Medicine and Health Sciences Commons^™

Characterizing Spoken Discourse In Individuals With Parkinson Disease Without Dementia, Angela C. Roberts

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

Background: The effects of disease (PD) on cognition, word retrieval, syntax, and speech/voice processes may interact to manifest uniquely in spoken language tasks. A handful of studies have explored spoken discourse production in PD and, while not ubiquitously, have reported a number of impairments including: reduced words per minute, reduced grammatical complexity, reduced informativeness, and increased verbal disruption. Methodological differences have impeded cross-study comparisons. As such, the profile of spoken language impairments in PD remains ambiguous.

Method: A cross-genre, multi-level discourse analysis, prospective, cross-sectional between groups study design was conducted with 19 PD participants (M_age = 70.74, M …

Language Skills, Oral Narrative Production, And Executive Functions Of Children Who Are Deaf Or Hard Of Hearing, Hyejin Park

Theses and Dissertations (ETD)

This study assessed the language skills, oral narrative abilities, and executive functions (EFs) of children who are deaf or hard of hearing (DHH) and normal hearing (NH), and examined the differences between two groups as well as the relationships between oral narrative production and EFs.

Eleven children who are DHH and ten who are NH, between 9 and 11 years of age, participated in the study. All of the children in the DHH group had bilateral hearing losses ranging from moderate through profound, and had no other diagnosed social, emotional or intellectual problems. All had more than 4 years 10 …

Nonword Repetition Performance Patterns In English - Spanish Bilingual Adults And English And Spanish Monolingual Adults, Nadia Arriazola Flores

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

Nonword repetition (NWR) is known to be a less biased measure for assessing language abilities of culturally and linguistically diverse (CLD) children (Dollaghan & Campbell, 1998). NWR is used to examine phonological short-term memory mechanisms (also called working memory), because the tasks require the capability to discriminate, store, remember and reproduce phonological sequences (Baddeley, 1989; Braddeley 1974). The purpose of this study was to collect normative data on the NWR performance of bilingual and monolingual adults. This may contribute to the interpretation of performance in bilingual children by providing the standard of adult-like performance. This study examined the performance patterns …

Pragmatics, Prosody, And Social Skills Of School-Age Children With Language-Learning Differences, Janet Lynn Bradshaw

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

Social skills are an important aspect of child development that continues to have influences in adolescence and adulthood (Hart, Olsen, Robinson, & Mandleco, 1997). Interacting in a social world requires an integration of many abilities that include social skills and emotional understanding of oneself and other persons. Children who have difficulties with interpreting social cues (e.g., identifying basic emotions and responding to cues in speech) have immediate and progressive consequences in both academics and social living. Children with typical language skills are successfully interacting with peers and acknowledging social rules for different environments (e.g., playing at school vs. playing at …

Effects Of Age And Syntactic Complexity On Speech Motor Performance, Christopher Dromey, Kelsey Boyce, Ron Channell

Faculty Publications

Purpose: This study investigated the effect of age on articulatory movement and stability in young, middle-aged, and older adults. It also examined the potential influence of linguistic complexity on speech motor control across utterances that differed in their length and grammatical complexity.
Method: There were 60 participants in three age groups: 20-30 years, 40-50 years, and 60-70 years, with equal numbers of men and women in each group. The speakers produced 10 repetitions of five different stimuli, each of which included the same bilabial-loaded phrase in different grammatical contexts, while their lip movements were recorded.
Results: Participants from the 60 …

Anomia Treatment Platform As Behavioral Engine For Use In Research On Physiological Adjuvants To Neurorehabilitation, Diane Kendall, Anastasia Raymer, Miranda Rose, Joellen Gilbert, Leslie J. Gonzalez Rothi

Communication Disorders & Special Education Faculty Publications

The purpose of this study was to create a "behavioral treatment engine" for future use in research on physiological adjuvants in aphasia rehabilitation. We chose the behavioral target anomia, which is a feature displayed by many persons who have aphasia. Further, we wished to saturate the treatment approach with many strategies and cues that have been empirically reported to have a positive influence on aphasia outcome, with the goal being to optimize the potential for positive response in most participants. A single-subject multiple baseline design with replication across eight participants was employed. Four men and four women, with an average …