Communication Sciences and Disorders Commons^™

August 13, 2013, Communication Disorders & Sciences

Faculty Meeting Minutes & Agendas

The August 13, 2013 "Welcome Back" faculty meeting.

Auditory Temporal Processing In Children With Specific Language Impairment Compared To Same-Age Controls, Elaine Yuen Ling Kwok

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

It has been proposed that impaired language development in children with Specific Language Impairment (SLI) originates from immature auditory temporal integration (ATI), but results are inconsistent. We compared electroencephalographic data from 25 children with SLI aged 6-11 years to 25 typically developing peers. Participants’ neural responses to a 50ms tone presented alone were compared to their responses to two tones separated by silent gaps of 100, 200, 300 or 400ms. Amplitude and latency of P1 and N2 responses to single tones and tone pairs were compared across groups and gap conditions. The groups did not differ in the amplitude or …

Relationship Between A Measure Of Social And Emotional Development And Early Communication Development In Young Children With Cleft Palate, Jenna L. Pugh

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This study was an examination of responses to a standardized assessment of social-emotional behaviors and correlation with speech and language development in young children with cleft palate and/or lip. Twenty-eight participants aged 14-35 months with nonsyndromic cleft palate and or lip were included in this study. The Infant-Toddler Social and Emotional Assessment (ITSEA) was used to identify emerging social and emotional behaviors. Descriptive analysis of ITSEA results was completed. Pearson correlation coefficient and effect size estimates were calculated between ITSEA domain raw scores and measures of speech and language development. A small proportion of participants (14%) showed ITSEA scores beyond …

Assessing For And Understanding The Impact Of Hearing Loss In Children, Sally A. Arnold Ph.D.

NYS Child Welfare/Child Protective Services Training Institute

Hearing loss in children may occur unnoticed if the family isn’t knowledgeable about hearing loss and the child is not routinely seen for medical exams or by a school or a service provider. The child welfare caseworker may be in a position to spot a potential hearing loss and make an appropriate referral.

This PowerPoint describes:

Indicators of hearing loss when assessing children;

Hearing milestones by age;

The types of hearing loss;

Appropriate referrals if a hearing loss is suspected.

This PowerPoint can be useful not just for the caseworker’s knowledge, but may be useful in helping parents understand why …

The Role Of The Vestibular And Proprioceptive Systems In Processing Dynamic Sound Localization Cues, Janet Kim

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

Head movements are known to be beneficial during sound localization because the auditory system can integrate the dynamic cues generated by head movement while maintaining a spatial representation of the position and orientation of the head-in-space. To measure the extent to which vestibular and proprioceptive cues influence processing of dynamic sound localization cues resulting from head rotation, we measured the ability of normally hearing listeners to localize front/back sources of low-frequency sounds while the two modalities were individually or congruently stimulated. Targets were presented over headphones during head rotations using virtual auditory space methods. Dynamic localization cues corresponded to head-in-space …

A Comparison Of Speech Amplification Devices For Individuals With Parkinson's Disease And Hypophonia, Monika Andreetta

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

One of the most prevalent speech impairments in idiopathic Parkinson’s disease (PD) is hypophonia, a reduction in intensity, which typically decreases intelligibility. Speech amplification devices are a potential solution; however, despite the availability of a broad range of devices, no previous studies systematically compare their efficacy in PD. This study examined the effects of speech task (Sentence Intelligibility Test versus conversation), background noise (no noise versus 65 dB SPL multi-talker noise), and selected devices (ADDvox, BoomVox, ChatterVox, Oticon, SoniVox, Spokeman, and Voicette) for 11 PD and 10 control participants, using outcome measures of speech intensity, speech-to-noise ratio, intelligibility, sound quality, …

Examining Parents' Interactions With Their Children During Literacy Activities, Kerianne Frodsham Allsop

Theses and Dissertations

The purpose of this study was to examine the nature of conversational interactions between parents and their children during early literacy instructional activities. Parents engaged their children in interactions within hands-on activities designed to teach specific literacy skills as part of a kindergarten project entitled Systematic and Engaging Early Literacy (SEEL). Data for this study were extracted from audio and video recordings of parent-child interactions during three targeted literacy activities. Specialized software (LENA Pro) was used to analyze the interactions regarding adult and child use of targeted words (word count) and turn taking. To gain additional information about the exchanges, …

Language Contributions To Health Related Quality Of Life In Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis, Katie M. Findlater

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

Concurrent with the well-documented motor speech production impairments in amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), individuals with ALS exhibit language problems including confrontation and generative naming difficulties, single word auditory and reading comprehension problems, and decreased self-regulation based on fewer self-corrected utterances, among other language disruptions. Health related quality of life (HRQoL) measures specific to ALS often contain items related to its characteristic speech production problems that are thought to influence overall quality of life. However, the language problems in ALS are rarely if ever considered within the context of HRQoL. The current study aimed to identify the relationship between language problems …

The Effectiveness Of Systematic And Engaging Early Literacy (Seel) Intervention On Word Reading In Kindergarten Students Receiving Tier 3 Services, Christina Haley Cole

Theses and Dissertations

This study evaluated the effectiveness of the Systematic and Engaging Early Literacy (SEEL) intervention method to improve consonant-vowel-consonant (CVC) reading in four students receiving Tier 3 services. The SEEL intervention method was also combined with the use of digital books on an iPad to investigate the effects of using technology in reading intervention sessions. Previous research indicates effectiveness for the foundational principles of SEEL, which include instruction in engaging, meaningful contexts that provide frequent and intense opportunities to practice. This research involved 4 kindergarten students who qualified for Tier 3 services based on their performance on an index of difficulty …

Social Networks Of Children With Language Impairment, Serena Marita Louisa Mickelson

Theses and Dissertations

Children with language impairment (LI) often exhibit social difficulties along with language issues that can affect their friendships with peers. This study sought to identify the self-reported social networks of children with LI and compare them to the self-reported social networks of children with typical language development. Sixteen children with LI (9 girls and 7 boys) between the ages of 5-11 years, and sixteen children with typical language development matched for age and gender were studied. Children were asked to name interactants in four social circles (Blackstone & Hunt Berg, 2003): family, friends, acquaintances, and paid interactants. A parent also …

Alternative Ear-Canal Measures Related To Absorbance, S. T. Neely, S. Stenfelt, Kim S. Schairer

ETSU Faculty Works

Abstract:

Several alternative ear-canal measures are similar to absorbance in their requirement for prior determination of a Thévenin-equivalent sound…

Brittany Bernal - Sensorimotor Adaptation Of Vowel Production In Stop Consonant Contexts, Brittany A. Bernal

Ronald E. McNair Scholars Program 2013

The purpose of this research is to measure the compensatory and adaptive articulatory response to shifted formants in auditory feedback to compare the resulting amount of sensorimotor learning that takes place in speakers upon saying the words /pep/ and /tet/. These words were chosen in order to analyze the coarticulatory effects of voiceless consonants /p/ and /t/ on sensorimotor adaptation of the vowel /e/. The formant perturbations were done using the Audapt software, which takes an input speech sample and plays it back to the speaker in real-time via headphones. Formants are high-energy acoustic resonance patterns measured in hertz that …

The Longitudinal Course Of Attention Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder In Velo-Cardio-Facial Syndrome, Kevin M. Antshel, Kaitlin Hendricks, Robert J. Shprintzen, Wanda Fremont, Anne Marie Higgins, Stephen V. Faraone, Wendy R. Kates

Communication Disorders Faculty Publications

OBJECTIVE: To evaluate predictors of persistence of attention deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) in a large sample of children with velo-cardio-facial syndrome (VCFS) with and without ADHD followed prospectively into adolescence. STUDY DESIGN: Children with VCFS with (n = 37) and without (n = 35) ADHD who were on average 11 years old at the baseline assessment and 15 years old at the follow-up assessment were comprehensively assessed with structured diagnostic interviews and assessments of behavioral, cognitive, social, school, and family functioning. Control participants both with and without ADHD were also followed prospectively. RESULTS: In adolescence, 65% of children with VCFS continued …

Alumni Newsletter July 2013, Communications Disorders & Sciences

Newsletters and Documents

No abstract provided.

Effect Of Concurrent Walking And Interlocutor Distance On Conversational Speech Intensity And Rate In Parkinson's Disease, Cassandra M. Mccaig

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

This study examined the effects of concurrent walking tasks and interlocutor distance on conversational speech production in fifteen individuals with idiopathic Parkinson’s disease (PD) and fourteen age-equivalent controls. Recent studies of speech in PD have demonstrated that changes in the behavioural conditions and the environmental context can have a powerful effect on the severity of speech symptoms in PD. This investigation focused on changes in speech intensity and speech rate in response to changes in walking speed and interlocutor distance. Results suggest that the introduction of a concurrent walking task significantly increased the conversational speech intensity of both controls and …

The Effect Of Using Low Dose Exposure To A Humanoid Robot To Elicit Social Engagement Behaviors In Children With Autism Interacting With A Familiar Adult, Cambrie Nicole Roueche

Theses and Dissertations

This study examined the effects of low dose exposure to a humanoid robot on the social engagement skills of four children with autism during select activities with a familiar adult. Participants included two males and two females who ranged in age from four to nine at the commencement of the study. The current study was part of a larger investigation focused on the effect of exposure to a robot on social engagement with a variety of social partners and situations. Children participated in variable multiple baseline sessions followed by a varied number of sessions of traditional treatment. After traditional treatment, …

The Effect Of Age On Speech Motor Performance During Divided Attention, Dallin J. Bailey

Theses and Dissertations

The present study examined the divided attention effects of three non-speech tasks on concurrent speech motor performance. These tasks targeted linguistic, cognitive, and manual motor activity. Participants included 60 healthy adults separated into three different age groups of twenty participants each: college-age (20s), middle-aged (40s), and older adults (60s). Each participant completed a speech task once in isolation and once concurrently with each of the three non-speech tasks: a semantic decision task, a quantitative comparison task, and a manual motor task. The non-speech tasks were also performed in isolation. The speech task involved repeating a target phrase each time a …

Automated Identification Of Relative Clauses In Child Language Samples, Erika E. Ehlert

Theses and Dissertations

Relative clauses are grammatical constructions that are of relevance in both typical and impaired language development. Thus, the accurate identification of these structures in child language samples is clinically important. In recent years, computer software has been used to assist in the automated analysis of clinical language samples. However, this software has had only limited success when attempting to identify relative clauses. The present study explores the development and clinical importance of relative clauses and investigates the accuracy of the software used for automated identification of these structures. Two separate collections of language samples were used. The first collection included …

The Effects Of Emotion On Acoustic Characteristics Of Vocal Vibrato In Trained Singers, Sharee Oakes Holmes

Theses and Dissertations

The purpose of this study was to investigate the effects of emotion on several key acoustic features of vibrato including vibrato rate, extent, and steadiness (measured by FM rate COV and FM extent COV). We hypothesized that intensity of emotion would have a significant effect on vibrato rate, extent, and periodicity, although the direction of these changes was undetermined. There were 10 participants, including eight females and two males, who were graduate student singers with high competency ratings. Each participant completed a series of tasks including sustained vowels at several pitch and loudness levels, an assigned song that was determined …

Brain Imaging Of Event Related Potentials In Children With Language Impairment, Hillary Ann Benton

Theses and Dissertations

Event related potentials (ERPs) may provide specific information about how particular aspects of language are processed by the brain over time. This study investigated the electrophysiology of language processing in two children with language impairment (LI) when compared to five typically developing children. The N400, P600, and the early left anterior negativity (ELAN) were analyzed after participants listened to linguistically correct, syntactically incorrect, and semantically incorrect sentences. Participants were instructed to indicate whether the sentences were correct or incorrect. Latency and amplitude of the ERP components were compared between the two groups of participants and sentence types. Results from the …

The Effectiveness Of Using Electropalatography To Remediate A Developmental Speech Sound Disorder In A School-Aged Child With Hearing Impairment, Kristina Lynne Pickett

Theses and Dissertations

Advances in instrumentation and computer technology such as electropalatography (EPG) have offered additional types of feedback to more traditional therapy for individuals with speech disorders, specifically those with hearing impairment. The purpose of this study was to document whether therapeutic integration of EPG visual feedback in combination with traditional articulation therapy for a school-aged child with an articulation disorder secondary to hearing impairment was more effective than traditional therapy alone. One participant received five sessions of each therapy approach. Six adult listeners rated the quality of the participant's production of /r/ in words recorded during the therapy sessions. The EPG …

A Preliminary Study Of The Articulatory And Acoustic Features Of Forward And Backward Tone Placement In Singing, Krista Wyllys

Masters Theses

A variety of terms exist for describing tone quality in singing, and voice scientists, voice therapists, teachers of singing, and students of singing use different terms to describe the same sound. One aspect of tone quality is tone placement. Teachers of singing often rely on imagery and imitation to elicit correct tone placement from students of singing. More concrete data about what produces forward and backward tone placement could supplement singing teachers’ current practice of using imagery and imitation to elicit a desirable tone quality. This study examined forward and backward tone placement to determine the articulatory gestures and acoustic …

Behavioral Inhibition And Childhood Stuttering., Victoria Tumanova, Dahye Choi, Edward G. Conture, Tedra A. Walden, Warren E. Lambert

Communication Sciences and Disorders - All Scholarship

Purpose—The purpose of this study was to assess the relation of behavioral inhibition to stuttering and speech/language output in preschool-age children who do (CWS) and do not stutter (CWNS).

Method—Participants were preschool-age (ages 36 to 68 months), including 26 CWS (22 males) and 28 CWNS (13 males). Participants’ behavioral inhibition (BI) was assessed by measuring the latency to their sixth spontaneous comment during conversation with an unfamiliar experimenter, using methodology developed by Kagan, Reznick, and Gibbons (1989). In addition to these measures of BI, each participant’s stuttered and non-stuttered disfluencies and mean length of utterance (in morphemes) were assessed.

Results—Among …

Executive Functions And Social Interactions: Developing Social Scenarios, Mackenzie Waite

Masters Theses

The aim of this study was to develop a series of vignettes to form the basis for an assessment of executive functions (EFs) for 9 – 12 year old children. Although EFs are necessary for effective social communication and positive social interactions, currently, most EF assessments focus on impersonal activities. Little research exists that incorporates real-time processing using ecologically valid social scenarios. The current study aims to develop realistic scenarios that children could encounter in daily life. Ethnographic interviews were conducted with six participants, who worked in a school with 9-12 year old children, to gain their perspective on social …

Explicit Teacher-Implemented Phoneme Awareness Instruction: Preschool Effects, Heather M. Osterhouse

Masters Theses

The purpose of the current study was to investigate the impact of explicit, concentrated, teacher-implemented phonological awareness instruction for ―at risk‖ 4- year-olds. Early childhood educators were trained to implement a 10-week program delivered for 20-minute sessions, four times a week, in their classrooms. The program focused on phonological awareness beginning at the level of letter-sound knowledge and advancing to blending and segmenting constituent phonemes in words. Pre- to post-treatment comparisons of phonological awareness and letter knowledge skills indicated that children in the experimental group made significant gains in comparison to the control group in phoneme blending and letter knowledge. …

Exploring The Relationship Between Ease Of Articulation And Treatment For Aos, Linda Shuster, Claire Cottrill

Linda Shuster

No abstract provided.

Individual Articulator's Contribution To Phoneme Production, Jun Wang, Jordan R. Green, Ashok Samal

CSE Conference and Workshop Papers

Speech sounds are the result of coordinated movements of individual articulators. Understanding each articulator’s role in speech is fundamental not only for understanding how speech is produced, but also for optimizing speech assessments and treatments. In this paper, we studied the individual contributions of six articulators, tongue tip, tongue blade, tongue body front, tongue body back, upper lip, and lower lip to phoneme classification. A total of 3,838 vowel and consonant production samples were collected from eleven native English speakers. The results of speech movement classification using a support vector machine indicated that the tongue encoded significantly more information than …

The Effects Of Practice On The Concurrent Performance Of A Speech And Postural Task In Persons With Parkinson Disease And Healthy Controls, K. Bo Foreman, Stuart Sondrup, Christopher Dromey, Eon Jarvis, Shawn Nissen, Leland E. Dibble

Faculty Publications

Purpose. Persons with Parkinson disease (PD) demonstrate deficits in motor learning as well as bidirectional interference (the performance of one task concurrently interferes with the performance of another task) during dual-task performance. Few studies have examined the practice dosages necessary for behavioral change in rehabilitation relevant tasks. Therefore, to compare the effects of age and PD on motor learning during dual-task performance, this pilot study examined persons with PD as well as neurologically healthy participants during concurrent performance of postural and speaking tasks. Methods. Seven persons with PD and 7 healthy age-matched and 10 healthy young control subjects …

Relations Between Oral Pharyngeal Size And Kinematic Measures Of Tongue Related Swallowing Movements, Danielle Monast

Honors Theses

Background: Though the tongue plays a critical role during the oral phase of swallowing, studies have found that the size and shape of tongue movements during swallowing can vary greatly among individuals. One factor that may contribute to this movement variability is oral-pharyngeal cavity geometry. A cavity with a different size and shape may require different movements for efficient swallowing. While there are a number of studies that have attempted to relate the oral-pharyngeal anatomy with features of orofacial movement, these studies focused on speech movements and no studies have directly evaluated the relation between swallowing related tongue movements and …

Audiology Services At Remote Area Medical Expeditions In Southern Appalachia, Marc A. Fagelson

ETSU Faculty Works

This presentation summarizes the preparation for, and execution of, audiology series provided by East Tennessee State University's Audiology, Program at Remote Area Medical (RAM) expeditiors in the Southern Appalachian region. In 2010 and 2012, ETSU audiology faculty and students evaluatd 281 patients and subsequently fit 178 hearing aids.