Inequality in communicative resources available to non-speaking children with cerebral palsy in comparison with their "naturally" speaking co-participants has material consequences for the ways in which face-to-face interaction is organized. Analyses of interaction involving non-speaking children with physical disability and speaking…

Purpose: The spatiotemporal index (STI) is one measure of variability. As currently implemented, kinematic data are used, requiring equipment that cannot be used with some patient groups or in scanners. An experiment is reported that addressed whether STI can be extended to an audio measure of sound pressure of the speech envelope over time that…

The structure of /s/-clusters has been a rather controversial subject due to their structural oddities. Studies on the acquisition of these clusters have contributed to the discussion to validate certain theoretical claims, and sonority-related issues have always been in focus. Cross-linguistic acquisition data from children with phonological…

Children with unintelligible speech differ in severity, underlying deficit, type of surface error patterns and response to treatment. Detailed treatment case studies, evaluating specific intervention protocols for particular diagnostic groups, can identify best practice for children with speech disorder. Three treatment case studies evaluated the…

With modern improvements to hearing aids and cochlear implant (CI) technology, and consequently improved access to speech, there has been greater emphasis on listening-based therapies for children with hearing loss, such as auditory-verbal therapy (AVT). Speech and language, speech perception in noise, and reading were evaluated before and after…

Adult scaffolding during repeated storybook reading was developed for children who use speech as their primary expressive modality, but through the use of augmentative and alternative communication, it has been extended to children who do not have functional, intelligible speech. Scaffolding strategies during repeated storybook reading and during…

This study focuses on the comorbidity between attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) symptoms and speech sound disorder (SSD). SSD is a developmental disorder characterized by speech production errors that impact intelligibility. Previous research addressing this comorbidity has typically used heterogeneous groups of speech-language…

Earlier research has suggested a link between epileptiform activity in the electroencephalogram (EEG) and developmental speech-language disorder (DSLD). This study investigated the strength of this association by comparing the frequency of EEG abnormalities in 45 language-normal children (29 males, 16 females; mean age 6y 11mo, SD 1y 10mo, range…

There are many kinds of speech and language disorders that can affect children. This fact sheet will present four major areas in which these impairments occur. These are the areas of: (1) Articulation; (2) Fluency; (3) Voice; and (4) Language. Following a brief narrative on a day in the life of a Speech Language Pathologist, this fact sheet…

Purpose: Childhood apraxia of speech (CAS) has been associated with a wide variety of diagnostic descriptions and has been shown to involve different symptoms during successive stages of development. In the present study, the authors attempted to associate the symptoms of CAS in a particular developmental stage with particular…

We examined categorical speech perception in school-age children with developmental dyslexia or Specific Language Impairment (SLI), compared to age-matched and younger controls. Stimuli consisted of synthetic speech tokens in which place of articulation varied from "b" to "d". Children were tested on categorization, categorization in noise, and…

Childhood apraxia of speech (CAS) is a proposed speech disorder subtype that interferes with motor planning and/or programming, affecting prosody in many cases. Pilot data (Peter & Stoel-Gammon, 2005) were consistent with the notion that deficits in timing accuracy in speech and music-related tasks may be associated with CAS. This study…

Background: Nasometry has supplemented perceptual assessments of nasality, using speech stimuli, which are devoid of nasal consonants. However, such speech stimuli are not representative of conversational speech. A weak relationship has been found in previous studies between perceptual ratings of hypernasality and nasalance scores for passages…

Parenting a child with special needs can be perplexing and overwhelming journey which requires parents to make choices in unfamiliar territory. The manner in which parents make choices for their children establishes a model and sets a tone for what they expect their children to learn as well as what we expect of the people who serve their…

Background: Increasing evidence suggests that childhood language problems persist into early adulthood. Nevertheless, little is known about how individual and environmental characteristics influence the language growth of individuals identified with speech/language problems. Method: Individual growth curve models were utilised to examine how…