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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)

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)

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)

Descriptive studies of clinician-child therapy interaction suggest a tightly controlled system of verbal exchange centring around the underlying plan of the clinical lesson. Drawing upon examples from therapy lessons, this paper describes the nonverbal component of clinician-client interaction. Nonverbals are associated features of situational context, lesson organiza tion, and remedial sequences; they emphasize, parallel, or replace verbal and nonverbal elements. The clinician uses a wide variety of body mechanisms (e.g. head, face, hands, voice) to support her efforts to facilitate child responses and manage social behaviour. A full under standing of lesson discourse must include observations of nonverbal communication. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Qualitative studies have produced new but fragmentary observations of the discourse of clinical lessons. This paper surveys these findings and integrates them around the principles of conversational discourse and discourse analysis. The picture which emerges is that training lessons are patterned within and across levels of conversational discourse. Social, verbal, and nonverbal components of clinician—child interaction are organized hierarchically for the purposes of eliciting correct linguistic responses. Clinical discourse research is discussed with reference to questions of clinical validity and practicality. Five learning hypotheses are also suggested. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

There has been a small accumulation of studies of clinician-child discourse. Early work has demonstrated the value of careful description of real lessons as they are carried out by clinicians working with speech and language-disordered children. In this descriptive report the role of non verbal communication is emphasized, particularly with reference to pointing as a clinical teaching device. Transcriptions of three clinician-led lessons were analysed. The results verified the systematic nature of pointing as an augmentation to remedial control. The need for full descriptions of nonverbal communication as it facilitates lesson applications is discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Six public school speech-language pathologists interacted with second-graders under two conditions: articulation and language intervention. A ten-minute segment from each of 12 therapy sessions was recorded, transcribed, segmented, coded, quantitatively and qualitatively analyzed using several discourse features. Discourse patterns during both conditions resembled the tutorial discourse pattern. However, language remediation utterances were longer and more natural than those of articulation sessions. All transcripts contained patterns of discourse consistent with tutorial interaction styles: clinicians made requests, evaluated children's remarks, and controlled the topic; children produced responses and statements in large numbers. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Compares mothers' and non-mothers' semantic adaptation to deviant speech. Adaptation of comprehension strategies to decode command sentences spoken by a child known to generate patterned deviant utterances; Perceptual adaptation; Maternal experience with child speech.

Examines the connection between speech pathology and linguistics. Description of the discriminative and imitative behavior of a boy who misarticulated the letter r; Assumption that there is a difference between intrapersonal and interpersonal discrimination of speech sounds; Argument that phonemes may be viewed best as having significance within a phonological system.