The primary purpose of this study was to demonstrate the efficacy of the blending portion of the Promoting Awareness of Sounds in Speech (PASS) program, a comprehensive and explicit phonological awareness intervention curriculum designed for preschool children with speech and language impairments. A secondary purpose was to examine the effects of…

Evaluates whether time-in alone (physical touch and verbal praise) versus the combined use of time-in and time-out was a more effective treatment for noncompliance with three developmentally disabled children. Results show that although time-in alone resulted in increased compliance, the time-in/time-out combined phase resulted in further…

A time-out from speaking contingency was evaluated in the treatment of stuttering in three school-age children. A red light time-out signal appeared for five seconds when the child stuttered. Two of the children responded to time-out with clear reductions in stuttering. Listeners did not detect any differences between the perceptually stutter-free…

Discusses a study that compared speech and prosody-voice profiles of children (ages 4-14) with suspected developmental apraxia of speech (DAS) to profiles of 73 children with speech delay. Also describes a second study of 20 children (ages 3-9) that investigated whether stress was a diagnostic marker of DAS. (Author/CR)

A study used the conversational speech samples from 19 children (ages 4-14) with suspected developmental apraxia of speech (DAS) to investigate the characteristics of the disability. The results of the study, combined with the results of two previous studies, indicate inappropriate stress is a diagnostic marker for DAS. (Author/CR)

A survey of 100 speech-language pathologists involved in the assessment and treatment of patients with dysarthria investigated their attitudes toward the Darley, Aronson, and Brown (DAB) method of classification. Results indicated that most clinicians, believing it helps in the design of a treatment protocol, used the DAB classification system.…

Telephone interviews with families (n=4,689) in New South Wales, Australia, found the prevalence of stuttering in the overall population was 0.72% with highest rates in children (1.4) and lowest in adolescents (0.53%). Male to female ratios were 2.3:1 overall. Incidence estimates ranged from 2.1% in adults to 3.4% in older children. The…

Reviews recent research on English place assimilation (e.g., "sweet" articulated as "sweep" in the environment "sweet boy"), evaluating an account of variation in terms of abstract, underspecified lexical form representations. A hybrid account is proposed where abstract lexical representations can be contacted directly by varying phonetic forms.…

A study of 10 typical women investigated the effect of fingerspelling task length on temporal characteristics and perceived naturalness of speech produced during simultaneous communication. Speech produced during simultaneous communication was rated as less natural and demonstrated increased interword interval, diphthong, work, and sentence…

A study of eight Dutch individuals (ages 14 to 56) who stutter found that adaptation of stuttering frequency during repeated readings may be a result of motor learning. Furthermore, during repeated readings, reductions in stuttering frequency were not related to reductions in the variability of acoustically derived measures of speech production.…

Acoustic data for 26 typically speaking 9 to 15 year olds for the /s/ frication were collected and evaluated. Analysis of the reference data set indicated that acoustic characterization of /s/ is appropriately and optimally obtained from the midpoint of /s/, represented in linear scale, referenced to individual linguistic-phonetic contexts,…

This research report presents new young adult norms for the Test of Adolescent/Adult Language-3 (TOAL-3) using data from the Ottawa Speech and Language Study (N=242). It is thought this population better represents the full range of young adult language abilities (because the original norms included only individuals who pursued postsecondary…

Speech samples of 79 dysarthric patients were judged for voice quality, articulation, nasality, and prosody as well as overall intelligibility. Application of a multiple regression model found that intelligibility can be expressed as a linear combination of weighted perceptual dimensions with articulation as the strongest contributor to…

A study examined family histories of 31 children with specific language impairments who were known to have particular grammatical limitations in a core feature of grammatical acquisition, a stage known as Extended Optional Infinitives. The families had significantly more speech and language difficulties, as well as language-related difficulties,…

In this study, eight young adolescents with dyslexia were compared to age-matched controls on a number of speech and non-speech auditory tasks. Children with dyslexia had significantly higher thresholds in backward masking for bandpass noise than did control participants, but differed in no other way. (Contains references.) (Author/CR)