties in speaker intelligibility. METHOD: To evaluate the relative effects on intelligibility of deletion of final consonants (DFC), stopping of fricatives and affricates (SFA), and fronting of velars (FV),…

This final report documents the achievements of the State of Georgia Department of Education Speech-Language Pathology Assessment Project (SPAP), which examined competencies needed by school speech-language pathologists and developed the Speech-Language Pathology Assessment Instrument (SPAI) to assess those competencies. Trainees, instructed in…

The report documents the achievements of the SPAP (Speech-Language Pathology Assessment Project), which examined competency statements for beginning speech-language therapists. Noted are the development and revision of the SPAI (Speech-Language Pathology Assessment Instrument), a training conference for using the SPAI, practice assessment of…

The construction of therapy protocols for a large-scale randomized controlled trial comparing speech and language therapists and assistants, and group and individual therapy approaches for children aged 6-11 in mainstream schools is outlined. The aim was to outline the decision-making processes that led to the construction of the research therapy…

Background: Speech and language therapists treating children who stutter appear to be assigned a difficult task. Natural spontaneous remission accounts for approximately 60-80% of all children recovering from stuttering. Despite our best efforts, no protocol has ever shown its effectiveness separate from natural recovery rates (i.e. 60-80%).…

Current research highlights the prevalence of potentially undetected communication difficulties, often associated with major difficulties in literacy and learning, among pupils identified as having behavioural, emotional and social difficulties (BESD). In this article, Sarah Heneker, who is a speech and language therapist working mainly with…

As a strategy in education, short termism has been much criticised. In this article Jannet Wright and Myra Kersner consider the effects of short-term projects in relation to their own area of expertise in speech and language therapy. While they find such projects encourage creativity they also identify some serious limitations.

The present study investigated perceptual characteristics of speech in persons with stuttering before and after speech therapy. Five adult stutterers served as subjects. All the stutterers underwent prolongation therapy. Percentage of dysfluency, rate of reading, and type of dysfluencies were calculated in reading and spontaneous speech, before…

The effectiveness of the Ling System of Speech Training (which uses a systems analysis and task analysis approach to determine speech tasks by level, their prerequisites, and subskills) in facilitating gains in the suprasegmental and segmental aspects of speech and in speech intelligibility was examined with 15 hearing impaired children (5-8 years…

Results of a seven-week sentence stimulation treatment on sentence production in an aphasic adult female with agrammatism indicated that treatment influenced description of test picture sets and that some generalization to other picture sets occurred. (Author/DB)

The paper describes the development of Signed Target Phoneme (STP) Therapy, using the hand shapes of the Americal Manual Alphabet to cue phonemes. Adding STP to traditional therapy methods with a five-year-old boy diagnosed as having developmental apraxia of speech revealed a positive relationship between application of STP procedures and a more…

Individuals with long-standing habit cough having no organic basis can be successfully treated with a combination of psychotherapy and speech therapy. Techniques for speech therapy are adapted from those used with hyperfunctional voice disorders to fit this debilitating laryngeal disorder. (Author)

Primary Objective. To extend the capabilities of current electropalatography (EPG) systems by developing a pressure-sensing EPG system. An initial trial of a prototype pressure-sensing palate will be presented. Research Design. The processes involved in designing the pressure sensors are outlined, with Hall effect transistors being selected. These…