The study investigated articulatory production in 50 Spanish speaking preschool children through administration of the Prueba de Articulacion de Consonantes y Semivocales, a measure of 21 stimulus words with accompanying drawings and which tests 18 consonants and two semivowels in either the initial, medial, or final position. Errors produced by…

Reviews current approaches to testing oral competence at 16plus and suggests some less artificial alternatives. (AA)

A study of 114 Black undergraduates in two predominantly White midwestern universities demonstrates that communication apprehension (CA) among Blacks appears to be an audience-based phenomenon. Black females scored lower than Black males on the Personal Report of Communication Apprehension-24 (PRCA-24). The higher the CA score, the higher the…

Ten mothers and 20 children, aged 5 and 10 years, were examined to determine the time at which velopharyngeal port opening began in /dVn/ syllables and velopharyngeal port closing reached completion in /nVd/ syllables. Adults and children nasalized most vowels in the /dVn/ context and the /nVd context. (Author/JDD)

This study of 20 stuttering and 20 nonstuttering preschool children found that stuttering children scored lower on 7 out of 8 language measures, with no significant intergroup differences on articulation proficiency or fluency. There were few significant correlations between measures of stuttering rate, speaking rate, and language performance…

This article presents an analysis of Ordinate Corporation's PhonePass Spoken English Test-10. The company promotes this product as being a useful assessment tool for screening job candidates' ability in spoken English. In the real-life domain of the work environment, one of the primary target language use tasks involves extended production…

A traditional method of localizing brain functions has been to identify shared areas of brain damage in individuals who have a particular deficit. The rationale of this "lesion overlap" approach is straightforward: if the individuals can no longer perform the function, the area of brain damaged in most of these individuals must have been…

As part of the evaluation of a 5-year longitudinal research and development project in individualized language learning, several alternative methods for testing oral English production were tried out. The Bilingual Syntax Measure was selected for adaptation because of the relative effectiveness of its visual component in eliciting responses.…

A number of conscious and unconscious objections (e.g., "Speech instruction should be given in the home," and "spoken English should be taught incidentally in all lessons.") have contributed to the present neglect of spoken language in secondary education. We must realize that, in order to be effective, speech must be taught systematically in a…

To determine the effectiveness of group articulation therapy, 180 educable retarded children in special classes (average age 9, average IQ 70), all of whom had articulation problems, were rated on the Carter/Buck Prognostic Speech Test and a picture version of McDonald's deep test of articulation. Subjects were then randomly assigned to one of…

After 20 second-grade lisping children were taught to articulate /s/ and /z/ correctly, each child invited three classmates to a session in which classmates could earn tokens contingent on the target child's correct articulation. Target children in groups using a response cost procedure produced significantly more correct responses. (Author/KM)

This article summarizes current trends in speech and language pathology services to individuals with Down's syndrome. Speech and language pathologists (N=112) responded to a survey identifying widely used assessment instruments, therapy materials, sources of information, and needs in relation to services at five age levels. (Author/DB)

Though frequently defined as the difference between spontaneous and imitative testing responses, additional clinical procedures for the evaluation of stimulability are reviewed. The clinical implications of isolated sound, syllable, and word-level stimulability are also discussed. (Author/DLS)