David L. Ratusnik

Biracial Testing: The Question of Clinicians' Influence on Children’s Test Performance

Six speech and language clinicians, three black and three white, administered the Goodenough Drawing Test (1926) to 144 preschoolers. The four groups, lower socioeconomic black and white and middle...

Vocal symptomatology of postoperative dysphonia

Vocal symptomatology of 24 patients was assessed following the removal of polyps (12 cases) and polypoid degeneration (12 cases). In addition to fundamental frequency, hoarseness type was measured using the spectrographic system developed by Yanagihara which assesses harmonic structure of phonemes relative to noise components. Mean vocal frequency (155Hz) for the polypoid degeneration group was significantly lower than mean vocal frequency for the polyp group (186Hz). There was no difference between the two groups in mean spectrographic hoarseness type.

Relationship among Race, Social Status, and Sex of Preschoolers' Normal Dysfluencies: A Cross-Cultural Investigation.

This study compared the rate of dysfluency found among lower social status black, lower social status white, middle social status black, and middle social status white preschool children. Spontaneo...

Short-Form Application of the Screening Test of Spanish Grammar and the Northwestern Syntax Screening Test to Latino Children.

Short-form versions of the Screening Test of Spanish Grammar (Toronto, 1973) and the Northwestern Syntax Screening Test (Lee, 1971) were devised for use with bilingual Latino children while preserving the original normative data. Application of a multiple regression technique to data collected on 60 lower social status Latino children (four years and six months to seven years and one month) from Spanish Harlem and Yonkers, New York, yielded a small but powerful set of predictor items from the Spanish and English tests. Clinicians may make rapid and accurate predictions of STSG or NSST total screening scores from administration of substantially shortened versions of the instruments. Case studies of Latino children from Chicago and Miami serve to cross-validate the procedure outside the New York metropolitan area.