Background: Evidence suggests there is a heightened risk of psychiatric disorder in children with speech-language impairments. However, not all forms of language impairment are strongly associated with psychosocial difficulty, and some psychiatric disorders (e.g., attention deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD)) are more prevalent than others in…

Purpose: This study examined 2nd-grade teachers' perceptions of the academic, social, and behavioral competence of students with speech sound disorders (SSDs). Method: Forty-eight 2nd-grade teachers listened to 2 groups of sentences differing by intelligibility and pitch but spoken by a single 2nd grader. For each sentence group, teachers rated…

This study examined visual analog scaling judgments of disfluency by normal listeners in response to oral reading by 20 adults with spasmodic dysphonia (SD) and nondysphonic controls. Findings suggest that although dysfluency is not a defining feature of SD, it does contribute significantly to the overall clinical impression of severity of the…

Clause, syllable, and response latency characteristics of conversational utterances were assessed in 14 boys who stuttered and 14 normally fluent boys. Findings suggest that changes in the number of clausal constituents that must be constructed, stored, or coordinated within an utterance may influence the likelihood of speech errors and, hence,…

Discusses developmental apraxia of speech (DAS), a putative diagnostic category for children whose speech errors differ from errors of children with developmental speech delay and resemble errors of adults with acquired apraxia of speech. A study of 148 children with language impairments investigated the diagnosis of DAS. (Author/CR)

This study examined the interaction of ambient frequency and feature complexity in the diphthong errors produced by 13 Cantonese-speaking children with phonological disorders. Perceptual analysis of 611 diphthongs identified those most frequently and least frequently in error. Suggested treatment guidelines include consideration of three factors:…

Ten adults with dysarthria of various etiologies, type, and severity were compared to age-matched and gender-matched nondysarthric speakers on 40 short sentences. Results indicated reduced intonation values for the dysarthric group and varying rates as a function of subject group and sentence type. Results suggest that dysarthria is a deficit in…

Children (ages 5-7, N=31) with expressive phonological impairments were tested on phonological awareness and compared with control children. Children with phonological impairments scored well below controls on phonological awareness and literacy, independent of other language problems. Results suggest that both speech impairment and literacy…

Noncontingent escape (NCE) was used to reduce disruptive behavior in three children (age 4) with autism during regularly scheduled speech therapy sessions. Results showed rapid decreases in disruptive behavior and accompanying increases in compliance across children. Findings suggest that speech therapists can effectively implement NCE. (Author/CR)

This study compared two methods of speech elicitation for phonological assessment: conversation and picture naming with 13 male phonologically impaired children (ages 4.2 to 5.11 years). Results suggest that both methods are useful clinical assessment tools but that the picture-naming test may tap the child's phonological system more deeply and be…

This study (with 16 children and 11 adults) examined an alternative to the Developmental Weighting Shift model which explains age-related differences in labeling of speech stimuli as due to increasing experience with word-internal structure. Findings rejected the alternative model, that changes in perceptual weighting strategies are due to…

Comparison of the speech fluency and phonology of 18 boys (mean age 61 months) who stuttered and demonstrated either normal or disordered phonology found that the two groups were generally similar in terms of their basic speech disfluency, nonsystematic speech error, and self-repair behaviors. Predictions of the covert repair hypothesis of…

In this study, seven children with specific language impairment (SLI) and speech deficits were matched with same age peers and evaluated for iambic (weak-strong) and trochaic (strong-weak) prosodic speech forms. Findings indicated that children with SLI and speech deficits show less mature segmental and speech motor systems, as well as decreased…

This article reviews literature relating to the role of severe congenital speech impairment on phonological processing before reporting on a study of five adults with severe congenital speech impairments and their responses on tasks involving reading, receptive vocabulary, lexical decision making, and phoneme identification. Difficulties with…

Introduction: In this article we analyze the existence of personality characteristics associated with childhood dyslalia. Bibliographic references with regard to this topic are few and not recent. Different authors indicate that certain personality traits can act on some occasions as triggers to or as to encourage such alterations, and in other…