News/ Events

College of Clinical & Rehabilitative Health Sciences
Birthday Party Photos
Natural History Museum
Gray, Tennessee
February 19, 2008

2008 Dean's Clinic Enhancement Award

This year's award goes to Bob Barnhart, Ph.D. (Physical Therapy) and Teresa Boggs, M.S. (Communicative Disorders) for their proposal to establish an Interdisciplinary Sensory and Motor Assessment and Intervention Center at the NAVE Center in Elizabethton.

They were awarded $10,050.00 to purchase equipment for the center which will provide assessment and intervention for children with autism and other developmental challenges.  The long range goal of this center is to provide an interdisciplinary assessment environment for children and treatment consultation for families and professionals in the region.

ETSU Audiology Students Receive Grant To Expand RAM Activities

JOHNSON CITY - Students in the Doctor of Audiology (Au.D.) program within East Tennessee State University's College of Clinical and Rehabilitative Health Sciences have received grant funding from the National Association of Future Doctors of Audiology to expand volunteer services for the upcoming Remote Area Medical (RAM) event in Wise, VA.

The grant was written by the Au.D. students and allows them to increase the number of patients that can be seen and to purchase supplies and educational materials.  During the 2007 RAM project, the ETSU audiology students provided hearing evaluations to more than 200 individuals during a three-day period, and identified nearly 100 who needed a hearing aid.  They later returned to fit those patients with amplification.

"Our students are very committed to the RAM project and to serving the needs of Appalachia residents, particularly those who have no means of affording hearing devices," said Dr. Sherri Smith, an Audiologist with the James H. Quillen VA Medical Center and an Assistant Professor with ETSU's Department of Communicative Disorders.  "It is especially impressive that the students took it upon themselves to write the grant and were able to receive funding."

This year's ram event in Wise County is scheduled July 25-28.

Dr. Kerry Proctor-Williams, Department of Communicative Disorders, receives NIH funding for an intervention study for children with language impairment.

Project Summary/Abstract

Children with specific language impairment (SLI) lag behind children with typical language development (TL) in their grammatical development, despite equivalent early exposures to a form of adult grammatical corrections in conversation, called recasts (Fey et al., 1999), and their demonstrated ability to learn from recasts in intervention as quickly as do children with TL (Nelson et al., 1996). 


Recasts are immediate adult responses to child utterances that repeat some of the child's words and correct or otherwise modify the morphologic or syntactic form of the child's prior utterance, while maintaining the central meaning of the child's production.  For example, if a child said "It falled down", an adult corrective recast would be "It fell down".

From one theoretical view, the basis of the grammatical problems of children with SLI involves limitations in working memory, and processing speed and capacity (Leonard et al., 2007).  Leonard et al. suggest that intervention approaches that decrease processing demands and offer multiple repetitions of words and sentences have the potential to override processing limitations.  The facilitative properties of recasts and the flexibility of their use in treatment give them the capability to fulfill these conditions. 


The question remains, however, how can clinicians employ recasts in intervention most efficaciously?  Warren et al. (2007) suggest that it is time for the field of child language to begin specifically investigating components of treatment intensiveness, such as dosage, and their impact on treatment efficacy. 


Currently, such research is virtually nonexistent.  The proposed study will begin to fill this gap through examination of two specific aspects of dosage;  recast rate and recast distribution.  The specific aim of this study is to determine how rate and distribution of recasts affects acquisition of irregular past tense of novel verbs, by 24 children with SLI (4 and 5 year olds) and 24 younger, language equivalent, children with TL (3 year olds).

This study, which utilizes a multi factor between groups design, includes two independent experimental tasks.  Experiment 1 examines the children's learning of two irregular past tense novel verbs (dake-doke and kig-kug) in response to one of three rates of recasts, 0.5/min, 1.0/min or 1.5/min, over five sessions.  Experiment 2 examines the children's acquisition of two different irregular past tense novel verbs (jare-jore and twink-twank) when given 20 verb exposures each in 1,2 or 5 sessions.  Outcome variables include percent of accurate production in obligatory contexts of the target verbs during the sessions and on post-test probes.

This research proposal represents the fourth study in a path of research that has three long-term goals:  (1) establishment of efficacious early intervention techniques that will contribute to the amelioration of the long-term interpersonal and academic consequences of SLI; (2) a detailed understanding of language processing limitations that affect morphosyntactic acquisition of children with SLI; and (3) development of a dynamic assessment protocol that distinguishes late-talking toddlers with SLI from those with TL.  The methodology and results of the proposed study will contribute significantly to future randomized clinical trials.

Dean's List - Spring 2008

To view the list of students who made the Dean's List for the Spring 2008 semester please click the link below.

Dean's List - Spring 2008

Symposium of Child Language Disorders

University of Wisconsin, Madison

Promoting Speech and Vocabulary Development through Specialized Storybooks in Children with and without Cleft Palate

Smith, J. M.S. - Scherer, N.J., Ph.D. - Kaiser, A. Ph.D.

East Tennessee State University

*Vanderbilt University

Abstract

This study investigated changes in vocabulary and speech sound production in response to storybooks embedded with Enhanced Milieu Teaching language prompts and speech recasts. Six children received the intervention, three with cleft lip and palate (CL/P), displaying speech and language delays, and three language-matched children with non-clefts, each 12-24 months of age.  A multiple baseline design across behaviors was implemented by a trained graduate clinician. 

Results indicated that all children increased their use of the target vocabulary and speech sound production of stop consonants, while reducing compensatory articulation errors. Generalization of the targets to a novel picture-naming task was also observed, as was generalization to a free play task, and to the home as reported by the parents.  Effect sizes were moderate to high for all children. The children with CL/P required more treatment sessions to achieve criterion than the non-cleft children. Analysis of 20-minute language samples, given pre- and post-intervention for each participant, showed that both groups of participants increased their expressive vocabulary and speech production measures post intervention. 

Recent Publications

To view recent publications please click the title of the article you wish to view below.

Studying the Effects of Inspiratory Muscle Training in Patients with Obstructive Lung Diseases

Corticosteroid Supplementation:  Is It Still Relevant?

Overview - The Consumer Handbook on Tinnitus

Early and Later Vocalization Skills In Children With and Without Cleft Palate