Digital Commons Network^™

Examining Social Pragmatic Communication: Evidence From Parent And Professional Questionnaires, Katelyn Adams

Honors Theses

Hyter (2007) defined pragmatics as “daily interactions among groups of people with varying worldviews, each influenced by a history of social practices” (p.131). People use aspects of pragmatics in their everyday life depending on the context of their current social situation. For example, one’s pragmatic language could differ in a day from talking with a boss at work to having a conversation with a friend on the phone. These variations in conversational processes result in the assessment of pragmatics being a difficult task.

In this honors thesis, I examined results from Dr. Yvette Hyter’s assessment battery, the Assessment of Pragmatic …

Speech Naturalness Before And Following Treatment In Adults Who Stutter, Alexis Novelli

Honors Theses

Purpose: The speech of persons who stutter can often sound unnatural. This can be due to a variety of factors including the presence of stuttering itself and/or the unintended consequence of speech-altering treatment. Understanding factors that contribute to speech naturalness within the stuttering population can direct improved management approaches. This study examines associations between speech task, behavioral measures of stuttering, and selected acoustic measures on listener ratings of speech naturalness for a group of adults immediately before and after participation in an intensive fluency-shaping treatment program. A secondary aim of this study is to assess the use of a novel …

Language Profiles Of Children Who Have Experienced Complex Trauma And Fetal Alcohol Spectrum Disorders, Christel G. Ciolino

Masters Theses

Children who experience maltreatment and children with Fetal Alcohol Spectrum Disorders (FASD) have similar neurological differences and are at risk for language impairments. However, limited research has been conducted to analyze their specific skill sets. To address this limitation, retrospective data from the Children’s Trauma Assessment Center of Southwest Michigan were analyzed. The linguistic profiles of 79 children with histories of varying numbers of traumatic experiences and comorbid FASD statues are compared in the areas of semantics, syntax, pragmatics, and social communication. Individuals had high pass rates on the CELF-5 Screening Test and high overall scores on the Pragmatic Protocol-Revised …

Assessment For Mild Cognitive Impairment: Striving For Best Practice, Julie Leigh Dalmasso

Dissertations

This dissertation is a series of three studies aimed at determining the best assessment practices for mild cognitive impairment (MCI) that can employed by speech-language pathologists (SLPs). The first study was non-experimental and descriptive examining whether three commonly used assessment instruments yielded similar categorical results. The data were analyzed to determine whether the Eight-Item Interview to Differentiate Aging and Dementia (AD8), the Mini-Mental State Examination (MMSE), and the Cognitive-Linguistic Quick Test (CLQT) identified the same participants from a neurotypical sample as having cognitive deficits. Very little agreement was found amongst the three tools.

Study two was modified to include two …

A Survey Of Perceptions And Professional Boundaries Between Music Therapy And Speech-Language Pathology, Jennifer Rose Fromius

Masters Theses

The purpose of this study is to examine the relationship between music therapists and speech-language pathologists in order to gain a better understanding of professional boundaries within each profession, frequency of co-treatment between the two professions, and perceptions of referral in clinical practice. Data for this research were collected through two online questionnaires with parallel sets of questions, which were distributed to a sample of boardcertified music therapists (MT-BC) and speech-language pathologists (CCC-SLP). Quantitative and qualitative data collected from the survey (N= 283; n = 45 MT-BC, n = 238 CCC-SLP) are analyzed to determine if there are correlations and …