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Nan Bernstein Ratner

Publications and source records attributed to Nan Bernstein Ratner.

10 recordsLinked to original sources
PubMed2006

Infants' early ability to segment the conversational speech signal predicts later language development: a retrospective analysis.

Two studies examined relationships between infants' early speech processing performance and later language and cognitive outcomes. Study 1 found that performance on speech segmentation tasks before 12 months of age related to expressive vocabulary at 24 months. However, performance on other tasks was not related to 2-year vocabulary. Study 2 assessed linguistic and cognitive skills at 4-6 years of age for children who had participated in segmentation studies as infants. Children who had been able to segment words from fluent speech scored higher on language measures, but not general IQ, as preschoolers. Results suggest that speech segmentation ability is an important prerequisite for successful language development, and they offer potential for developing measures to detect language impairment at an earlier age.

Aptitude↗
PubMed2006

Information literacy for speech-language pathologists: a key to evidence-based practice.

PURPOSE: In this tutorial, we review the tenets of information literacy (IL) that parallel and intersect with new American Speech-Language-Hearing Association (ASHA) certification standards requiring clinicians to engage in evidence-based practice (EBP). METHOD: A review of the literature on EBP in medical and allied health areas was conducted through an online database search. The Information Literacy Competency Standards for Higher Education (American Library Association, 2004) are used as a framework for outlining IL practices that will aid in EBP. RESULTS: Current strategies are contrasted with more desirable strategies. Potential barriers to the utilization of information-literate procedures in locating sources of reliable clinical evidence are discussed together with potential solutions. CONCLUSION: Suggestions for more efficient information searches by clinicians, as well as a proposed discipline-wide agenda for increasing clinicians' IL skills during and after entry-level graduate training, are provided.

American Speech-Language-Hearing Association↗
PubMed2006

Evidence-based practice: an examination of its ramifications for the practice of speech-language pathology.

PURPOSE: The purpose of this article is to consider some of the ramifications that arise when a discipline newly endorses evidence-based practice (EBP) as a primary guiding principle. Although EBP may appear straightforward, events experienced by peer disciplines that have preceded us in the implementation of EBP raise questions about defining acceptable forms of evidence for treatment effectiveness and efficacy, the potential roles of nonspecific or common factors, therapist quality in achieving therapy outcomes, and eventual applications of EBP that may overly confine which treatments are considered acceptable and reimbursable. METHOD: Through narrative review of the literature, the article examines valuable as well as controversial features of EBP in addition to obstacles that may impede the transition of evidence (research findings) to clinical practice. CONCLUSION: EBP is a valuable construct in ensuring quality of care. However, bridging between research evidence and clinical practice may require us to confront potentially difficult issues and establish thoughtful dialogue about best practices in fostering EBP itself.

Biomedical Research↗
PubMed2005

Evidence-based practice in stuttering: Some questions to consider.

UNLABELLED: A recent forum in JFD (28/3, 2003) evaluated the status of evidence-based practice in fluency disorders, and offered recommendations for improvement. This article re-evaluates the level of support available for some popular approaches to stuttering therapy and questions the relative value placed on some types of programs endorsed by the forum. Evidence-based practice is discussed within the context of emerging concerns over its application to non-medical interventions and suggestions are made for grounding fluency interventions by reference to empirically supported principles of change. A popular, evidence-based intervention for stuttering in young children (the Lidcombe program) is evaluated within the suggested parameters. EDUCATIONAL OBJECTIVES: After reading this article, the reader will be able to: (1) evaluate the status of evidence-based practice in fluency disorders; (2) list concerns about the impact of narrow interpretation of EBP on research and practice in the field of fluency disorders and other non-medical domains; (3) articulate the role of theory and basic research in selecting among and evaluating therapy approach options.

Evidence-Based Medicine↗
PubMed2005

Concurrent validity of the language development survey: associations with the MacArthur-Bates communicative development inventories: words and sentences.

This study examined the concurrent validity of the Language Development Survey (LDS), a 310-word parent report screening tool for language delay in toddlers, by testing its associations with the MacArthur-Bates Communicative Development Inventories: Words and Sentences (CDI:WS), a 680-word parent report instrument. Participants were 239 toddlers 23-25 months of age. The correlation between total vocabulary score on the 2 instruments was .95, and correlations across comparable semantic categories ranged from .84 to .94. The correlation between the LDS and the CDI:WS for mean length of phrases calculated on 3 examples of the child's longest and best phrases was .90. Both instruments demonstrated that parents reported higher vocabulary and mean phrase length scores for girls. The study indicates that information obtained from the LDS about rank ordering of toddlers in terms of their reported vocabulary and mean length of phrases is equivalent to that obtained from the longer CDI:WS.

Child Language↗
PubMed2004

Nonword repetition abilities of children who stutter: an exploratory study.

UNLABELLED: Past research has suggested that children who stutter (CWS) may have less well-developed language skills than fluent children, and that such relative linguistic deficiencies may play a role in precipitating their disfluencies. However, data to support this position are primarily derived from results of standardized diagnostic inventories, which are originally designed to identify frank language impairment. Nonword repetition has emerged as a more sensitive measure of children's linguistic abilities. In this exploratory study, eight CWS (mean age 5:10, range 4:3-8:4) were compared to eight normally developing children (ND) (mean age 5:9, range 4:1-8:4) in their ability to repeat the nonwords of the Children's Test of Nonword Repetition. CWS performed more poorly than NS on measures of Number of Words Correct and Number of Phoneme Errors at all nonword lengths, although statistical differences were observed only for 3-syllable nonwords. When lexical stress of the nonwords was varied to a non-English stress pattern, all participants repeated the stimuli with less accuracy, and the CWS again exhibited more errors than NS. Fluency for the CWS group did not change systematically with increasing nonword length. These preliminary findings are interpreted in light of a number of extant theories of the underlying deficit in childhood stuttering. We conclude that children who stutter may have diminished ability to remember and/or reproduce novel phonological sequences, and that further investigation into this possibility may shed light on the emergence and characteristics of childhood stuttering. EDUCATIONAL OBJECTIVES: After completing this activity, the learner will: (1) be able to evaluate the research support for a linguistic component to stuttering; (2) describe the use of nonword repetition as an experimental and assessment device with children with SLI and children who stutter; (3) suggest future directions for research to further refine the potential role that linguistic encoding plays in the etiology and persistence of stuttering.

Case-Control Studies↗
PubMed2004

Caregiver-child interactions and their impact on children's fluency: implications for treatment.

There is a relatively strong focus in the stuttering literature on the desirability of selected alterations in parental speech and language style in the management of early stuttering. In this article, the existing research support for such recommendations is evaluated, together with relevant research from the normal language acquisition literature that bears on the potential consequences of changing parental interaction style. Recommendations with relatively stronger and weaker support are discussed. Ways in which children's communication styles and fluency may be altered through newer fluency treatment protocols are contrasted with older, more general parent advisements. Finally, directions for future research into the efficacy of recommendations made to the parents of children who stutter (CWS) are offered.

Caregivers↗
PubMed2002

Measuring lexical diversity in children who stutter: application of vocd.

UNLABELLED: There is growing but equivocal evidence that the language abilities of young children who stutter (CWS) may be depressed when compared to those of their fluent peers. In particular, the lexical skills of CWS have variously been reported to be weaker or stronger than comparison children in a number of recent studies. One source for such disagreement may be the measures used to compute lexical characteristics of these children's spoken conversations. In this study, we examined the concurrent validity of two measures of lexical diversity in spontaneous language samples, Type-Token Ratio (TTR) and the newly developed utility vocd (Malvern & Richards, 1997), using a standard test of expressive vocabulary as the comparison measure. Findings indicated that vocd values ("D") correlated well with standardized measures of expressive vocabulary, while TTR values did not. In addition, both the standardized measure and vocd revealed significantly poorer expressive lexical skills of CWS, whereas TTR analyses did not evidence this difference. Results are discussed in relation to the relative strength of vocd over TTR as a method for describing lexical characteristics of the spontaneous language samples of this population. EDUCATIONAL OBJECTIVES: The reader will learn about and be able to (1) identify several common measures of conversational vocabulary and the strengths and weaknesses of each, and (2) compare the performance of the young CWS in this study to their normally fluent peers in terms of vocabulary performance on both formal and conversational measures of vocabulary.

Algorithms↗