The purpose of this paper is to evaluate the effectiveness of a craft book used for stimulation therapy on the phonetic sounds /ŋ/, /r/, /s/, /ʃ/, /tʃ/, and /θ/. The book is specifically geared toward children who do not qualify for speech remediation services but who may be at risk of a speech sound disorder. Four children participated in the study with ages ranging from 4;3-7;6. The study lasted for four weeks in which data was collected on a weekly basis via Likert Scale surveys in accordance with two conversational speech samples. The speech samples were phonetically transcribed with minimal differences pre and post use of the craft book. Data from the surveys give insight to the children’s favorite crafts, the level of difficulty of each craft, and the likelihood of the craft book to be used as part of a remediation program. The study had limitations in sample size, duration, and number of craft activities. Future revisions should include increasing the number of crafts available per chapter and incorporating into the introduction an educational component for parents.

For this project the main goal was to create a curriculum aimed at fourth grade students. This curriculum was intended to introduce them to different forms of communication, and teach them the skills, attitudes, behavior, and knowledge that would enable them to be able to communicate and interact better with a wide range of people with different types of communication styles. American Sign Language was used for this curriculum as an example of an alternative communication method. The project included developing teaching materials and lessons which made up the curriculum, after that this curriculum was implemented with 11 fourth grade students.

This study evaluated whether the Story Champs intervention is effective in bilingual kindergarten children who speak Spanish as their native language. Previous research by Spencer and Slocum (2010) found that monolingual, English-speaking participants made significant gains in narrative retelling after intervention. This study implemented the intervention in two languages and examined its effects after ten sessions. Results indicate that some children benefited from the intervention and there was variability across languages as well.

Early childhood language environment has an important effect on developmental language outcomes. Intervention and parent training for children who have speech and language delays often focuses on the implementation of strategies designed to enhance the language environment. With quantitative information on different aspects of the language environment, intervention and parent training can be better tailored to the needs of each child and can be made easier for parents to implement. This study uses the Language Environmental Analysis (LENA) system to explore differences in language environment across participants, settings (toddler group and home), and activities (general, outside, and organized playtime, story time, meal time, naptime, transition, public outside visits, travel time, TV time, personal care, and other). Participants were five children, ages 20-35 months who had speech and language delays. The children wore the LENA for one day and the adult words to the child, child vocalizations and turn-taking were analyzed during each activity and setting. We found that general and outside playtime activities, meal time, and personal care times were activities that consistently resulted in high levels of child vocalization across participants. Structured play and story time did not result in high levels of child vocalization. We also found that, for some children, there were differences in the quantity of adult language addressed to the child in language group and home settings. These findings have implications for training parents to provide language rich environments for their child.

The increase of Traumatic Brain Injury (TBI) cases in recent war history has increased the urgency of research regarding how veterans are affected by TBIs. The purpose of this study was to evaluate the effects of TBI on speech recognition in noise. The AzBio Sentence Test was completed for signal-to-noise ratios (S/N) from -10 dB to +15 dB for a control group of ten participants and one US military veteran with history of service-connected TBI. All participants had normal hearing sensitivity defined as thresholds of 20 dB or better at frequencies from 250-8000 Hz in addition to having tympanograms within normal limits. Comparison of the data collected on the control group versus the veteran suggested that the veteran performed worse than the majority of the control group on the AzBio Sentence Test. Further research with more participants would be beneficial to our understanding of how veterans with TBI perform on speech recognition tests in the presence of background noise.

Preschoolers' vocabularies are an important component of their receptive and expressive language skills. This study was designed to catalog preschoolers' expressive vocabularies to provide an accurate estimate of how many words and which words seven preschoolers knew. In this study a LENA digital recorder was used to record language samples of the children (age range 40 months to 69 months) over 4-6 days. Their language samples were transcribed and individual root words were extracted. The children spoke an average of 1,698 unique words (range 1,522 \u2014 1,957 words). There were 539 words produced by all of the children in the study as well as 820 words produced by 6 of the 7 children. These data provide preliminary information that will be useful for designing a larger, more comprehensive study of children's vocabulary with the goal of teachers and speech-language pathologists being able to use this information to determine if a child's vocabulary is smaller than other children when they enter elementary school. This can inform assessment and intervention decisions as well as provide guidance to preschool curriculum developers.

This creative project is a children's book entitled Sheldon the Shy Tortoise. Accompanying the story is a literature review of the research on childhood shyness. The purpose of the project is to gain a better of understanding of shyness in childhood. Topics covered in the literature review include risk factors and causes, negative social and behavioral effects, impact on academics, and treatment options. Using this information, the children's book was written. It aims to be fun for children to read while also providing insight and encouragement into some of the problems related to being shy. The story features animal characters and a relatively simple plot so it is easily understandable by the target audience of late-preschool and early-elementary children. The main character, Sheldon the tortoise, is often physically and metaphorically "stuck in his shell". He wants to participate in social activities but is afraid to do so. Through a series of events and interactions, Sheldon starts to come out of his shell in every sense of the phrase. The book is illustrated using photographs of hand-crocheted stuffed animals representing each of the characters. By incorporating scholarly research into the writing process, children will hopefully be able to gain an understanding of their shyness and ways to help decrease it. Teachers should be able to better understand their shy students and understand some of the unique challenges of working with shy children. This creative project helps convey necessary information to children and families during a critical period of development.