Compared speaking rates, digit span, and speech timing in profoundly deaf 8- and 9-year-olds with cochlear implants and normal-hearing children. Found that deaf children displayed longer sentence durations and pauses during recall and shorter digit spans than normal-hearing children. Articulation rates strongly correlated with immediate memory…

A voice training program to improve pitch register was developed for profoundly hearing-impaired young adults. Ten students of the National Technical Institute for the Deaf completed the program; results showed a significant reduction in pitch level, as well as improvement in pitch control and word intelligibility. (Author/JDD)

Two operant speech treatment programs for establishing fluent speech--Delayed Auditory Feedback and Gradual Increase in Length and Complexity of Utterance--were compared, with 24 elementary-secondary level students. Both programs produced important improvement in fluency in a reasonable time period and resulted in similar levels of transfer and…

One hundred plastic surgeons responded to a survey on opinions toward facial plastic surgery for individuals with Down's syndrome. Twenty-four of the surgeons had performed the surgery. Surgeons indicated appropriate circumstances for the surgery, consent requirements, degree of understanding expected of the patient, and degree of discomfort…

Testing of 17 adult and 25 adolescent stutterers during a 12-month to 24-month postintensive treatment phase revealed that 69% of subjects maintained satisfactory fluency on surprise phone calls at home/work and 80% of subjects rated their speech fluency as good or fair on the Speech Performance Questionnaire. (Author/JDD)

Five profoundly hearing-impaired children were taught to speak seven consonant sounds using palatometry which allows learners to see tongue-to-palate contact patterns used in sound production. Results demonstrated that visual articulatory modeling and feedback of linguapalatal contact patterns is an effective means of teaching consonants and…

Speech language pathologists providing early intervention services for stuttering are urged to evaluate conceptual and practical aspects of various intervention procedures. After a review of three treatment methods (environment manipulation, prolonged speech, and response-contingent stimulation), the article concludes that response-contingent…

Sixteen preschool subjects were evaluated within several weeks after stuttering onset and followed for six months. Findings showed a strong tendency for reduction in stuttering-like disfluencies, number of head/face movements, and parent and clinician severity ratings of stuttering. Several subjects, including severe cases, exhibited complete…

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.…

Seventeen primary school deaf and hard-of-hearing children were given two types of training for 9 weeks each. Phonological training involved practice of /s, z, t, d/ in word final position in monomorphemic words. Morphological training involved learning and practicing the rules for forming third-person singular, present tense, past tense, and…

Describes a cassette tape remedial language laboratory system for improvement in English language articulation. (CH)

A three-factor model for the management of early childhood stuttering is proposed that takes into account stuttering's psychosocial, psycholinguistic, and physiological aspects. The primary focus of the present article is the psycholinguistic factor. To this end, a rationale for the use of language-based therapy is presented, together with…

The key element to the survival of speech communication and its status in academe is the basic course, which tells the academic community what speech communication is and what it can produce in terms of observable student behavior. This basic course, upon which many communication departments depend, must produce students who are obviously trained…

Systematic desensitization is described as an effective method for reducing test and speech anxieties in college students. Two standardized hierarchies, one for test anxiety, are presented to minimize problems in hierarchy construction. (Author)