Search PubMed⌕ Search

Biomedical subjects

F P Roth

Publications and source records attributed to F P Roth.

12 recordsLinked to original sources

Investing in emergent literacy intervention: a key role for speech-language pathologists.

Emergent literacy is a developmental period that is receiving renewed and increased emphasis in the fields of education and speech-language pathology because of its influence on the later literacy development and achievement of students. With their strong background in language, language development, and language disorders, speech-language pathologists (SLPs) can make significant contributions to the acquisition of emergent literacy skills. This article focuses on SLP direct-service roles for students with identified communication impairments and on indirect roles of assisting teachers and others to promote the emergent literacy skills of all students. In addition to the acknowledged importance of general oral language, guidelines, suggestions, and resources are offered to foster emergent literacy skills in five specific areas: (1) early phonological awareness, (2) joint book reading and sense of story, (3) alphabetic letter knowledge, (4) adult modeling of literacy activities, and (5) experience with writing materials.

Awareness↗

Communicative intervention for children with psychiatric and communication disorders.

Many children and adolescents with psychiatric disorders exhibit severely compromised language and social communication systems. The nature and scope of their deficits make a multidisciplinary team approach essential to management in which improved functional and socially appropriate communication is a primary goal. For this reason SLPs generally play a key role in the intervention process and share responsibilities for the planning, coordination, and implementation of instructional-educational goals.

Adolescent↗

Finding DNA regulatory motifs within unaligned noncoding sequences clustered by whole-genome mRNA quantitation.

Whole-genome mRNA quantitation can be used to identify the genes that are most responsive to environmental or genotypic change. By searching for mutually similar DNA elements among the upstream non-coding DNA sequences of these genes, we can identify candidate regulatory motifs and corresponding candidate sets of coregulated genes. We have tested this strategy by applying it to three extensively studied regulatory systems in the yeast Saccharomyces cerevisiae: galactose response, heat shock, and mating type. Galactose-response data yielded the known binding site of Gal4, and six of nine genes known to be induced by galactose. Heat shock data yielded the cell-cycle activation motif, which is known to mediate cell-cycle dependent activation, and a set of genes coding for all four nucleosomal proteins. Mating type alpha and a data yielded all of the four relevant DNA motifs and most of the known a- and alpha-specific genes.

Cloning, Molecular↗

Word frequency and age effects in normally developing children's phonological processing.

Eleven kindergarten-age students and 11 second-grade students were asked to perform each of four phonological processing tasks: (a) confrontation naming of object drawings, (b) rapid sequential naming of object drawings and letters, (c) segmentation of words into sounds, and (d) blending sounds to produce words. Response accuracy and, for the picture naming tasks, response latency were measured. In addition, single-word reading ability and silent reading comprehension were evaluated. Results indicated that high-frequency stimuli were named faster and, in one task, more accurately than low-frequency stimuli. Blending sounds to produce high-frequency words was less difficult than blending sounds to produce low-frequency words, but word frequency did not affect sound segmentation performance. Children in second grade generally were faster and more accurate than kindergarten children in naming pictures. They also were able to segment more sounds and correctly blend sounds to produce more target words than kindergarten students. Confrontation naming accuracy, rapid object- and letter-naming latency, and sound segmentation and blending accuracy were intercorrelated and were related to word recognition and to reading comprehension. Serial naming speed was highly related to phonological awareness in kindergarten, whereas confrontation naming accuracy was highly related to phonological awareness in second grade. A limited cognitive resources framework was adopted to interpret these findings.

Child↗

The oral syntactic proficiency of learning disabled students: a spontaneous story sampling analysis.

A comprehensive analysis of syntactic complexity was performed on spontaneously generated oral stories obtained from 93 learning disabled (LD) and normally achieving (NA) students, 14 to 16 each at 8:0-9:11 (years:months), 10:0-11:11, and 12:0-13:11 age levels. Syntactic complexity was measured using a structural constituent analysis and a T-unit analysis. In direct contrast to the extant LD literature, the results revealed almost identical rates of correct usage and extremely similar patterns of usage between the LD and NA subjects on all measures. Post-hoc analyses indicated that three syntactic structures were used by a significantly greater percentage of NA subjects than LD students. The significance of these findings is discussed with respect to: (a) previous and current characterizations of syntactic abilities of LD students; and (b) the importance of differentiating between statistical and clinical significance for the meaningful interpretation of research data.

Adolescent↗

Symbolic play and social participation abilities of language-impaired and normally developing children.

The symbolic play and social participation behaviors of 6 language-impaired and 8 normal language-learning children were compared on three measures of play: (a) the Symbolic Play Test (Lowe & Costello, 1976), (b) the Brown-Lunzer Scale (Brown, Redmond, Bass, Liebergott, & Swope, 1975), and (c) the Scale of Social Participation in Play (Tizard, Philps, & Plewis, 1976). Subject groups were equated for MLU (Brown, 1973), Developmental Sentence Scoring (Lee, 1974), and performance on the Test of Auditory Comprehension of Language (Carrow, 1973). Results indicated that the language-impaired subjects demonstrated significant deficits in symbolic, adaptive, and integrative play behaviors in comparison with the linguistically equivalent normal subjects. The language-impaired group also evidenced significantly more nonplay and significantly less solitary and parallel play than their normal peers. Findings are discussed with respect to the developmental relationship between language and cognition.

Child↗

Narrative discourse: spontaneously generated stories of learning-disabled and normally achieving students.

Spontaneously generated oral stories were obtained from 93 learning-disabled (LD) and normally achieving (NA) students, 14 to 16 each at 8:0-9:11, 10:0-11:11, and 12:0-13:11 age levels. The stories were analyzed using an adapted version of Stein and Glenn's (1979) story grammar. The results showed significant group and age differences. The stories told by the LD subjects contained fewer propositions and complete episodes and contained significantly fewer Minor Setting statements than those of their NA peers. Within an episode, the LD subjects were less likely to include Response, Attempt, and Plan statements than the NA counterparts. Group differences were also found in the area of interepisode relations. The major age-related findings were an increased occurrence of complete episodes and a greater frequency of embedded episodes as a function of increasing age. Findings are discussed with regard to the development of oral narration abilities. Explanations are offered to account for the storytelling deficits exhibited by the LD subjects.

Adolescent↗

Clinical evaluation of language functions (CELF) diagnostic battery: an analysis and critique.

To summarize, the main strengths of the CELF are the clarity with which the manual describes the subtests and the instructions provided for test administration. Major concerns center on the absence of a theoretical framework as a basis for the selection of language skills assessed, the use of only "normal" children in the standardization sample, the lack of scoring criteria for one subtest, the seemingly incorrect weighting system for another, and minimal evidence of test reliability and validity.

Adolescent↗