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Purpose: Talkers typically use a slow speaking rate when producing clear speech, a speaking style that has been widely shown to improve intelligibility over conversational speech in difficult communication environments. With training, however, talkers can learn to produce a form of clear speech at normal speaking rates that provides young listeners with normal hearing much of the same intelligibility benefit. The purpose of this study was to determine if older listeners with normal hearing can also obtain an intelligibility benefit from clear speech at normal rates. Method: Eight older listeners (55-68 years of age) with normal hearing were presented with nonsense sentences from 4 talkers in a background of speech-shaped noise (signal-to-noise ratio = 0 dB). Intelligibility (percent correct key words) was evaluated for conversational and clear speech produced at 2 speaking rates (normal and slow), for a total of 4 conditions: conv/normal, conv/slow, clear/normal, and clear/slow. Results: As expected, the clear/slow speaking condition provided a large and robust intelligibility advantage (23 points) over conv/normal speech. The conv/slow condition provided almost as much benefit on average (21 points) but was highly variable across talkers. Notably, the clear/normal speaking condition provided the same size intelligibility advantage (14 points), previously reported for young listeners with normal hearing (Krause & Braida, 2002), thus extending the benefit of clear speech at normal speaking rates to older normal-hearing listeners. Conclusions: Applications based on clear/normal speech (e.g., signal processing approaches for hearing aids) have the potential to provide comparable intelligibility improvements to older and younger listeners alike.

A study investigated self-efficacy beliefs, sources of efficacy information, person input variables, and outcome expectations in relationship to the career interests of 96 adolescents with learning disabilities. Self-efficacy beliefs were found to be a substantial predictor of career interests and to consistently mediate the relationship of other measures. (Author/CR)

In speech therapy lessons, discourse between the clinician and the child is impacted by the social presuppositions of both participants. This paper argues that some macroanalysis of the clinician's social experiences must be incorporated into the microanalysis of therapy to sort out the multiple meanings of therapy events. (Author/JDD)

Eight dyads of misarticulating school children (mean age = 7:9 years) enrolled in clinical programs were videotaped while they role-played remedial articulation lessons. Hierarchical relationships among the selected levels of analysis suggested the use of a cohesive register appropriate for clinical teaching. Children's sociolinguistic perspectives on remedial lessons should be considered. (Author/CL)

Discourse material excerpted from a language lesson with five hearing-impaired primary pupils suggests that teacher-pupil interaction is organized on several levels of structure. A hierarchy of lesson interaction is demonstrated through the illustrative discourse samples; hierarchial levels of roles, tasks, phrases, topics, sequences, turns, and utterances are identified and discussed. (Author/CL)

The study of children (ages 4 to 6 years) with articulation problems found that syntactic structure and word structure significantly affected the accuracy of articulation and the degree of word simplification, suggesting that structural complexity may contribute to overall hierarchical complexity, in turn causing children to simplify their speech. (Author/DLS)

Operation SAIL was designed to facilitate the assimilation of children who relocate from the inner city to suburban schools. The project includes faculty inservice training, parent orientation and involvement, and student cognitive and affective development. The methodology and results of the program's first year are described herein. (GC)

Teachers can deal with language disordered children through discourse analysis, a conversational teaching process aimed at getting children to talk. Steps include selecting a topic to talk about during the remedial language session, having teacher and child take turns talking about the topic, using requests to constrain the child's responses so that the structural target is produced, and providing evaluation. (SW)

Effects of phonological and syntactic structure on the sentence productions of 10 language disordered school children (mean age 6.2 years) were investigated. Some of the results indicated that the syllabic complexity of target sentences as well as clause embedding significantly contributed to sentence inaccuracy (omission, substitution, addition, and transposition errors). (Author/MC)

This article reviews "Getting Comfortable with Special Education Law: A Framework for Working with Children with Disabilities" by Dixie Snow Huefner, a book that explains the history and foundation of important disability-related laws and litigation and their most recent modifications for meeting the needs of individuals with disabilities in public and in private. The book also examines the changing roles of special education and special educators. (CR)