Our purpose is to highlight the contributions of TalkBank initiatives to improved understanding of clinical impairments in adult and child speakers and examine remaining challenges and proposed solutions. We review the origins and development of TalkBank initiatives that have targeted a wide array of typical and atypical child and adult…

Background: 'Speech sound disorder' is an umbrella term that encompasses dysarthria, articulation disorders, childhood apraxia of speech and phonological disorders. However, differential diagnosis between these disorders is a persistent challenge in speech pathology, as many diagnostic procedures use symptom clusters instead of identifying an…

Multidimensional analysis involves moving away from one-dimensional analyses such as most articulation tests to comprehensive analyses involving levels of phonological information from the word level down to segments. This article outlines one such approach that looks at four levels from words to segments, using nine phonological measures. It also…

Purpose: This research note gives details of 2 releases of audio recordings available from speakers who stutter that can be accessed on the Web. Method: Most of the recordings are from school-age children. These are available on the University College London Archive of Stuttered Speech (UCLASS) Web site, and information is provided about how to…

Jaw movement patterns were examined longitudinally in a 3-year-old male with childhood apraxia of speech (CAS) and compared with a typically developing control group. The child with CAS was followed for 8 months, until he began accurately and consistently producing the bilabial phonemes /p/, /b/, and /m/. A movement tracking system was used to…

Nine speakers with verbal apraxia repeated 12 consonant-vowel-consonant target syllables four times each. Significantly more errors were produced in voiced than in voiceless contexts. Sixty-six percent of productions were produced in the same manner for first and last trials. (Author/DB)

An articulatory inventory was administered to 19 dysarthric adults and scored using two judging formats--phoneme identification and traditional testing. Results indicated the traditional testing format consistently overestimated the articulation skills of subjects, especially severely involved subjects. (Author/DB)

The oral expressive language of 47 aphasic subjects (who had suffered a single unilateral occlusive cerebral vascular accident two to four weeks prior to original testing) was measured on two occasions a year apart. Results found positive changes toward normal language functioning for several variables with type of aphasia affecting outcome on…

The study comparing perceptual judgments of speech disfluency by 20 mothers of either stuttering or normally fluent children found no appreciable differences between groups in their judgments. Both groups of mothers most frequently judged sound/syllable repetitions to be stuttered, followed by whole-word repetitions and broken words. (Author/DB)

A rationale for improving speech diagnosis within the hearing impaired population is presented. An instructional program to improve diagnosis is described. Measures of the validity and reliability of the training materials were secured from 15 speech/language pathologists experienced in working with young hearing impaired adults. (Author)

Programs (N=182) providing speech assessment services to hearing-impaired children were surveyed. Frequency of use scores and rankings are reported for test instruments frequently used for assessment at the infant, preschool, primary, and secondary educational levels. Domains tested and stimulus response demands of the instruments are discussed.…

This investigation was undertaken to address questions about topic familiarity and disfluencies during oral descriptive discourse of adult speakers. Participants expressed more attributes when the topic was familiar than when it was unfamiliar. Fillers and lexical pauses were the most frequent disfluencies. The mean duration of each hesitation…

Electropalatography (EPG) was used to obtain details of tongue contacts with the hard palate in four articulation-disordered children. EPG provided relevant diagnostic information, showing patterns in both spatial configuration and variability and allowing the tentative diagnosis of two children as verbal dyspraxic. (Author/DB)

Three methods for evaluating change in the spontaneous language of aphasic subjects were compared. Clinical judgments of experienced speech language pathologists showed excellent agreement with the Shewan Spontaneous Language Analysis (SSLA) and less agreement with the Western Aphasia Battery. The SSLA was found to provide the most comprehensive…

The study comparing word-initial target phonemes and phoneme production of five toddlers with cleft palate and five normal toddlers found that the cleft palate children tended to target more words with word-initial nasals, approximants, and vowels and fewer words with word-initial stops, fricatives, and affricates than normal children. (Author/DB)