Special Education and Teaching Commons^™

Kinematics Of Disease Progression In Bulbar Als, Yana Yunusova, Jordan R. Green, Mary J. Lindstrom, Laura J. Ball, Gary L. Pattee, Lorne Zinman

Department of Special Education and Communication Disorders: Faculty Publications

The goal of this study was to investigate the deterioration of lip and jaw movements during speech longitudinally in three individuals diagnosed with bulbar amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS). The study was motivated by the need to understand the relationship between physiologic changes in speech movements and clinical measures of speech performance such as speaking rate and speech intelligibility. Movements of the lip and jaw were quantified with respect to their size speed, and duration. The data revealed several changes in lip and jaw movement that coincided with ALS progression. In two out of three speakers, the changes in measures of …

A Cross-Sectional Comparison Of The Effects Of Phonotactic Probability And Neighborhood Density On Word Learning By Preschool Children, Jill R. Hoover, Holly L. Storkel, Tiffany Hogan

Department of Special Education and Communication Disorders: Faculty Publications

Two experiments examined the effects of phonotactic probability and neighborhood density on word learning by 3-, 4-, and 5-year-old children. Nonwords orthogonally varying in probability and density were taught with learning and retention measured via picture naming. Experiment 1 used a within-story probability/across-story density exposure context. Experiment 2 used an across-story probability/within-story density exposure context. Results showed that probability and density interacted to create optimal learning conditions. Specifically, rare/sparse sound sequences appeared to facilitate triggering of word learning. In contrast, the optimal convergence for lexical configuration and engagement was dependent on exposure context. In particular, common sound sequences and dense …

Subthalamic Nucleus Deep Brain Stimulation Changes Speech Respiratory And Laryngeal Control In Parkinson's Disease, Michael J. Hammer, Steven M. Barlow, Kelly E. Lyons, Rajesh Pahwa

Department of Special Education and Communication Disorders: Faculty Publications

Adequate respiratory and laryngeal motor control are essential for speech, but may be impaired in Parkinson's disease (PD). Bilateral subthalamic nucleus deep brain stimulation (STN DBS) improves limb function in PD, but the effects on respiratory and laryngeal control remain unknown. We tested whether STN DBS would change aerodynamic measures of respiratory and laryngeal control, and whether these changes were correlated with limb function and stimulation parameters. Eighteen PD participants with bilateral STN DBS were tested within a morning session after a minimum of 12 h since their most recent dose of anti-PD medication. Testing occurred when DBS was on, …

Articulatory-To-Acoustic Relations In Response To Speaking Rate And Loudness Manipulations, Antje Mefferd, Jordan R. Green

Department of Special Education and Communication Disorders: Faculty Publications

Purpose: This investigation determined the strength of association between tongue kinematic and speech acoustic changes in response to speaking rate and loudness manipulations. Performance changes in the kinematic and acoustic domains were measured using two aspects of speech production presumably affecting speech clarity: phonetic specification and variability.
Method: Tongue movements for the vowels /ia/ were recorded in ten healthy adults during habitual, fast, slow and loud speech using three dimensional electromagnetic articulography. To determine articulatory-to-acoustic relations for phonetic specification, we correlated changes in lingual displacement with changes in acoustic vowel distance. To determine articulatory-toacoustic relations for phonetic variability, we correlated …

Laryngeal Somatosensory Deficits In Parkinson’S Disease: Implications For Speech Respiratory And Phonatory Control, Michael J. Hammer, Steven M. Barlow

Department of Special Education and Communication Disorders: Faculty Publications

Parkinson’s disease (PD) is often associated with substantial impairment of speech respiratory and phonatory control. However, the degree to which these impairments are related to abnormal laryngeal sensory function is unknown. This study examined whether individuals with PD exhibited abnormal and more asymmetric laryngeal somatosensory function compared with healthy controls, and whether these deficits were associated with disease and voice severity. Nineteen PD participants were tested and compared with 18 healthy controls. Testing included endoscopic assessment of laryngeal somatosensory function, with aerodynamic and acoustic assessment of respiratory and phonatory control, and clinical ratings of voice and disease severity. PD participants …

Using Visual Scene Displays To Create A Shared Communication Space For A Person With Aphasia, Karen Hux, Megan Buechter, Sarah Wallace, Kristy S.E. Weissling

Department of Special Education and Communication Disorders: Faculty Publications

Background: Low-tech visual scene displays (VSDs) combine contextually rich pictures and written text to support the communication of people with aphasia. VSDs create a shared communication space in which a person with aphasia and a communication partner co-construct messages.

Aims: The researchers examined the effect of low-tech VSDs on the content and quality of communicative interactions between a person with aphasia and unfamiliar communication partners.

Methods & Procedures: One person with aphasia and nine unfamiliar communication partners engaged in short, one-on-one conversations about a specified topic in one of three conditions: shared-VSDs, non-shared-VSDs, and no-VSDs. Data included discourse analysis scores …

Accuracy Of Perceptually Based And Acoustically Based Inspiratory Loci In Reading, Yu-Tsai Wang, Jordan R. Green, Ignatius S. B. Nip, Ray D. Kent, Jane Finley Kent, Cara Ullman

Department of Special Education and Communication Disorders: Faculty Publications

Investigations of speech often involve the identification of inspiratory loci in continuous recordings of speech. The present study investigates the accuracy of perceptually determined and acoustically determined inspiratory loci. While wearing a circumferentially vented mask connected to a pneumotach, 16 participants read two passages. The perceptually determined and acoustically determined inspiratory loci were compared with the actual loci of inspiration, which were determined aerodynamically. The results showed that (1) agreement across all three judges was the most accurate of the approaches considered here for detecting inspiratory loci based on listening; (2) the most accurate pause duration threshold for detecting inspiratory …

Age Effect On The Gaze Stabilization Test, Julie A. Honaker

Department of Special Education and Communication Disorders: Faculty Publications

Impairments of the vestibular-ocular reflex (VOR) lead to a decline in visual acuity during head movements. Dynamic visual acuity (DVA) testing is a sensitive assessment tool for detecting VOR impairments. DVA evaluates accuracy of visual acuity during fixed velocity head movements. In contrast, the Gaze Stabilization test (GST) is a new functional evaluation of the VOR that identifies a person’s maximum head velocity (in degrees per second) a person can maintain with stable vision of a target (i.e. optotype). The objective of this study was to evaluate the effect of age on the GST in participants without vestibular disease. The …

Tac-Cell Inputs To Human Hand And Lip Induces Shortterm Adaptation Of The Primary Somatosensory Cortex, Lalit Venkatesan, Steven M. Barlow, Mihai Popescu, Anda Popescu, Edward T. Auer

Department of Special Education and Communication Disorders: Faculty Publications

A new pneumatic tactile stimulator, called the TAC-Cell, was developed in our laboratory to noninvasively deliver patterned cutaneous stimulation to the face and hand in order to study the neuromagnetic response adaptation patterns within the primary somatosensory cortex (S1) in young adult humans. Individual TAC-Cells were positioned on the glabrous surface of the right hand, and midline of the upper and lower lip vermilion. A 151-channel magnetoencephalography (MEG) scanner was used to record the cortical response to a novel tactile stimulus which consisted of a repeating 6-pulse train delivered at three different frequencies through the active membrane surface of the …

Effects Of Systematic Social Skill Training On The Social-Communication Behaviors Of Young Children With Autism During Play Activities, Laura L. Maddox

College of Education and Human Sciences: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

A systematic social skills training intervention to teach reciprocal sharing was designed and implemented with triads of preschool-age children, including one child with an autism spectrum disorder (ASD) and two untrained classroom peers who had no delays or disabilities. A multiple-baseline research design was used to evaluate effects of the social skills training intervention on social-communication and sharing behaviors exhibited by the participants with ASD during interactive play activities with peers. Social-communication behaviors measured included contact and distal gestures, touching peers and speaking. Four sharing behaviors were also measured, including sharing toys and objects, receiving toys and objects, asking others …

Lip Movement Exaggerations During Infant Directed Speech, Jordan R. Green, Ignatius S. B. Nip, Erin M. Wilson, Antje Mefferd, Yana Yunusova

Department of Special Education and Communication Disorders: Faculty Publications

Purpose: Although a growing body of literature has indentified the positive effects of visual speech on speech and language learning, oral movements of infant directed speech have rarely been studied. This investigation used 3-dimensional motion capture technology to describe how mothers modify their lip movements when talking to their infants.
Method: Lip movements were recorded from twenty-five mothers as they spoke to their infants and other adults. Lip shapes were analyzed for differences across speaking conditions. The maximum fundamental frequency, duration, acoustic intensity, and first and second formant frequency of each vowel were also measured.
Results: Lip movements were significantly …

Vowel Recognition From Continuous Articulatory Movements For Speaker-Dependent Applications, Jun Wang, Jordan R. Green, Ashok Samal, Tom D. Carrell

Department of Special Education and Communication Disorders: Faculty Publications

A novel approach was developed to recognize vowels from continuous tongue and lip movements. Vowels were classified based on movement patterns (rather than on derived articulatory features, e.g., lip opening) using a machine learning approach. Recognition accuracy on a single-speaker dataset was 94.02% with a very short latency. Recognition accuracy was better for high vowels than for low vowels. This finding parallels previous empirical findings on tongue movements during vowels. The recognition algorithm was then used to drive an articulation-to-acoustics synthesizer. The synthesizer recognizes vowels from continuous input stream of tongue and lip movements and plays the corresponding sound samples …

Orostiff: Face-Referenced Measurement Of Perioral Stiffness In Health And Disease, Shin-Ying Chu, Steven M. Barlow, Douglas Kieweg, Jaehoon Lee

Department of Special Education and Communication Disorders: Faculty Publications

A new device and automated measurement technology known as OroSTIFF is described to characterize non-participatory perioral stiffness in healthy adults for eventual application to patients with orofacial movement disorders associated with neuromotor disease, traumatic injury, or congenital clefts of the upper lip. Previous studies of perioral biomechanics required head stabilization for extended periods of time during measurement which precluded sampling patients with involuntary body/head movements (dyskinesias), or pediatric subjects. The OroSTIFF device is face-referenced and avoids the complications associated with head-restraint. Supporting data of non-participatory perioral tissue stiffness using OroSTIFF are included from 10 male and 10 female healthy subjects. …

Modified Head Shake Computerized Dynamic Posturography, Julie A. Honaker, Connie M. Converse, Neil T. Shepard

Department of Special Education and Communication Disorders: Faculty Publications

PURPOSE: Recent research on head shake posturography has demonstrated a modest increase in sensitivity to identifying peripheral vestibular system asymmetry when horizontal head movements were added to portions of the standard Sensory Organization Test (SOT) battery. However, limitations with respect to the head shake protocol were outlined, and usable data for assessing performance could not be established. The purpose of this study was to test a change in protocol for use of head shake SOT to address the noted limitations.
METHOD: Forty participants ranging in age from 20 to 79 years with no history of dizziness completed Conditions 2 and …

Chronic Subjective Dizziness (Csd) Vs. Conversion Disorder: Discussion Of Clinical Findings And Rehabilitation., Julie A. Honaker, Jane M. Gilbert, Jeffrey P. Staab

Department of Special Education and Communication Disorders: Faculty Publications

PURPOSE: Audiologists frequently encounter patients who complain of chronic dizziness or imbalance, in the absence of active vestibular or neurological deficits. Knowledge about conditions that cause this clinical presentation will allow audiologists to make important contributions to accurate diagnosis and effective management of these patients. This article reviews two such conditions, chronic subjective dizziness (CSD) and conversion disorder. METHOD: A case of CSD and another of conversion disorder are presented with a literature review of their clinical presentations, key diagnostic features, and treatment strategies. The role of the audiologist in assessing patients with these conditions and facilitating appropriate treatment referrals …

A Short Report: Word-Level Phonological And Lexical Characteristics Interact To Influence Phoneme Awareness, Tiffany Hogan

Department of Special Education and Communication Disorders: Faculty Publications

In this study, we examined the influence of word-level phonological and lexical characteristics on early phoneme awareness. Typically-developing children, ages 61-78 months, completed a phoneme-based, odd-one-out task that included consonant-vowel-consonant word sets (e.g., “chair-chain-ship”) that varied orthogonally by a phonological characteristic, sound-contrast similarity (similar vs. dissimilar), and a lexical characteristic, neighborhood density (dense vs. sparse). In a subsample of the participants – those with the highest vocabularies – results were in line with a predicted interactive effect of phonological and lexical characteristics on phoneme awareness performance: word sets contrasting similar sounds were less likely to yield correct responses in words …

Vowel Recognition From Articulatory Position Time-Series Data, Jun Wang, Ashok Samal, Jordan R. Green, Tom D. Carrell

Department of Special Education and Communication Disorders: Faculty Publications

A new approach of recognizing vowels from articulatory position time-series data was proposed and tested in this paper. This approach directly mapped articulatory position time-series data to vowels without extracting articulatory features such as mouth opening. The input time-series data were time-normalized and sampled to fixed-width vectors of articulatory positions. Three commonly used classifiers, Neural Network, Support Vector Machine and Decision Tree were used and their performances were compared on the vectors. A single speaker dataset of eight major English vowels acquired using Electromagnetic Articulograph (EMA) AG500 was used. Recognition rate using cross validation ranged from 76.07% to 91.32% for …

Preface To The 18th Annual Asha-Nih Research Symposium: Neurobiological Determinants Of Communication Development, Steven M. Barlow, Jordan R. Green

Department of Special Education and Communication Disorders: Faculty Publications

Neurobiological studies of the mammalian brain in health and disease have contributed greatly towards an improved understanding of the maturation-dependent vulnerability of the late preterm brain, the plasticity of the immature nervous system, and the evolution of specialized mechanisms for a communication or ‘language-ready’ neural substrate. Advances in developmental neurobiology have important implications for speech-language pathologists and audiologists working with neonates who, by virtue of their prematurity, are at risk for developmental disabilities. The extra-uterine environment during this critical period (24–40 weeks gestation) in brain development has a profound and long lasting impact on the premature infant. Prior barriers to …

Statistical Frequency In Perception Affects Children’S Lexical Production, Peter T. Richtsmeier, Louann Gerken, Lisa Goffman, Tiffany Hogan

Department of Special Education and Communication Disorders: Faculty Publications

Children’s early word production is influenced by the statistical frequency of speech sounds and combinations. Three experiments asked whether this production effect can be explained by a perceptual learning mechanism that is sensitive to word-token frequency and/or variability. Four-year-olds were exposed to nonwords that were either frequent (presented 10 times) or in¬frequent (presented once). When the frequent nonwords were spoken by the same talker, children showed no significant effect of perceptual frequency on production. When the frequent nonwords were spoken by different talkers, children produced them with fewer errors and shorter latencies. The results implicate token variability in perceptual learning.

Kinematic Analysis Of Articulatory Coupling In Acquired Apraxia Of Speech Post-Stroke, Carly J. Bartle-Meyer, Justine V. Goozée, Bruce E. Murdoch, Jordan R. Green

Department of Special Education and Communication Disorders: Faculty Publications

Primary objective: Electromagnetic articulography was employed to investigate the strength of articulatory coupling and hence the degree of functional movement independence between individual articulators in apraxia of speech (AOS). Methods and procedures: Tongue-tip, tongue-back and jaw movement was recorded from five speakers with AOS and a concomitant aphasia (M = 53.6 years; SD = 12.60) during /ta, sa, la, ka/ syllable repetitions, spoken at typical and fastrates of speech. Covariance values were calculated for each articulatory pair to gauge the strength of articulatory coupling. The results obtained for each of the participants with AOS were individually compared to those obtained …

Changes In Responsiveness When Brain Injury Survivors With Impaired Consciousness Hear Different Voices, Steffany Chleboun, Karen Hux, Jeff Snell

Department of Special Education and Communication Disorders: Faculty Publications

Primary objective—The researchers sought to determine whether individuals with impaired consciousness secondary to acquired brain injury (ABI) changed in responsiveness when purposefully presented with familiar, unfamiliar, and synthetic voice messages.

Research design—Researchers used an ABA single case study design across stimuli. Participants were 3 minimally-responsive ABI survivors.

Methods and procedures—Participants heard auditory stimuli two times daily for thirty days. Data from video recordings included tallies of behavioural responses at 10-second intervals throughout baseline, intervention, and post-intervention phases of each session. Statistical calculations allowed determination of responsiveness changes across time intervals within sessions.

Main outcomes and results—Unique response profiles emerged across …

Modeling The Developmental Patterns Of Auditory Evoked Magnetic Fields In Children, Rupesh Kotecha, Maria Pardos, Yingying Wang, Ting Wu, Paul Horn, David Brown, Douglas Rose, Ton Degrauw, Jing Xiang

Department of Special Education and Communication Disorders: Faculty Publications

Background: As magnetoencephalography (MEG) is of increasing utility in the assessment of deficits and development delays in brain disorders in pediatrics, it becomes imperative to fully understand the functional development of the brain in children.

Methodology: The present study was designed to characterize the developmental patterns of auditory evoked magnetic responses with respect to age and gender. Sixty children and twenty adults were studied with a 275-channel MEG system.

Conclusions: Three main responses were identified at approximately 46 ms (M50), 71 ms (M70) and 106 ms (M100) in latency for children. The latencies of M70 and M100 shortened with age …

The Development Of Jaw Motion For Mastication, Erin M. Wilson, Jordan R. Green

Department of Special Education and Communication Disorders: Faculty Publications

The developmental course of early chewing has rarely been studied, although such knowledge is essential for understanding childhood feeding and swallowing disorders. The goal of this investigation was to quantitatively describe age- and consistency-related changes in jaw kinematics during early chewing development. An optical-motion tracking system was used to record jaw movements during chewing in 3-dimensions in 11 typically-developing participants longitudinally from 9–30 months of age. Age related changes in jaw movement were described for both puree and regular consistencies. The findings demonstrated that the development of rotary jaw motion, jaw motion speed, and management of consistency upgrades are protracted …

Types Of Language Disorders In Students Classified As Ed: Prevalence And Association With Learning Disabilities And Psychopathology, Gregory J. Benner, Richard E. Mattison, J. Ron Nelson, Nicole C. Ralston

Department of Special Education and Communication Disorders: Faculty Publications

The purpose of this study was to determine the prevalence of four types of language disorders among public school students (N = 152) classified as Emotional Disturbance (ED). We also examined the association of the types of language disorders experienced by these students with specific learning disabilities and clinical levels of specific types of psychopathology. Nearly 66% of the students with ED experienced a language disorder, with combined receptive-expressive disorders being the most common (35.5%). Students with a language disorder, particularly combined receptive-expressive disorder, showed significantly poorer achievement and more learning disabilities (LD) in all areas compared to students with …

Effects Of Audibility And Multichannel Wide Dynamic Range Compression On Consonant Recognition For Listeners With Severe Hearing Loss, Evelyn Davies-Venn, Pamela Souza, Marc Brennan, G. Christopher Stecker

Department of Special Education and Communication Disorders: Faculty Publications

Objective—This study examined the effects of multichannel wide-dynamic range compression (WDRC) amplification and stimulus audibility on consonant recognition and error patterns.

Design—Listeners had either severe or mild-to-moderate sensorineural hearing loss. Each listener was monaurally fit with a wearable hearing aid using typical clinical procedures, frequency-gain parameters and a hybrid of clinically prescribed compression ratios for DSL (Scollie et al., 2005) and NAL-NL (Dillon, 1999). Consonant-vowel nonsense syllables were presented in soundfield at multiple input levels (50, 65, 80 dB SPL). Test conditions were four-channel fast-acting WDRC amplification and a control compression limiting (CL) amplification condition. Listeners identified the stimulus heard …

Neurobiological Determinants Of Communication Development, Steven M. Barlow, Jordan R. Green

Department of Special Education and Communication Disorders: Faculty Publications

Neurobiological studies of the mammalian brain in health and disease have contributed greatly towards an improved understanding of the maturation-dependent vulnerability of the late preterm brain, the plasticity of the immature nervous system, and the evolution of specialized mechanisms for a communication or “language-ready” neural substrate. Advances in developmental neurobiology have important implications for speech-language pathologists and audiologists working with neonates who, by virtue of their prematurity, are at risk for developmental disabilities. The extra-uterine environment during this critical period (24–40 weeks gestation) in brain development has a profound and long lasting impact on the premature infant. Prior barriers to …

A Nonword Repetition Task For Speakers With Misarticulations: The Syllable Repetition Task (Srt), Lawrence D. Shriberg, Heather L. Lohmeier, Thomas F. Campbell, Christine A. Dollaghan, Jordan R. Green, Christopher A. Moore

Department of Special Education and Communication Disorders: Faculty Publications

Purpose. Conceptual and methodological confounds occur when non(sense) repetition tasks are administered to speakers who do not have the target speech sounds in their phonetic inventories or who habitually misarticulate targeted speech sounds. We describe a nonword repetition task, the Syllable Repetiton Task (SRT) that eliminates this confound and report findings from three validity studies.
Method. Ninety-five preschool children with Speech Delay and 63 with Typical Speech, completed an assessment battery that included the Nonword Repetition Task (NRT: Dollaghan & Campbell, 1998) and the SRT. SRT stimuli include only four of the earliest occurring consonants and …

Fukuda Stepping Test: Sensitivity And Specificity, Julie A. Honaker, Neil T. Shepard

Department of Special Education and Communication Disorders: Faculty Publications

Background: A vestibulospinal test known as the Fukuda Stepping Test (FST) has been suggested to be a measure of asymmetrical labyrinthine function. However, an extensive review of the performance of this test to identify a peripheral vestibular lesion has not been reported.
Purpose: The purpose of this study was to evaluate the sensitivity and specificity of the standard FST and a head shaking variation for identification of a peripheral vestibular system lesion.
Research Design: In this retrospective review, we compared performance on the FST with and without a head shaking component to Electronystagmography (ENG) caloric irrigation unilateral weakness results.
Study …

The Child Outcomes Of A Behavior Model, J. Ron Nelson, Kristin Duppong-Hurley, Lori Synhorst, Michael Epstein, Scott Stage, Jacquelyn Buckley

Department of Special Education and Communication Disorders: Faculty Publications

Within 3-tier behavioral models, universal interventions are expected to prevent the onset of problem behavior in a majority of children altogether and to sustain improvements in child outcomes by the selected and indicated interventions. A cohort longitudinal design was used to assess the extent to which a 3-tier model achieves these expected outcomes. The respective universal, selected, and indicated interventions included Behavior and Academic Support and Enhancement. First Step to Success, and MultiSystemic Therapy. A total of 407 children in Grades K-3 from 1 of 4 longitudinal cohorts participated. The results of 2-level linear growth analyses indicate that the 3-tier …

Introduction: Advances In The Early Detection Of Reading Risk, Jennifer M. Thomson, Tiffany Hogan

Department of Special Education and Communication Disorders: Faculty Publications

As we write the prologue to this Special Issue of the Journal of Learning Disabilities, "Advances in the early detection of reading risk," the U.S. National Early Literacy Panel has recently released its report, “Developing Early Literacy” (National Early Literacy Panel, 2008). A chapter of the report is devoted to reviewing studies that attempt to identify the most accurate preschool and kindergarten predictors of later outcomes in reading and spelling. The report is affirmative of an emerging consensus that the very early status of skills directly related to literacy: alphabet knowledge, phonological awareness, rapid automatic naming (RAN), phonological memory and …