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An Investigation of Attitudes and Reactions of Preschool and School-Age Children Toward a Child Speaker with Stuttering Patterns
This study compared the attitudes and reactions of thirty preschool and thirty school-age children toward a child speaker with stuttering patterns. An introduction reviewed previous literature on defining stuttering, adults' and children's attitudes toward stuttering, and the stutterer's personality traits. The children of the study rated either a normal child speaker or a child speaker with stuttering patterns on a sociometric scale. In a giving task, the children were asked to choose one of the speakers. Statistical testing revealed that the school-age children had a more negative attitude toward and less social acceptance of the child speaker with stuttering patterns than the normal-speaking child. Implications for the speech-language pathologist in treating the child stutterer are discussed.
Bilingualism and Aphasia: Word Retrieval Skills in a Bilingual Anomic Aphasic
This study attempted to investigate the effects of aphasia on word retrieval skills in a bilingual (Spanish-English) anomic patient. Two aspects of word finding difficulties were considered. First, an attempt was made to determine whether the patient exhibited the same degree of difficulty in both languages. Second, after the presentation of three different types of facilatory cues (initial syllable, sentence completion, translated word) the correct number of correct responses per cue were analyzed to determine whether or not the same kinds of cues were equally effective in English and in Spanish. Results indicated that word retrieval was affected to essentially the same degree in both languages, with performance in Spanish only slightly better than in English. Cue effectiveness also appeared to differ across languages.
Voice Onset Time Characteristics of Selected Phonemes in Young and Old Male Speakers
The purpose of the investigation was to compare mean voice onset time in young and old male subjects, as well as to examine variability of VOT productions with age for prevocalic bilabial, alveolar, and velar voiced and voiceless stop consonants. Forty-five Caucasion.males were divided equally into three.age groups. Ten tokens of six stimulus words were recorded and wide band spectrograms were made. Results of an analysis of variance revealed no significant differences in VOT with age when averages of the phonemes were used for analysis; however, a significant interaction between age and voiced phonemes was found when individual trials of phoneme productions were used for analysis.
Assessment of Functional Communication Skills in Institutionalized and Non-Institutionalized Elderly Subjects Using the Spontaneous Speech and Auditory Comprehension Subtests of the Western Aphasia Battery
The purpose of this study was to determine if there is a difference in functional communication skills between elderly persons in nursing homes and those living independently in the community. Thirty non-institutionalized elderly subjects were given the Western Aphasia Battery (WAB) screening tool. These scores were compared to WAB screening scores obtained from 20 institutionalized subjects. The difference between these scores was statistically significant. The institutionalized subjects' scores were also correlated with a Facilitators Evaluation of Communication Skills (FECS) inventory. Results showed a moderate correlation between the institutionalized subjects' WAB screening score and their FECS rating. The benefits of a screening tool for elderly populations are discussed.
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