Purpose: This study examined literary element use in third-grade written narratives to determine if children who are deaf and hard of hearing (DHH) and their peers with typical hearing (TH) met macrostructure writing proficiency expectations addressed in the Common Core State Standards. Method: Participants included 134 children who completed third grade across three groups: children who used cochlear implants (CIs), children who used hearing aids (HAs), and children with TH. Given a picture prompt, participants composed a written narrative. Using the third-grade Common Core State Standards that addressed macrostructure, written narratives were scored with a rubric that outlined the criteria for meeting seven literary element categories: characters, actions, feelings, dialogue, topic, sequence, and plot. Results: CI, HA, and TH children did not meet most macrostructure literary element criteria for narrative writing addressed in the third-grade Common Core State Standards. Literary element outcomes did not significantly differ between CI, HA, and TH groups, except for topic. Conclusions: DHH and TH third-grade students did not demonstrate strong macrostructure writing skills in their written narratives. To build a solid writing foundation, elementary students, regardless of hearing status, would benefit from general and genre-specific writing interventions that incorporate self-regulating strategies throughout their writing process to facilitate the transition from learning to write to writing to learn. Supplemental Material: https://doi.org/10.23641/asha.34259406
Purpose: Listening effort may impact listeners' performance; however, existing methods for measuring this effort have not been thoroughly applied to preschool children. This study investigated the multidimensional nature of listening effort in preschool children with hearing loss (HL) compared to those with typical hearing (TH). Method: Fifty children ages 4–6 years (25 with HL and 25 with TH) participated in this study. Children with TH had a mean bilateral hearing threshold of 11.47 dB HL ( SD = 3.98). Children with HL had mean bilateral hearing thresholds of 56.6 dB HL ( SD = 3.9) and mean bilateral aided thresholds of 25.9 dB HL ( SD = 4.5). Children with a history of premature birth, low birth weight, birth complications, medical disorders, or rare diseases were excluded. Auditory tasks included a speech identification test, a subjective listening effort questionnaire, and physiological measurements under three signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) conditions. Results: Children with HL showed significantly lower speech identification accuracy, F (1, 48) = 29.72, p < .001, η p 2 = .38, and longer response times, with a significant post hoc difference between groups at the −5-dB SNR condition, F (2, 96) = 4.65, p = .012. Interestingly, children with TH reported higher subjective effort than HL children at 0 dB SNR, χ 2 (2) = 8.22, p = .02. Critically, the HL group exhibited significantly higher skin conductance response (SCR) across all conditions, F (2, 96) = 7.64, p < .001, η p 2 = .14. Multiple regression analyses across the entire sample, controlling for language ability, demonstrated that SCR remained a significant predictor of performance across all SNR conditions ( b = −45.95 to −58.62, all p < .025). Conclusions: This study demonstrated the value of a multidimensional assessment of listening effort. SCR emerged as a sensitive and objective indicator, revealing significantly higher effort in the HL group. Notably, no significant correlation was found between SCR and subjective listening effort, highlighting the discrepancy between perceived and physiological effort. These findings support the integration of physiological measures, particularly SCR, with behavioral assessments to provide a comprehensive and reliable evaluation of listening effort in young children with HL.
Purpose: Stuttering therapy is complex, addressing speech, cognitive, affective, and social factors. Children who stutter often present with co-occurring speech and language disorders. Historically, speech-language pathologists (SLPs) have reported less comfort with stuttering treatment compared with other speech and language disorders. The current study used a combined quantitative and qualitative approach to investigate SLPs' perceptions of the therapy they provide to an individual child who stutters with one or more concomitant disorders on their caseload. Method: Forty-five SLPs completed a survey describing their therapy for an individual child who stutters with at least one concomitant disorder. SLPs provided separate ratings of how well the child's stuttering therapy and therapy for concomitant needs were going, along with written rationales for each rating. Results: Ratings of therapy were generally positive; however, quantitative analysis indicated that therapy for concomitant needs was more likely to be rated as going “very well” and less likely to be rated as “sometimes poorly and sometimes well” compared with stuttering therapy. Qualitative analysis revealed that SLPs' ratings of concomitant therapy reflected positive child attributes (e.g., motivation), well-established therapy processes, and consistent positive progress. Conclusions: This study extended prior work on perceptions of stuttering and concomitant communication disorders by focusing on individual children who stutter. Although SLPs viewed both therapies positively overall, perceptions were comparatively more favorable for concomitant therapy. Child-level factors and consistent progress emerged as important influences of SLPs' perception of concomitant therapy.
Purpose: Bilingual children from ethnic minority backgrounds in China often face challenges acquiring Mandarin Chinese as their second language (L2). This study aimed to (a) evaluate the effectiveness of a school-based book reading intervention (BRI) on the bilingual language development of Dai–Mandarin young bilingual children in China and (b) examine how demographic and language environment factors were associated with the intervention outcomes. Method: A cluster-level randomized controlled trial design was employed. Fifty-one Dai–Mandarin bilingual children aged 4;1 (years;months) to 5;1 were randomized at the class level into a treatment or control group. The treatment group ( n = 26) participated in the BRI spanned across 6 weeks with daily 25-min sessions. The sessions focused on shared book reading, explicit vocabulary instruction, and sentence structure activities. The control group ( n = 25) followed their regular curriculum without intervention. Vocabulary, narrative skills, and general language skills were assessed using four standardized, criterion-referenced or researcher-developed measures at pre-intervention and immediate postintervention; the researcher-developed measures were also administered at midintervention. Demographic information and language learning environments were collected through a parental questionnaire. Results: The treatment group showed significant improvements in Mandarin (L2) curriculum-specific receptive and expressive vocabulary, and narrative structural complexity. Positive trends were observed in overall narrative skills in both languages and L2 receptive and expressive vocabulary. While intervention benefits were generally equal across participants, expressive vocabulary gains were positively associated with increased cumulative L2 use and male gender, general expressive language gains with having more siblings, and curriculum-specific expressive vocabulary with older age. Conclusions: The study shows that a language-focused BRI can effectively improve young bilingual children's selected vocabulary and narrative skills, even in large-group, resource-constrained settings. By demonstrating a practical framework for integrating language resources, the study offers valuable guidance to educators and speech-language pathologists working with bilingual children in linguistically and culturally diverse, low-resource contexts. Supplemental Material: https://doi.org/10.23641/asha.34001103
Purpose: Children with developmental language disorder (DLD) produce more speech disruptions and have a slower speech rate than their peers. This study validated measures of effortful sentence production by examining their association with general language ability and differences between groups of children with DLD and typical language development (TLD). Measures of effort were expected to be related to general language ability, and children with DLD were expected to produce more stall-type disruptions (i.e., repetitions, filled pauses, and unfilled pauses) and use fewer words per minute (WPM) than their peers with TLD. Method: Audio-recorded responses to the Redmond Sentence Recall task for 139 children with TLD ( M age = 86.85 months) and 58 children with DLD ( M age = 90.64 months) were transcribed, aligned to the audio, and coded for sentence disruptions using the Codes for the Human Analysis of Transcripts form from TalkBank. A custom-made Python script computed measures of stall rate, nondisrupted rate (e.g., the percentage of utterances with no disruptions), and WPM and were examined relative to child performance on the Clinical Evaluation of Language Fundamentals–Fourth Edition. Results: When controlling for age, stall rate and nondisrupted rate were moderately correlated with general language ability, and WPM was strongly correlated with general language ability. The DLD group used significantly more stalls and fewer WPM and nondisrupted utterances than did the TLD group. Conclusions: The findings demonstrate that measures of effortful sentence production are systematically associated with language ability. Future directions for leveraging artificial intelligence to automate these measures and exploring their utility as value-added indicators of DLD are discussed.
