Catherine Moran

Enhancing Phonological Awareness and Letter Knowledge in Preschool Children with Down Syndrome

This study investigated the effectiveness of a phonological awareness intervention for 4‐year‐old children with Down syndrome. Seven children with Down syndrome who attended an early intervention centre participated in the intervention. Their performance on measures of phonological awareness (initial phoneme identity), letter name and sound knowledge, and print concepts pre‐intervention and post‐intervention, was compared with that of a randomly selected group of age‐matched peers with typical development. The intervention involved print referencing techniques whereby the children’s parents were instructed to bring the children’s attention to targeted letters and sounds within words and to draw their attention to the initial phonemes in words during daily shared book reading activities. The intervention was presented for a 6‐week period. The results indicated a significant treatment effect on phonological awareness and letter knowledge for the children with Down syndrome. Additionally, above‐chance performance on the initial phoneme identity task was contingent on letter knowledge of the particular phoneme. Individual profiles of the children with Down syndrome pre‐intervention and post‐intervention are presented, and implications for the management of preschool children approaching the age of integration into mainstream primary schools are discussed.

Language and memory profiles of adolescents with traumatic brain injury.

The performance of adolescents who suffered a traumatic brain injury in childhood, on language comprehension tasks with varying working memory demands, was examined. It was hypothesized that adolescents with a traumatic brain injury would perform more poorly than their non-injured peers, particularly on those tasks with high working memory demands. A case study design allowed for both group and intra-participant comparisons. A battery of language comprehension and working memory tasks was administered to six adolescents aged 12–16 years. Their performance was compared with six individually age-matched peers with typical development and to the normative data of the standardized tests. Intra-participant performance was examined by comparing results across language tasks that varied in working memory demands. Analysis revealed that individuals with traumatic brain injury performed poorly compared with their age-matched peers. However, the pattern of listening comprehension impairment differed across individuals and marked variability within the comprehension profiles for some individuals with traumatic brain injury was evident. Language comprehension tasks with high working memory demands generally posed the most difficulty for individuals with traumatic brain injury.

Inference comprehension of adolescents with traumatic brain injury: a working memory hypothesis.

This study investigated inference comprehension performance in adolescents who had suffered a traumatic brain injury (TBI). Using stimuli adapted from Lehman-Blake and Tompkins, participants listened to short paragraphs that varied according to the working memory demands of the task and answered comprehension questions that required inferences to be generated. Six adolescents, aged 12–16 years, who had suffered a TBI prior to the age of 10 years, were assessed and their performance was compared to six individually age-matched peers with typical development. Analysis revealed that individuals with TBI did not differ from non-injured peers in their understanding of inferences when the storage demands of the task were minimized. However, when storage demands were high, adolescents with TBI performed poorly compared to their age-matched peers. Results are discussed relative to a working-memory hypothesis of impairment following TBI.

A longitudinal investigation of oral narrative skills in children with mixed reading disability

This 2-year longitudinal study investigated oral narrative ability in 14 children with mixed reading disability and their age-matched peers with typical development. The children were aged between 6;4 and 7;8 at the commencement of the study and assessments were administered individually to the children on three occasions over a 2-year period. Oral narratives were elicited in a personal narrative context (i.e., the child was encouraged to relate personal experiences in response to photo prompts) and a story retelling context. Oral narrative comprehension was assessed in a fictional story context through questions relating to story structure elements. Results indicated that the children with mixed reading disability demonstrated inferior oral narrative production and oral narrative comprehension performance compared to children with typical reading development at each assessment occasion. To further explore these childrens difficulties in oral narrative ability, their performance was compared to a reading comprehension-age match control group at the third assessment trial. The results suggested the children with mixed reading disability had a specific deficit in oral narrative comprehension.

Speech intelligibility and perceptions of communication effectiveness by speakers with dysarthria following traumatic brain injury and their communication partners

Primary objective: This study examined differences in perceived communicative effectiveness between a group of eight participants with chronic dysarthria following TBI and their nominated communication partners (TBIP). The relationship between communicative effectiveness and listener ratings of speech intelligibility was also examined. Research design: Group comparison design. Methods and procedures: The Communicative Effectiveness Survey was completed by the participants with TBI and their communication partner. Speech intelligibility of the eight adults with dysarthria was rated by nine naive listeners using direct magnitude estimation. Main outcomes and results: The participants with TBI tended to rate their communicative effectiveness higher than their TBIP; however, this trend was not significant. No significant differences were noted between the TBI and TBIP groups in ratings of communicative effectiveness in various communication settings. No significant relationship was found between conversation level intelligibility and perceptions of communicative effectiveness, as rated by individuals with TBI and TBIP. Conclusions: The findings of this study highlight the need for collaborative participation in the therapeutic process by all stakeholders. The lack of correlation between speech intelligibility and perceived communicative effectiveness highlights the need for careful examination of activity and participation during assessment and goal-setting.

Working memory and proverb comprehension in adolescents with traumatic brain injury: A preliminary investigation

Primary objective: This study investigated the relationship between working memory and comprehension of low-familiarity proverbs in adolescents with traumatic brain injury (TBI). Methods and procedures: Ten adolescents, aged 12–21 years who had suffered a TBI prior to the age of 10 years and 10 individually age-matched peers with typical development participated in the study. The participants listened to short paragraphs containing a proverb and interpreted the meaning of the proverb using a forced-choice task. In addition, participants engaged in a task that evaluated working memory ability. Main outcomes and results: Analysis revealed that individuals with TBI differed from their non-injured peers in their understanding of proverbs. In addition, working memory capacity influenced performance for all participants. Conclusions: The importance of considering working memory when evaluating figurative language comprehension in adolescents with TBI is highlighted. Implications for future research, particularly with regard to varying working memory and task demands, are considered.

Effects of phonological awareness and semantic intervention on word-learning in children with SLI

This study examined the effects of phonological awareness and semantic intervention on word-learning abilities in children with Specific Language Impairment (SLI) and whether treatment order influenced outcomes. An alternating treatment design was implemented to evaluate whether phonological awareness, semantic awareness, or a combination of both interventions positively influenced childrens word-learning ability and whether the order of the treatments influenced outcomes. Nineteen children with SLI, aged between 6;3 and 8;2 years, and 19 age-matched children with typical language development participated in this study. The children with SLI were randomly assigned either to treatment condition A (phonological awareness intervention followed by semantic intervention) or treatment condition B (same interventions in reverse order). A word-learning paradigm was applied at pre-, mid-, and post-testing to evaluate which condition accelerated the receptive and expressive learning of novel words. Positive treatment effects on producing new words were found for the children who received phonological awareness intervention followed by semantic intervention. There was no improvement on the comprehension of new words for either group. The findings suggest that phonological awareness intervention may not only improve childrens phonological skills, but may help to facilitate some aspects of word-learning when followed by an additional semantic based intervention.

Clinical Measurement of Pharyngeal Surface Electromyography: Exploratory Research

Background. Dysphagia diagnosis is limited by our inability to evaluate the underlying neuromuscular pathology of swallowing. A novel approach using pharyngeal surface electromyography (PsEMG) has been reported in the literature. Objective. Three exploratory projects were undertaken to provide data toward the validation of PsEMG as a clinical measure of pharyngeal physiology. The first evaluates laterality of electrode placement in the pharynx. The second and third evaluate PsEMG using a circumferential and unidirectional electrode, respectively, during swallowing maneuvers. Methods. In experiment 1, a catheter housing 3 manometric sensors and 1 bipolar PsEMG electrode was randomly inserted in each nares of 10 participants. Moving jaw radiographs were taken, and the PsEMG electrode was measured in millimeters from midline. In experiments 2 and 3, the catheter was placed in 22 and 40 research participants, respectively. Waveform characteristics were collected during swallowing maneuvers. The 2 experiments differed by type of electrode (circumferential, unidirectional) and swallowing maneuver (noneffortful and effortful swallow; noneffortful, effortful, and tongue-hold swallow). Results. Midline electrode placement occurred on 20% of trials with deviation of up to 14.7 mm on all other trials. Maneuver-specific differences in amplitude were not detected with PsEMG; unacceptable levels of intrasubject and intersubject variability were identified. Temporal relationships of PsEMG and pharyngeal manometric pressure appeared appropriate. The unidirectional electrode revealed a unique bimodal PsEMG pattern that may reflect sequential contraction of muscles of the posterior pharyngeal wall. Conclusions. The current PsEMG design and procedures do not validly measure pharyngeal muscle activity. Recommendations for improved methods are provided.

The Effects of Expansions, Questions and Cloze Procedures on Children's Conversational Skills.

The effectiveness of expansion as a technique for facilitating children’s language and conversational skills is well known (Scherer and Olswang, 1984). Expansion, however, can appear alone or in combination with other techniques. Using a repeated measures design, this study aimed to compare the effects of expansion alone (EA); expansion combined with wh-questions (EQ); and expansion followed by a cloze procedure (EC) on the conversational skills of eight preschool children with conversational difficulties. Results showed that while there were no significant differences in child verbal topic maintaining responses across all techniques, EA elicited a significantly higher number of topic extensions, more non-verbal topic maintaining responses and fewer ‘non-relevant responses’ from the children, than either EQ or EC. The positive effects of each technique on the pragmatic appropriateness in conversations suggest that they could be used strategically in language intervention to ensure greater therapeutic effect.

Spoken expository discourse of children and adolescents: Retelling versus generation

Abstract This cross-sectional study investigated the spoken expository discourse skills of children and adolescents elicited in generation and retelling conditions. There were three groups of participants: young school-age children (M = 7.0 years; n = 64); intermediate-school-age children (M = 11.3 years; n = 18) and high-school-age students (M = 17.6 years; n = 18). Participants were asked to generate expository discourse using the favourite game or sport (FGS) task and to retell an expository passage about the game of curling. All samples were transcribed and analysed on measures of verbal productivity (number of utterances), syntactic complexity (mean length of utterance in T-units [MLU] and clausal density) and verbal fluency (percent maze words). Results indicated that although all age groups produced longer samples in the generation condition, MLU was significantly longer in the retelling condition. The results suggest that the expository retelling task may be a clinically useful addition to a language assessment battery for children and adolescents.