Marc E. Fey

Articulation and Phonology: Inextricable Constructs in Speech Pathology

For many speech-language pathologists, the application of the concepts of phonology to the assessment and treatment of phonologically disordered children has produced more confusion than clinical a...

Analysis of the Speech of Phonologically Impaired Children in Two Sampling Conditions.

This study was conducted to assess the effects of speech sampling condition on the phonological error patterns of 14 moderately to profoundly phonologically impaired children. The target words from...

Effects of Dose Frequency of Early Communication Intervention in Young Children With and Without Down Syndrome

Children with intellectual disability were randomly assigned to receive Milieu Communication Teaching (MCT) at one 1-hr session per week (low dose frequency, LDF) or five 1-hr sessions per week (high dose frequency, HDF) over 9 months ( Fey, Yoder, Warren, & Bredin-Oja, 2013 . Non-Down syndrome (NDS) and Down syndrome (DS) subgroups were matched on intelligence, mental age, and chronological age. The NDS group had significantly more growth in spoken vocabulary than the DS group. In the DS subgroup, the HDF group had more spoken vocabulary growth than the LDF group when IQ was controlled. In both etiological subgroups, the HDF group yielded greater vocabulary production outcomes than the LDF group for children who played functionally with a range of objects.

Rule discovery in phonological acquisition

Menn has suggested that most early phonological rules have the effect of reducing the variety of the childs phonetic output forms. This proposal is compatible with the Interactionist–Discovery (I–D) theory of phonological acquisition. This paper presents one childs unique phonological rule which increases output variety and yet still yields a mismatch with the adult form. Evidence is presented which indicates that the rule was a stable and productive part of the childs phonology and that it was both phonetically and phonologically motivated. It is argued that an addition to the early strategies described by Menn is needed to account, specifically, for the discovery of this unique rule and, generally, for later stages of phonological development.

Two Approaches to the Facilitation of Grammar in Children With Language Impairments: Rationale and Description

This article describes in detail the design and rationale of two effective approaches for the facilitation of grammar in children with language impairments. One program was clinician directed and t...

Research to Practice (and Back Again) in Speech-Language Intervention

Three theses are developed in this article. First, although they share the common goal of striving toward the best intervention services possible, clinical practice and experimental intervention research are different in fundamental and practically significant ways. Second, nonexperimental research, some of which can be implemented by clinicians, provides an essential bridge between experimental investigation and clinical application. Third, professional and academic bodies governing speech-language pathology must take steps to ensure that speech-language professionals in research and clinical practice work in a complementary manner to develop and test the most effective intervention methods possible.

Sentence Recast Use by Parents of Children With Typical Language and Children With Specific Language Impairment

Many early studies failed to find differences in the language input of parents to children with specific language impairments (SLI) when compared to the input provided for MLU-matched children with typical language (TL). More recent investigations have revealed significant differences in the frequency of sentence recasts provided to young children. Specifically, parents of children with SLI have been shown to produce fewer recasts than do parents of younger children with TL. Because recasts have been shown to facilitate morphosyntactic development, these findings have important assessment and treatment implications. The purpose of this study was to replicate and extend these recent findings. The sentence recast usage of the parents of 10 children with SLI was compared with the recast usage of parents of 10 younger children with TL at two points in time. This strategy enabled us to examine specific hypotheses about the quantity of recasts used by parents and the changes in patterns of use over time. The re...

Intra-word phonological variability in young children

Three experiments are reported which explored the conditions under which intra-word phonological variability occurs. Using an unsolicited imitation task, evidence of variability was obtained for words containing two or more phonological characteristics (consonants, word shapes) that were unstable in the childs speech, and for words containing both unstable characteristics and characteristics the child had not shown any evidence of producing with accuracy. Intra-word variability was most likely to occur when more than one aspect was in a state of instability or when one aspect was unstable and another was non-acquired. Words containing two phonological aspects not yet acquired by the child seemed to have little influence on variability. The findings indicate that variability can be attributed to (1) the presence of optional simplification processes, (2) the presence of more than one process applicable to a specific aspect of the word, (3) a competition between two aspects of the word for accurate surface realization, and/or (4) a competition between consonant approximation and word shape approximation.

The relationship between language and reading: Preliminary results from a longitudinal investigation

This longitudinal study investigated the relationship between language and reading from three perspectives. First, we examined the reading and writing outcomes of children identified with spoken language impairments (LIs). Second, the early language abilities of children identified as poor readers were investigated. Finally, reading and language abilities were treated as continuous variables and the developmental relationship between them was studied. In general, the results indicated that language abilities (both phonological processing and oral language) significantly contributed to achievement in the early stages of reading (2nd grade) and had an even stronger effect as children acquired greater reading proficiency (4th grade).

Interaction of Lexical and Grammatical Aspect in Toddlers' Language

This study examined the effect of lexical aspect on childrens imitation accuracy of English tense-aspect morphology. Thirty-five typically developing children, ages 2;4 to 3;1, imitated sentence-pairs in which the same regular verb was used once in an activity (skip on the rug) and once in an accomplishment (skip out the door). Children imitated past-imperfective morphology equally well in accomplishments and activities, but they imitated past-perfective morphology with higher accuracy in accomplishments than activities. These findings suggest that childrens early morphology development is influenced by lexical aspect conveyed at the sentence level, as predicted by the PROTOTYPE HYPOTHESIS.