Gillberg, Christopher (2010). The ESSENCE in Child Psychiatry: Early Symptomatic Syndromes Eliciting Neurodevelopmental Clinical Examinations. Research in Developmental Disabilities: A Multidisciplinary Journal, v31 n6 p1543-1551 Nov-Dec. Co-existence of disorders–including attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder, oppositional defiant disorder, tic disorder, developmental coordination disorder, and autism spectrum disorder–and sharing of symptoms across disorders (sometimes referred to as comorbidity) is the rule rather than the exception in child psychiatry and developmental medicine. The acronym ESSENCE refers to Early Symptomatic Syndromes Eliciting Neurodevelopmental Clinical Examinations. It is a term I have coined to refer to the reality of children (and their parents) presenting in clinical settings with impairing child symptoms before age 3 (-5) years in the fields of (a) general development, (b) communication and language, (c) social inter-relatedness, (d) motor coordination, (e) attention, (f) activity, (g) behaviour, (h) mood, and/or (i) sleep. Children with major difficulties in one or more (usually several) of these fields, will be referred to and seen by health visitors, nurses, social workers,… [Direct]

Vokic, Gabriela (2008). The Role of Structural Position in L2 Phonological Acquisition: Evidence from English Learners of Spanish as L2. Foreign Language Annals, v41 n2 p347-363 Sum. In this pilot study, the speech of 12 adult native speakers of English with intermediate to intermediate-high proficiency in Spanish as a second language (L2) was analyzed to determine whether L2 learners rely on distributional information in the process of L2 speech learning and if so, if similar or dissimilar distributional patterns of sounds are more easily acquired. The parameter for (dis)similarity was set around the notion of structural position in combination with native language (L1) and L2 phonemic inventories. The results show that the subjects were consistently more successful in producing the phonemes with overlapping distributional patterns in L1 and L2 than phonemes whose distribution differed in L1 and L2 as well as novel L2 contrasts. (Contains 15 notes and 5 tables.)… [Direct]

Ashton, Roderick; de Zubicaray, Greig; McMahon, Katie; Meredith, Matthew; Postle, Natasha (2010). Mirror Neurons, the Representation of Word meaning, and the Foot of the Third Left Frontal Convolution. Brain and Language, v112 n1 p77-84 Jan. Previous neuroimaging research has attempted to demonstrate a preferential involvement of the human mirror neuron system (MNS) in the comprehension of effector-related action word (verb) meanings. These studies have assumed that Broca's area (or Brodmann's area 44) is the homologue of a monkey premotor area (F5) containing mouth and hand mirror neurons, and that action word meanings are shared with the mirror system due to a proposed link between speech and gestural communication. In an fMRI experiment, we investigated whether Broca's area shows mirror activity solely for effectors implicated in the MNS. Next, we examined the responses of empirically determined mirror areas during a language perception task comprising effector-specific action words, unrelated words and nonwords. We found overlapping activity for observation and execution of actions with all effectors studied, i.e., including the foot, despite there being no evidence of foot mirror neurons in the monkey or human… [Direct]

Boomsma, Dorret Irene; Felsenfeld, Susan; van Beljsterveldt, Catharina Eugenie Maria (2010). Attentional Regulation in Young Twins with Probable Stuttering, High Nonfluency, and Typical Fluency. Journal of Speech, Language, and Hearing Research, v53 n5 p1147-1166 Oct. Purpose: Using a sample of 20,445 Dutch twins, this study examined the relationship between speech fluency and attentional regulation in children. A secondary objective was to identify etiological overlap between nonfluency and poor attention using fluency-discordant twin pairs. Method: Three fluency groups were created at age 5 using a parent questionnaire: (a) probable stuttering (PS; N = 826; 4.0%), highly nonfluent (HNF; N = 547; 2.7%), and typically fluent (TF; N = 19,072; 93%). Multiple scales assessing attention, primarily self-regulation/inhibition, were obtained from both parents when children were ages 5 and 7 and from teachers when children were age 7. Results: When compared with the TF controls, both the PS and HNF children received higher (i.e., more problematic) scores on parental attention ratings at both ages (p less than 0.002). Effect sizes were moderate for both groups. Teacher and parent ratings were generally comparable. The discordant co-twin analyses suggested… [Direct]

Molnar, Monika; Polka, Linda; Rvachew, Susan (2008). Speech Perception by 6- to 8-Month-Olds in the Presence of Distracting Sounds. Infancy, v13 n5 p421-439 Sep. The role of selective attention in infant phonetic perception was examined using a distraction masker paradigm. We compared perception of /bu/ versus /gu/ in 6- to 8-month-olds using a visual fixation procedure. Infants were habituated to multiple natural productions of 1 syllable type and then presented 4 test trials (old-new-old-new). Perception of the new syllable (indexed as novelty preference) was compared across 3 groups: habituated and tested on syllables in quiet (Group 1), habituated and tested on syllables mixed with a nonspeech signal (Group 2), and habituated with syllables mixed with a non-speech signal and tested on syllables in quiet (Group 3). In Groups 2 and 3, each syllable was mixed with a segment spliced from a recording of bird and cricket songs. This nonspeech signal has no overlapping frequencies with the syllable; it is not expected to alter the sensory structure or perceptual coherence of the syllable. Perception was negatively affected by the presence of the… [Direct]

Yang, Bei (2010). A Model of Mandarin Tone Categories–A Study of Perception and Production. ProQuest LLC, Ph.D. Dissertation, The University of Iowa. The current study lays the groundwork for a model of Mandarin tones based on both native speakers' and non-native speakers' perception and production. It demonstrates that there is variability in non-native speakers' tone productions and that there are differences in the perceptual boundaries in native speakers and non-native speakers. There are four experiments in this study. Experiment 1 utilizes native speakers' production data from a published speech database to explore the features of tone production by native speakers. Inter-speaker normalization is used to analyze the data. Experiment 2 synthesizes 81 tones that are carried by four sentences to measure perception by native and non-native speakers. The intra-speaker and inter-speaker normalization is used to investigate the perceptual space of T1, T2, T3, and T4. The researcher also explores the salient features distinguish native speakers' and non-native speakers' perception of the four principal tones. Experiment 3 uses… [Direct]

Grisham-Brown, Jennifer; Harjusola-Webb, Sanna; Jackson, Sarah; Pretti-Frontczak, Kristie; Romani, Jeanne M. (2009). Response to Intervention: Implications for Early Childhood Professionals. Language, Speech, and Hearing Services in Schools, v40 n4 p424-434 Oct. Purpose: The purpose of this article is to discuss the importance of building strong early childhood communities of interdisciplinary practice in the application of a comprehensive curriculum framework. A curriculum framework is proposed as a means of applying and extending the principles of response to intervention (RtI) to early childhood education providers working with young children, including speech-language pathologists (SLPs). The article presents information regarding the elements of a curriculum framework and suggestions for practice. Method: Literature related to RtI was reviewed to identify common principles of practice. The resulting principles were then aligned to early childhood education recommended practices in order to illustrate the overlapping beliefs. Rationale and support for a curriculum framework as an early childhood education RtI model was then gathered to identify appropriate practices for working with young children who are served in a variety of early… [Direct]

Hustad, Katherine C. (2007). Contribution of Two Sources of Listener Knowledge to Intelligibility of Speakers with Cerebral Palsy. Journal of Speech, Language, and Hearing Research, v50 n5 p1228-1240 Oct. Purpose: This study examined the independent and combined effects of two sources of linguistic knowledge (alphabet cues and semantic predictability) on the intelligibility of speakers with dysarthria. The study also examined the extent to which each source of knowledge accounted for variability in intelligibility gains. Method: Eight speakers with cerebral palsy and dysarthria contributed speech samples, and 128 listeners transcribed the speech samples (16 listeners per speaker) in 4 different conditions (no cues and unpredictable sentences; no cues and predictable sentences; alphabet cues and unpredictable sentences; alphabet cues and predictable sentences). Listener transcription results were the dependent variable and were scored as the percentage of words identified correctly by listeners. Results: Both alphabet cues and semantic predictability made independent and overlapping contributions to intelligibility. In addition, alphabet cues accounted for more of the variability in… [Direct]

Cromdal, Jakob (2001). Overlap in Bilingual Play: Some Implications of Code-Switching for Overlap Resolution. Research on Language and Social Interaction, v34 n4 p421-51. Examines children's procedures for dealing with simultaneous bilingual speech as it arises in multiparty play episodes. Sequential analyses of more than 10 hours of videorecorded recess activities at an English school in Sweden revealed that children use an array of methods to minimize the overlapping passage. (Author/VWL)…

Wolfson, Nessa (1990). The Bulge: A Theory of Speech Behavior and Social Distance. Penn Working Papers in Educational Linguistics, v2 n1 p55-83. A discussion of speech behavior and social distance outlines the major ways in which the study of rules of speaking can provide insights into the norms and values of a speech community. It shows ways in which the same material can provide information about the interaction process and the situations in which interlocutors negotiate their relationships with one another, and then advances a theory concerning patterns of interaction within a general middle class American speech community. Speech behavior is shown to be a reflection of cultural values, and various examples of compliments and apologies in American English illustrate the concept. Speech behavior is also related to the negotiation of rules. The \bulge\ theory is proposed based on the way the frequencies of certain types of speech behavior plot out on a diagram, with the two extremes showing similar patterns as opposed to the middle section, which displays a characteristic bulge. That is, there is a qualitative difference…

Kilpatrick, Paul (1986). Turn and Control in Puerto Rican Spanish Conversation. An investigation of Puerto Rican Spanish conversational strategies involved analysis of recorded conversations for the amount of simultaneous speech, its context, and the turn-taking used. Overlapping and interruption were distinguished from cooperative (supportive) simultaneity of speech, and a \turn\ was defined as a recognized utterance. The primary finding was a high degree of simultaneous speech, with over 90 percent of turns having some form of overlap or interruption. The conversational characteristics revealed in this analysis were compared to the characteristics of separate English and Spanish conversations between Spanish-English bilinguals, in which more simultaneous speech was found during the Spanish conversations. The contrast in conversational strategies underlines the different cultural perceptions of simultaneous speech as polite or impolite, and it suggests a need for a definition of \turn\ that accommodates simultaneous speech differently and a need for further… [PDF]

Gantt, Walter (1977). Black Dialect: Myth and Reality. Based on transcribed conversations with black children in kindergarten and the intermediate grades, a study was devised to determine whether black urban children from lower socioeconomic areas speak a systematic, consistent form of nonstandard English, and if so, to provide a syntactical analysis of the dialect of nonstandard speakers. Speech samples from five groups of black children (kindergarten children, low achieving readers, better achieving readers, lower socioeconomic children, and higher socioeconomic children) were coded and tabulated according to the frequency and relative percentage of use of seven standard and eight nonstandard speech characteristics. No support was found for the notion that black nonstandard English was used consistently or that it provided a separate dialect. There was considerable overlapping in the use of both standard and nonstandard speech in the groups, and standard usage was dominant. (A transcribed and coded speech sample and the guide for…

Bergeron, F.; Doucet, M. E.; Ferron, P.; Lassonde, M.; Lepore, F. (2006). Cross-Modal Reorganization and Speech Perception in Cochlear Implant Users. Brain, v129 n12 p3376-3383 Dec. Recent work suggests that once the auditory cortex of deaf persons has been reorganized by cross-modal plasticity, it can no longer respond to signals from a cochlear implant (CI) installed subsequently. To further examine this issue, we compared the evoked potentials involved in the processing of visual stimuli between CI users and hearing controls. The stimuli were concentric circles replaced by a different overlapping shape, inducing a shape transformation, known to activate the ventral visual pathway in human adults. All CI users had their device implanted for greater than 1 year, but obtained different levels of auditory performance following training to establish language comprehension. Seven of the 13 patients showed good capacities for speech recognition with the CI (good performers) while the six others demonstrated poor speech recognition abilities (poor performers). The evoked potentials of all patients showed larger amplitudes, with different distributions of scalp… [Direct]

James, Lori E.; MacKay, Donald G.; Marian, Diane E.; Taylor, Jennifer K. (2007). Amnesic H.M. Exhibits Parallel Deficits and Sparing in Language and Memory: Systems versus Binding Theory Accounts. Language and Cognitive Processes, v22 n3 p377-452 Apr. This study examines sentence-level language abilities of amnesic H.M. to test competing theoretical conceptions of relations between language and memory. We present 11 new sources of experimental evidence indicating deficits in H.M's comprehension and production of non-cliche sentences. Contrary to recent claims that H.M.'s comprehension is unimpaired at grammatical levels, H.M. performed 2-6 standard deviations worse than controls matched for age, IQ and education in seven tasks: detecting grammatical errors, repairing sentences identified as containing an error, answering questions about who did what to whom in sentences, multiple-choice recognition of possible versus impossible interpretations of sentences containing ambiguities and figurative speech, discrimination between grammatical versus ungrammatical sentences, and describing the meanings of ambiguous sentences, phrases, and words. However, H.M.'s deficits were selective, e.g., sparing comprehension of familiar but not… [Direct]

Henner-Stanchina, C. (1980). From Reading to Writing Acts. An approach to the teaching of writing to English as a Second Language (ESL) students at Queen's College (City University of New York) is described. Starting from the observation of the learners' difficulties as well as their other learning activities, especially reading, a methodology is proposed based on the training already in progress in reading comprehension and speech acts. Examples are given of the categories that are used in the methodology and proposed exercises are described. In a final section, a constructive critique of the method is proposed: the incomplete nature of the analysis, a high level of abstraction, and an overlapping among the categories. (Author/AMH)…

Legendre, Geraldine (2006). Early Child Grammars: Qualitative and Quantitative Analysis of Morphosyntactic Production. Cognitive Science, v30 n5 p803-835. This article reports on a series of 5 analyses of spontaneous production of verbal inflection (tense and person-number agreement) by 2-year-olds acquiring French as a native language. A formal analysis of the qualitative and quantitative results is developed using the unique resources of Optimality Theory (OT; Prince & Smolensky, 2004). It is argued that acquisition of morphosyntax proceeds via overlapping grammars (rather than through abrupt changes), which OT formalizes in terms of partial rather than total constraint rankings. Initially, economy of structure constraints take priority over faithfulness constraints that demand faithful expression of a speaker's intent, resulting in child production of tense that is comparable in level to that of child-directed speech. Using the independent Predominant Length of Utterance measure of syntactic development proposed in Vainikka, Legendre, and Todorova (1999), production of agreement is shown first to lag behind tense then to compete… [Direct]

Fromkin, Victoria (1968). Speculations on Performance Models. Journal of Linguistics, v4 n1 p47-68. According to the author, competence and performance and their interrelationships are the concern of linguistics. Performance models must: (1) be based on physical data of speech; (2) describe the phenomena under investigation; (3) predict events which are confirmed by experiment; (4) suggest causal relationships by identifying necessary and sufficient elements; (5) be consistent; (6) be formulated so that they can be proven incorrect. Katz' performance model, encoding sentences as units, is inadequate since actual speech is at least half in phrases of three words or less. Morphemes cannot be hypothesized as encoding units, as the number is too large for processing. Liberman's model, providing for overlapping of neuromuscular instructions to produce output units of about syllabic size is shown to disagree with the author's electromyographic data for different sequences of the same phonemes. But the work of Kozhevnikov, Ladefoged, Fry, and others, supports the hypothesis that encoding…

Singleton, Cleavonne (1976). The Lasting Properties of Word-Counts. This study compared the vocabulary of the period from 1943 to 1945 to the vocabulary of 1975. In addition to a direct comparison of word use, an indirect comparison was made using Thorndike's word list in the \Teacher's Word Book\ (1931). The 1975 vocabulary, based on frequency of word appearance, was derived from 93 speeches made by students in public-speaking classes at Wabash College during 1975. Similar analysis of vocabulary made during the earlier period produced a system of categorization by word frequency, which was also used to evaluate the speech of 1975. Data indicated that, while the first two categories–the most frequently occurring words–correlated highly, the frequencies of remaining words were not highly correlated. The spoken vocabulary of 1975 was not found to differ markedly from the spoken vocabulary of the earlier period, in terms of the number of different words used; speakers during both periods tended to use their words in the same ratios. Overall, the two…

Levinson, Paul (1983). Information Technologies as Vehicles of Evolution. Technology contributes to the growth of human knowledge in five distinct, though overlapping, ways: (1) all technologies are material embodiments and thus more or less durable records of ideas that have survived some test with external reality; (2) telescopes, microscopes, and similar technologies extend external experience and knowledge to areas beyond human perception; (3) computers help people generate knowledge from otherwise overwhelming quantities of experiences; (4) the abstraction permitted by speech, writing, and similar media facilitate the evaluation and dissemination of knowledge; and (5) audiovisual media permit criticism and dissemination of relatively concrete representations of external reality. As the implementation of knowledge through technology significantly alters external reality, technology itself appears to play a decided role in our planet's evolutionary process. Neither human knowledge nor technology is free of unintended consequences, but they do inject an…

Marshall, David (2007). The Places of the Humanities: Thinking through Bureaucracy. Liberal Education, v93 n2 p34-39 Spr. Administrators hate to be called bureaucrats. They prefer to be seen as academic leaders. Leaders articulate priorities and values, serve as exemplars, and represent an institution to both others and itself. Today, more than ever, the humanities and the arts need academic leaders at every level of the university to give them voice, to avow their importance, to articulate the ways in which the humanities and arts speak for the university, the ways in which they give speech to the central values and value of a liberal education. Yet having been a dean for close to a decade, the author is aware that leadership takes place in an institutional and human infrastructure: a political landscape, a network of administrative hierarchies, faculty and academic senate committees, academic units with budgets, constituencies, needs, and responsibilities. Both day-to-day management and strategic planning take place in a bureaucracy, for better or for worse. The challenge for academic leaders is to… [PDF] [Direct]

O'Brien, Trudy (1985). Cross-Cultural Variability in Conversational Interactions. All speakers bring to even simple verbal encounters complex presuppositions and expectations that may create discourse interference. A second-language encounter carries a complex and often inexplicable expectation load. Language expresses meaning and intentions, but also carries social import. The value or appropriateness of speaking itself varies interculturally and intraculturally when it is considered in combination with sex, age, or participant status. Styles of presentation, including speech style, use of phatic communion, overlapping and turn-taking, and nonverbal behavior, vary considerably within and among groups. Nonnative speakers who do not know the codes or rituals of a group, or who use them inappropriately, will be judged, consciously or unconsciously, as inefficient in the communicative task. Discourse interference can even be produced by aspects of the second-language learning process, including instructor attitudes, the availability of appropriate social and… [PDF]

(1983). Domains of the Florida Performance Measurement System. This monograph sets forth in detail the concepts included in the five domains of teaching as identified by the Florida Coalition for the Development of a Performance Evaluation System. The first domain, planning, includes the concepts: (1) content coverage; (2) utilization of instructional materials; (3) activity structure; (4) goal focusing; and (5) diagnosis. The second domain, management of student conduct, covers eight concepts: (1) rule explication and monitoring; (2) teacher withitness; (3) overlapping (withitness); (4) quality of desist; (5) group alert; (6) movement smoothness; (7) movement slow-down; and (8) praise. The domain of instructional organization and development consists of the following concepts: (1) efficient use of time; (2) review of subject matter; (3) lesson development; (4) teacher treatment of student talk; (5) teacher academic feedback; and (6) management of seatwork/homework. In the domain of presentation of subject matter, the concepts discussed are… [PDF]

Provence, Sally (1982). Research on Infancy of Special Relevance for Mental Health. Matrix No. 11A. Research relevant to planning and practice in the area of infant mental health is discussed in this paper. First, three examples of research approaches that reflect current attitudes are given. The first example represents those studies in which there is an effort to closely coordinate physiological and behavioral studies. The second example represents studies focusing on the infant and the caretaking environment as a living, biological system. The third example represents interest in the systematic study of affect development, some of it with the goal of theory building. It is pointed out that these three large and overlapping areas of currently intense inquiry are applicable to clinical practice in the early years and each depends partly on the study of deviations in development and in the parent-child relationship. In subsequent material, several other categories of studies relevant for the field of infant mental health are cited in condensed form. These include studies of (1)… [PDF]

Slobin, Daniel I. (1969). Universals of Grammatical Development in Children. This report considers the early stages of grammatical development in the child. It summarizes some cross-linguistic similarities in acquisition of several different types of languages: English (both white and black, lower and middle class), German, Russian, Finnish, Samoan, and Luo. With this small but diverse collection of languages and cultures the author is in a position to consider varied speech input to the child and observe what remains constant in the course of language acquisition. He finds a number of small, intriguing differences but believes that \what is remarkable at first glance is the uniformity in rate and pattern of development.\ He traces stages of language development and points out the linguistic universals which manifest themselves at the various stages. Typically, in all cultures examined, there is a period of babbling ending somewhere around 18 months of age. Overlapping this period is a stage of single-word utterances, followed by a stage of two-word… [PDF]

Hartnett, Carolyn G. (1986). Thinking with Verbs and Conjunctions. Basic writers often experience difficulties when trying to articulate ideas in writing that are more specific, systematic, and fully developed than their speech. The writers must learn how to put their thinking into the appropriate forms and expressions necessary to address an academic audience. Noting that the natural working of the human mind seems to develop ideas in traditional rhetorical modes, such as definition, classification, comparison, and cause-and-effect, F. D'angelo has presented a systematic list of 10 overlapping static and progressive logical patterns of arrangement. When students want to develop an idea in one of these patterns, they need to consider how to organize their information and to choose expressions and grammatical forms that relate to the parts of the patterns or networks. M. A. K. Halliday and R. Hasan have suggested a valuable system of terms that express relationships between sentences. Cohesion requires understanding the relationships of ideas and… [PDF]

Stano, Michael (1983). The Critical Incident Technique: A Description of the Method. Critical Incident Technique (CIT) involves the collection of real-world examples of behavior that characterize either very effective or very ineffective performance of some activity. The principal advantage of the CIT is that it generates data based on actual behavior rather than on a particular researcher's subjectivity. The CIT has much to offer speech communication researchers, especially those in the applied communication area where the stress is on what actually works in real-world settings. Using the CIT, the research should collect and interpret examples of behavior from a sample before reviewing much of the existing literature on the subject. Questionnaire respondents should be told to think of recent examples related to the phenomenon being studied that stand out in their minds. These incidents are then subject to the equivalent of a content or factor analysis, sorted into a comprehensive list of behaviors. The researcher may elect to end the study and report or act on the…

Harnqvist, Kjell (1988). Background, Education and Work as Predictors of Adult Skills. A study examined the validity of home background at age 13, educational achievement, and work experience as predictors of adult capabilities. The population examined were members of the grade 6 Swedish school population who were born in 1948 on the 5th, 15th, and 25th in each month of that year (n=12,000, or 10 percent of the total). Data about these individuals' family and socioeconomic background, academic achievement, and employment and occupational status were obtained from a national data base on them that had been established in 1961 and periodically updated. In 1980, follow-up data intended to give a broad picture of the participants as young adults were collected by means of questionnaires mailed to three partly overlapping subsamples of the initial 12,000. Home background data were gathered on 2,339 persons (1,126 men and 1,213 women), 500 of whom were contacted for follow-up interviews. These data were supplemented by quantitative indices of the individuals' vocabulary and…

Kowal, Sabine; O'Connell, Daniel C. (2005). \Uh\ and \Um\ Revisited: Are They Interjections for Signaling Delay?. Journal of Psycholinguistic Research, v34 n6 p555-576 Nov. Clark and Fox Tree (2002) have presented empirical evidence, based primarily on the London-Lund corpus (LL; Svartvik & Quirk, 1980), that the fillers \uh\ and \um\ are conventional English words that signal a speaker's intention to initiate a minor and a major delay, respectively. We present here empirical analyses of \uh\ and \um\ and of silent pauses (delays) immediately following them in six media interviews of Hillary Clinton. Our evidence indicates that \uh\ and \um\ cannot serve as signals of upcoming delay, let alone signal it differentially: In most cases, both \uh\ and \um\ were not followed by a silent pause, that is, there was no delay at all; the silent pauses that did occur after \um\ were too short to be counted as major delays; finally, the distributions of durations of silent pauses after \uh\ and \um\ were almost entirely overlapping and could therefore not have served as reliable predictors for a listener. The discrepancies between Clark and Fox Tree's findings and… [Direct]