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The purpose of this study was to examine the use of high-frequency information for making gender identity judgments from high-pass filtered vowel segments produced by adult speakers. Specifically, the effect of removing lower-frequency spectral detail (i.e., F3 and below) from vowel segments via high-pass filtering was evaluated. Thirty listeners (ages 18-35) with normal hearing participated in the experiment. A within-subjects design was used to measure gender identification for six 250-ms vowel segments (/æ/, /ɪ /, /ɝ/, /ʌ/, /ɔ/, and /u/), produced by ten male and ten female speakers. The results of this experiment demonstrated that despite the removal of low-frequency spectral detail, the listeners were accurate in identifying speaker gender from the vowel segments, and did so with performance significantly above chance. The removal of low-frequency spectral detail reduced gender identification by approximately 16 % relative to unfiltered vowel segments. Classification results using linear discriminant function analyses followed the perceptual data, using spectral and temporal representations derived from the high-pass filtered segments. Cumulatively, these findings indicate that normal-hearing listeners are able to make accurate perceptual judgments regarding speaker gender from vowel segments with low-frequency spectral detail removed via high-pass filtering. Therefore, it is reasonable to suggest the presence of perceptual cues related to gender identity in the high-frequency region of naturally produced vowel signals. Implications of these findings and possible mechanisms for performing the gender identification task from high-pass filtered stimuli are discussed.

Purpose: The purpose of this article is to help speech-language pathologists (SLPs) apply the principles of evidence-based practice (EBP) to nonspeech oral motor treatments (NSOMTs) in order to make valid, evidence-based decisions about NSOMTs and thus determine if they are viable treatment approaches for the management of communication disorders., Method: A detailed description of EBP is provided, including levels of evidence for rating the quality of evidence. NSOMTs are described and a survey of the literature on NSOMTs is provided along with a determination of the level of evidence of each study reported. A systematic literature search was conducted using the electronic databases of MEDLINE and CINAHL (Cumulative Index to Nursing and Allied Health Literature) within an unrestricted time period. In addition, reference lists from identified articles were also reviewed. Ethical and fiscal issues related to EBP and NSOMTs, as well as clinical implications of EBP for the use of NSOMTs, are discussed., Results: A total of 45 articles/reports were published between 1981 and 2006 in peer-reviewed and non-peer-reviewed journals. Most of the sources (25) relied on weak anecdotal evidence and opinions. Moreover, studies that employed stronger designs reported negative results for NSOMTs (i.e., evidence against the use of NSOMTs for modifying speech)., Conclusion: Despite their use for many years and their popularity among some SLPs for the treatment of a wide variety of speech problems in children and adults, NSOMTs are controversial because sufficient evidence does not exist to support their effectiveness in improving speech. Moreover, limited evidence exists for the use of NSOMTs to facilitate nonspeech activities. Therefore, the available evidence does not support the continued use of NSOMTs as a standard treatment and they should be excluded from use as a mainstream treatment until there are further data. SLPs should consider the principles of EBP in making decisions about NSOMTs.

Objective: The purpose of this study was to obtain information about academic and clinical training of speech-language pathology students in cleft palate (CP)., Methods: Representatives of 232 accredited graduate programs in speech-language pathology were invited via e-mail to complete a web-based 32-item questionnaire. Questions focused on the type and nature of courses offered related to CP, availability of clinical practica, and number of hours of clinical experience by students. An item-by-item analysis was conducted and descriptive statistics obtained., Results: A total of 127 (54.7%) of the programs responded. Sixty-seven percent offered coursework exclusively devoted to CP, and for 53% of these it was a required course. For the programs that did not offer an exclusive course on CP, 35% indicated that CP was covered in other courses such as articulation, voice, or anatomy and physiology. Fifty-four percent of the programs offered clinical practica in CP. For these, a median of five students of a median graduate speech-language pathology class of 43 were enrolled in practica involving CP (range = 0-21), and students spent a median of 2 hours in practica involving CP (range = 0-100)., Conclusions: Cleft palate is a complex disorder to which many students have limited exposure and for which more graduate training is unlikely since the 1993 American Speech-Language-Hearing Association (ASHA) certification changes. As a result, there is a need to look towards alternative methods to enhance the educational and clinical experiences of students and practitioners in cleft palate.

The purpose of this investigation was to compare adolescents' perceptions of the nonspeech characteristics of dysarthric and normal speakers. Recordings of six three-word phrases produced by 16 speakers, eight cerebral palsied and eight normal-speaking children, were presented to 19 students for judgments of nonspeech characteristics on a semantic differential scale containing 22 bipolar adjective pairs. Results of their ratings indicated that for all 22 adjective pairs the normal speakers were judged more positively than the dysarthric speakers. Moreover, the differences in listeners' ratings between the two speaker groups were statistically significant for all adjective pairs. Implications of these findings and their comparison to the judgments of peer and adult listeners are discussed.

A questionnaire on nasopharyngoscopy was completed by 93 speech-language pathologists randomly selected from the Directory of the American Cleft Palate-Craniofacial Association. Although the majority rated nasopharyngoscopy as important in the assessment of velopharyngeal function, and believed that it should be performed by speech-language pathologists, the majority do not perform nasopharyngoscopic examinations. Moreover, 40% had no academic preparation and 20% had no clinical experience in nasopharyngoscopy. Implications of these findings concerning exposure to nasopharyngoscopy in speech-language pathology graduate training programs and in continuing education programs for practicing speech-language pathologists are discussed.

To compare the knowledge and experience of medical students in 1989 with that of those surveyed in 1973, a questionnaire about the various aspects of cleft palate was completed by 209 medical students from West Virginia University and the Louisiana State University Medical Center at Shreveport and New Orleans. Results revealed that 1989 students were more familiar with the embryology of cleft palate, racial and gender differences, and intellectual and psychologic issues (p less than .05). In contrast, the 1973 students were more able to define cleft palate, submucous cleft palate, and pharyngeal flap. There was no difference between the two groups of students in the amount of clinical exposure to cleft palate. These findings support the need for greater emphasis on cleft palate at the pre- and postdoctoral levels, as well as within continuing education programs. As part of current programs, the standard of practice of multidisciplinary team management for an individual with cleft palate should be underscored.

Questionnaire data about services and practices of cleft palate-craniofacial teams were obtained from 63 teams in 35 states. Findings indicate the following: (1) research was the least frequently conducted activity, although 73 percent of the teams indicated that they conducted research; and (2) the majority of those responding regarded cinefluoroscopy, endoscopy, perceptual assessment, oral examination, and videoendoscopy as important procedures, yet most patients (90%) seen by these teams did not receive instrumental assessment of velopharyngeal function.

The purpose of this investigation was to compare adolescents' perceptions of the nonspeech characteristics of voice-disordered and normal speakers. Recordings of six three-word phrases produced by 16 speakers, eight voice-disordered and eight normal-speaking children, were presented to 19 adolescent students for judgments of nonspeech characteristics on a semantic differential scale containing 22 bipolar adjective pairs. Results of their ratings indicated that for 15 of the 22 pairs (68.2%) the normal speakers were judged more positively than the voice-disordered speakers. Moreover, for 9 of the 22 pairs (40.9%) the differences in listeners' ratings between the two speaker groups were statistically significant. Implications of these findings concerning developmental trends in the perception of voice disorders and their potential impact on mainstreaming in schools are discussed.

A questionnaire was administered to 108 dental students from West Virginia University to assess their knowledge of cleft palate. Results revealed areas of deficiency in basic knowledge and exposure to clefting. When these data were compared to those from an earlier study (Lass et al., 1973) differences were found of varying type. A comparison between dental and medical students revealed that the basic knowledge of cleft palate and associated problems were not different between the two groups. However, the dental students had done more reading than the medical students and had the topic of cleft palate included in their coursework.

A 16-item questionnaire designed to survey opinions on the management of velopharyngeal insufficiency (VPI) was distributed to all members (N = 296) of the American Cleft Palate Association who were speech-language pathologists. Questionnaires were completed by 173 respondents (58.4 percent). There were differences of opinion among speech-language pathologists on various management issues related to VPI, including the value of instrumental assessment of VPI, the importance of oral examination of velopharyngeal function, and the effectiveness of speech therapy in the treatment of VPI. The implications of these findings for clinical training in VPI are discussed.

To determine the effect of speakers' attempts to disguise their voices on listeners' accuracy in judgments of speakers' sex and race, 26 speakers, 13 women and 13 men, recorded six sentences under three conditions: (a) in a normal manner, (b) in a manner in which they attempted to sound like a member of the opposite sex, and (c) in a manner in which they attempted to sound like a member of the black race. Three master tapes were constructed, one for each of the three conditions. A total of 40 judges, 20 in an experiment on sex identification and 20 in one on race identification, participated in two sessions, one for each of two tapes (control and disguise) in each experiment. In each session they were asked to judge the sex or race of the speaker of each sentence and, using a seven-point confidence rating scale, to indicate the over-all confidence in their judgments at the end of each session. Analysis indicated that, although listeners' accuracy for sex and race identification was greater under the control than disguised conditions for the majority of speakers, the differences between the two conditions were relatively small. Implications of these findings and suggestions for future research are discussed.

Twenty-five samples of various degrees of hypernasal speech were time altered (expanded) to 0%, 125%, 175% of the original time. Inexperienced and experienced student clinicians rated the magnitude of hypernasality and degree of confidence of ratings for each sample in each condition. The results indicate significant differences in ratings of hypernasality for the expansion conditions for both groups. Experienced clinicians showed less variability and higher mean ratings than inexperienced clinicians.

To determine the effect of listener's comprehension on speakers' height and weight judgments, a total of 40 speakers, 20 Americans (10 females and 10 males) and 20 non-Americans representing various nationalities (10 females and 10 males), recorded a standard prose passage. A total of three master tapes were constructed to represent the three experimental conditions: (1) American speakers' readings in English, (2) foreign speakers' reading in their native languages, and (3) foreign speakers' readings in English. A total of 30 judges, 15 females and 15 males, participated in three sessions, one for each of the three master tapes, and were asked to provide direct estimations of the height and weight of each speaker from the tapes. Listeners' comprehension does not appear to play a major role in height and weight judgmental tasks.

To determine whether listeners can accurately identify human-imitated animal sounds, 20 speakers (10 females and 10 males) recorded their imitations of cows, cats, dogs, pigs, and sheep. These recordings were randomly arranged on a master tape and presented to 30 judges for identification. Analysis indicates that listeners can accurately identify various human-imitated animal sounds. Implications and suggestions for future research are discussed.

The purpose of this series of experiments was to determine the effect of prior exposure to taped stimulus material on listeners' judgments of speakers' sex, height, and weight. Two series of listening experiments, one concerned with sex identification and one with height and weight identification, were conducted. Results indicate that prior exposure to stimulus material improved the accuracy of listeners' judgments of speakers' sex, height, and weight. However, they also indicate that it is not necessary to receive prior exposure to the complete set of stimuli to achieve accurate judgments. Prior exposure to the stimulus material improved listeners' confidence in their estimates of height and weight but not in their judgments of speakers' sex.

More than 1,200 students, parents, and professionals completed a questionnaire designed to assess knowledge and experience with cleft palate. Professionals knew more about cleft palate and had had more experience with it than either parents or students. Parents, however, knew more about cleft palate and had had more experience with it than had students. There was also an apparent relationship between knowledge and experience because those who knew more about cleft palate had also had more experience and training. The results reemphasize the need for pre-professional and continuing-education programs.

The purpose of this investigation was to determine the effect of speakers' attempts to disguise their voices on listeners' accuracy in judgments of height and weight. A total of six sentences were recorded by 26 speakers, 13 females and 13 males, under five conditions: in a normal manner (control condition) and in a manner in which they attempted to sound much taller and much shorter, as well as much heavier and much lighter than they actually were. Five master tapes were constructed, a control tape and four disguise tapes. Each tape contained a total of 156 sentences arranged in random order. A total of 40 judges, 20 in the height-estimation experiment and 20 in the weight-estimation experiment, participated in three sessions, one for each of the three master tapes (one control and two disguise tapes) in each experiment. They were asked to judge the height and weight of the speaker of each sentence and, using a seven-point confidence rating scale, to indicate the over-all confidence in their judgments at the end of each session. Although a majority of speakers yielded height and weight estimates consistent with the intended disguise conditions, the differences in listeners' estimates among all conditions were relatively small. Moreover, differences between speakers' actual heights and weights and listeners' height and weight estimates in the normal (control) condition were also relatively small. Implications of these findings and suggestions for future research are discussed.

The recordings of 20 speech defective speakers' readings of a standard prose passage were presented to 36 student speech clinicians under three listening conditions: (1) unaltered; (2) time expanded to 150% of the original recording time; and (3) time-expanded to 200% of the original recording time. Results of their evaluations indicate that the expanded versions of the recordings elicited more accurate evaluations by the student clinicians. Implications of these findings concerning the possible usefulness of time-expanded speech as an aid in the training of listening skills in student speech clinicians are discussed.

A questionnaire assessing knowledge of hearing and hearing loss, and planned hearing conservation practices, was collected from 71 high school students before and after an educational hearing conservation program (HCP) consisting of a film, a lecture and a handout. An average increase of 16.7% correct responses from pre- to postexposure to the HCP was found. Moreover, substantial percentages of respondents stated that they now plan to use hearing protection devices and procedures, when appropriate, and about 80% stated they found the HCP helpful to them.

Laryngeal air sacs are circular out-pocketings, located in the hyoid bone with their ostium in the midline of the anterior part of the larynx. From previous cadaver studies of the rhesus monkey it was deduced that the function of the air sac is to act as a resonating chamber. The present study was designed to test this hypothesis. Recordings were made of three rhesus monkeys before and after surgical removal of the air sac. Spectrographic analysis of the monkeys' vocalizations indicated that differences in formant frequency characteristics between pre-and post-surgical recordings were negligible. This finding suggests that the laryngeal air sac does not play an important role in the resonant properties of the monkeys' vocal tracts.

Spellacy and Spreen's Short Form of the Token Test was administered to 240 normal middle-class children, 20 in each of 12 half-year age groups from 6.0-6.5 through 11.6-11.11. Results of their performance on this test indicate that there are only slight differences between any of the 12 age groups investigated. The findings of this investigation provide normative data on children's performance on the Short Form of the Token Test, information that should be very useful in screening procedures for assessment of receptive language skills in children.

To determine whether oral tactile changes accompany improvement in articulation, 16 children were administered two tests of oral tactile perception and two tests of articulation competency at three time periods: before, during, and at the end of speech therapy. A positive relationship between articulation proficiency and oral tactile perception was established. Both articulation tests reflected a progressive improvement for the group across the three testing periods. One of the tests of oral tactile perception reflected the same progressive trend and the second test, while not exhibiting the identical trend, did reflect a general improvement from the first to the third testing period. These findings indicate that oral tactile skills appear to be important factors in speech production and that such skills should be assessed in cases of functional articulation disorders,

The Illinois Test of Psycholinguistic Abilities (ITPA) and the Token Test (TT) were administered to 24 5- and 6-yr-olds. There was a significant positive correlation between performance on the TT and only 2 of the 12 subtests of the ITPA: Grammatic Closure (p less than .05) and Sound Blending (p less than .05). TT scores did not correlate significantly with any of the ITPA subtests at the representational level of language. These findings support the conclusion of Williams and Marks (J. Speech Hear. Res., 1972, 15, 323ff) on the lack of validity of tests of receptive auditory comprehension which employ simultaneous presentation of stimuli through visual and auditory modalities and the arbitrary selection of one of the channels (auditory) as the primary process being measured. Implications for clinical use of the Peabody Picture Vocabulary Test and the TT were discussed and suggestions made for future research.

To determine if listeners can accurately distinguish between real and human-imitated animal sounds, a total of 165 recorded sounds (55 real and 110 human-imitated) of cats, cows, dogs, pigs, and sheep were randomly arranged on a master tape and presented to 30 listeners for discriminative judgments. Results indicate that, in general, listeners can accurately discriminate real from human-imitated animal sounds. Suggestions for future research are discussed.

A questionnaire designed to survey methods of assessing velopharyngeal closure and the extent of training and experience in velopharyngeal assessment was distributed to 256 randomly selected American Cleft Palate Association members. There was a 50% response rate and 94% of those responding were associated with cleft palate teams. Findings included the following: (1) the respondents rely primarily upon the use of listener judgments of spontaneous speech samples, phonological analysis, and lateral view cine/videofluoroscopy; (2) the majority spend thirty minutes or less on an average diagnostic evaluation of velopharyngeal competency; and (3) 45% feel that they are inadequately trained in assessment of velopharyngeal closure.

The purpose of this investigation was to compare listeners' evaluations of nonspeech characteristics of dysarthric and normal speakers. A total of 16 speakers, eight cerebral-palsied and eight normal children ranging in age from 6 to 11 years, recorded six three-word phrases. The cerebral-palsied speakers were judged to have disorders in at least two of the three areas of articulation, phonation, and resonance, and all were judged to have an articulation disorder as one of the two disordered areas. All normal speakers were found to have normal speech characteristics. A master tape containing the 16 speakers' recordings was presented to 25 listeners, who were asked to rate each of the speakers on a 24-item semantic differential scale that contained polarized adjective pairs concerned with personality and physical-appearance traits. Results of their ratings indicated that for all but two of the 24 adjective pairs, the normal speakers were judged more favorably than the dysarthric speakers, and for all but one of the 24 adjective pairs there were significant differences in judges' ratings between the normal and dysarthric speakers. It appears, therefore, that dysarthric speech adversely affected listeners' perceptions of the dysarthric speakers' personality and physical-appearance characteristics.

The purpose of this investigation was to determine if pretesting information has a biasing effect on the speech evaluations of student speech clinicians. A total of three groups of clinicians evaluated 10 speech characteristics of each of 17 recorded speech samples. The clinicians participated in two listening sessions. In the first (control) session, they evaluated the speech samples using a 4-point scale of defectiveness and were given no background information on the speakers. In the second (experimental) session, they were given fabricated case history information prior to their evaluations. Results of their ratings indicate that the pretesting information had a biasing effect on the clinicians' evaluations of the speech samples. Implications of these findings and suggestions for future inquiry are discussed.

Normal-hearing volunteers (N:30, aged 19-28 yrs) yielded intelligibility scores for W-22 word lists and CID sentences at 40 db re each S's SRT, and judgments on a 7-pt scale ("very pleasant"----"very unpleasant") for Sentence 3 of Fairbanks' "Rainbow Passage". Normal and time-altered speeds (60%: compression; 140%: expansion) were compared between the widely-used but obsolescent Lexicon Varispeech (VSp) unit vs the commercially available Variable Speech Control Model A-7 which incorporates a time-sampling technique similar to the VSp. With both VSp and VSC, intelligibility was nearly perfect at all three speeds, and thus both appear equally suitable for intelligibility studies, but at the 60% and 140% speeds the signal clarity was significantly preferable for the VSp system (p less than .01 in both cases), by .6 of a scale interval at 60% and 1.8 interval at 140%. Furthermore, the VSC does not operate beyond the 60-140% range, as occasionally may be desirable in research on the effects of time alteration on speech reception.

Correlation coefficients on height, weight, and temporal features were computed separately for 15 female and 15 male speakers. With only one exception, speakers' heights and weights were not significantly correlated with their temporal characteristics. Implications of these findings and suggestions for future research are discussed.