Introduction to Communicative Disorders Chapter 12 – 14

Literacy

reading and writing. 

Emergent literacy skills

skills that precede conventional reading and writing; include such preschool skills as letter recognition and sight reading words; the most rudimentary reading and writing skills.

Phonics

a method of teaching reading to children by pointing out letter-sound correspondence or sounding out words.

Phoneme

The smallest element of oral language that makes a difference in meaning.

Phonological awareness

the awareness of individual phonemes, syllables, syllable onsets, words, words that rhyme, and skills of manipulating all of them.

Reading

oral; is a form of verbal behavior evoked by printed stimuli.

Writing

A form of verbal behavior that creates printed material; language expression through the printed or visual forms.

Print awareness

A set of skills related to printed material that preschoolers exhibit; includes alphabet knowledge, print knowledge (knowledge of printed material even if the child cannot read it yet), book handling, etc...

Intellectual disabilities

slower than normal rate of learning resulting in deficiencies of oral language learning and emergent literacy

Logographic stage of reading/writing

children’s recognition of printed words; prereading stage in the process of learning to read and write; ages preschool to first grade; child may pretend to read, retell stories in storybooks by looking at pictures, names the letters of the alphabet, prints their own name, and plays with books, pencils, and crayons.

Alphabetic stage of reading/writing

Children’s knowledge of printed letters, words, and correct spelling of words; a stage in learning to read and write; can spell out spoken words, read simple stories, and begin to write the spelling of words (grades 1 – 2).

Orthographic stage

Children begin to read more fluently (grades 2 – 3), reading simple stories and familiar stories with fluency, reading new words with little hesitation, and concentrating on meanings of words.

Printing of the letters of the alphabet

are considered the most fundamental writing skills children need to master for writing; they build fine motor skills, develop letter recognition, strengthen sound-symbol awareness, support spelling development, build working memory for writing, support early literacy skills, and create a foundation for all future writing.

Rhyming

Knowledge of rhyming words helps strengthen phonological awareness; helps children notice word patterns and spelling patterns; improves listening and auditory discrimination; builds vocabulary; supports memory and recall; and makes reading fun and engaging.

Alliteration

identifying words that begin or end with a certain sound by using prompts such as “tell me three words that end with the /sh/ sound.

Phoneme isolation

the clinician assesses this skill identifying sounds in different positions by using prompts such as “tell me if the /b/ is in the beginning, middle, or end of the word “bus” or what is the last sound in the word “pan”?

Sound segmentation

a child’s skills in identifying different syllables in a word; counting syllables in words; an emergent literacy skill.

l for literacy

Involves four main areas: foundation skills (phonological awareness, print awareness, letter-sound knowledge, rapid naming, letter recognition, and vocabulary); decoding and word recognition (sight word recognition, letter sound correspondence, sounding out phonemes); reading comprehension and listening comprehension; language development; left to right directionality; and written language (letter formation, spelling patterns, morphological knowledge, sentence structure, grammar errors, and organization of writing); and finally learning to read

Informal assessments for literacy

Observing reading aloud, taking language samples, having the child retell a story, asking comprehension questions, dictation tasks, and writing prompts.

Formalized/standardized assessments for literacy

TOPP – 2 (Comprehensive Test of Phonological Processing); PAT – 2 (Phonological Awareness Test); PLS – 5 Literacy Subtests (Preschool Language Scale 5); TOWRE – 2 (Test of Word Reading Efficiency); WRMT – III (Woodcock Reading Mastery Tests); TOWL – 4 (Test of Written Language); GORT – 6 (Gray Oral Reading Tests); KTEA – 3 (Kaufman Test of Educational Achievement).

Literacy intervention

Involves working with the child’s family, collaborating with teachers, and working with an SLP for areas of phonological awareness, print awareness, and home literacy environment to help with proper intervention. 

Hearing loss

a reduced ability to detect or understand sounds; for communication disorders, hearing loss is important because it can significantly impact speech, language, learning, and social development; consists of conductive, sensorineural, and mixed hearing loss.

Acoustics

branch of physics, or the study of sound as a physical event as heard by an auditory system.

Pure tone

a tone of a single frequency; sounds of specific frequencies.

Frequency

the number of times a cycle of vibration repeats itself within a second.

Pitch

a sensation determined by the frequency of sound vibration; the greater the frequency, the higher the perceived pitch.

Loudness

The physical characteristics of intensity of a sound determine this sensation; loudness is a sensory experience or a sensation.

Sound pressure level

a measure of the pressure of a sound; the intensity of a sound as expressed in terms of decibels at a certain sound pressure level.

Outer ear

Auricle/pinna and external auditory meatus – parts of the outer ear; funnels sound to the ear canal and helps localize sound; these areas lead to the eardrum.

Tympanic membrane

thin, semitransparent, cone-shaped eardrum which is highly sensitive to sound.

Middle ear

Contains the 3 tiny bones (malleus, incus, stapes); the middle ear space; the eustachian tube; and the nasopharynx.

Inner ear

contains the cochlea, the vestibule, the semi-circular canals and the auditory nerve CN 8.

Air conduction

Sound traveling through the medium of the air; air-conducted sound reaches the cochlea through the outer ear and middle ear.

Bone conduction

A process of conducting sound through the bone vibrations of a skull and the ossicular chain.

Conductive hearing loss

diminished conductance of sound to the middle ear due to abnormalities of the external auditory canal, the eardrum, or ossicular chain of the middle ear

Otitis media

middle ear effusions or infection in the middle ear, often associated with upper respiratory infections; serous otitis media results in the middle ear being inflamed and filled with thick or watery fluid; the eustachian tube, that connects the middle ear cavity to the nasopharynx, is blocked; acute otitis media has a sudden onset due to infection, and a quick build-up of fluid and pus in the middle ear results in moderate to severe pain. Medications may help this situation; however, many individuals often have a myringotomy performed, to relieve the pressure off.

Chronic otitis media

tympanic membrane is permanently ruptured with or without middle ear diseases; patients may have minimal pain, but foul-smelling discharge from the ear noted; perforations to the middle ear as determined through the history; myringotomy in which the eardrum is surgically repaired is also considered.

Sensorineural hearing loss

diminished hearing due to damaged hair cells of the cochlea or the auditory portion of cranial nerve 8; the middle ear may effectively conduct the sound to the inner ear, but the hair cells in the cochlea or the acoustic nerve may be damaged resulting in a sensorineural hearing loss.

Otosclerosis

A very common cause of conductive hearing loss is the disease of the bones of the middle ear, especially the stapes, whose footplate is attached to the oval window.

Meningitis

an inflammation of the meninges due to a viral infection; the meninges are a thin membrane covering the brain and spina cord.

Anoxia

lack of oxygen during delivery; potential cause of brain damage.

Tinnitis

Various kinds of annoying noises in the ear; precepting of sound when no external sound is present such as ringing, buzzing, humming, hissing, or cliclick.

Central auditory processing disorder

complex language processing problems that are caused by a lesion or lesions in the central auditory system.

Audiologist

An expert in all aspects of hearing and its disorders; maintains special clinical and research training in the assessment of hearing disorders and rehabilitation of individuals with hearing loss, and can suggest an appropriate diagnosis of hearing disorders and their underlying pathology.

Audiometer

An electronic instrument that generates and amplifies pure tones, noise, and other stimuli for testing hearing.

Word recognition test

requires the person to correctly repeat such monosyllabic words as “day” and “cap” spoken by the audiologist; determines the comprehension of speech.

Tympanometry

this instrument helps measure the admittance values when a sound stimulus is placed in the external ear canal with an airtight closure and measures changes in the acoustic energy as the sound stimulates the auditory system. The graphed result from this testing is the tympanogram.

Auditory brainstem response

testing which determines and records the electrical activity in the auditory nerve, the brain stem, and the cortical areas of the brain.

Behavioral observation audiometry

A procedure in which sound stimuli are presented to elicit reflexive responses from young children through clapping, calling the infant’s name, and presenting noises that certain toys make.

Hearing screening

A quick and preliminary method of identifying children and adults who might have a hearing problem.

Bilateral hearing loss

both ears are affected with hearing loss.

Unilateral hearing loss

one ear is affected with hearing loss.

Audiogram

A graph that shows the results of various hearing tests; a graph of hearing loss.

Aural rehabilitation

The set of services designed to help individuals with hearing loss communicate as effectively as possible. Although audiologists are the primary providers of AR, speech pathologists play an essential role in improving speech, language, and communication outcomes for people with hearing loss; efforts to improve the communicative effectiveness of individuals with hearing loss in family, social, educational, and occupational settings.

Behind the ear aid

this hearing aid is fitted behind and over the ear with a custom fitted earmold placed in the ear and a small flexible plastic tube from the aid carries the amplified sound to the ear through the earmold.

In the ear aid

this hearing aid fits completely inside the outer part of the ear; it is custom-made to the person’s ear and helps make sounds louder and clearer.

In the canal aid

small hearing device that fits partly inside the ear canal and helps make sounds easier to hear while staying fairly hidden

Completely in the canal aid

a very small hearing device that fits deep inside the ear canal, making it almost invisible while helping sounds become louder and clearer.

Auditory training

A significant component of a comprehensive aural rehabilitation program designed to train people who have been recently fittedwith hearing aids to listen to amplified sounds, recognize their meanings, distinguish one sound from the other, and understand better the speech spoken to them, especially in a noisy environment.

Auditory based training

May begin at the phoneme level, word level, or sentence level; phoneme based results in the participants hearing such syllables as pha, tah, or kah and touching the correct box on the computer screen; word based training results in the person hearing a target word and touch the box that shows the correct word along with other similar nontarget words; sentence based training results in the person listening to a sentence and selecting one of several pictures that depict the correct meaning.

Speechreading

understanding speech by looking at the face of the speaker; comprehension of spoken speech enhanced by visual cues that supplement the auditory cues.

Lipreading

the reader may concentrate solely on the nonauditory movements of the speaker, mostly the movements of the lips and tongue.

Assistive listening device

tools that help people hear better in different situations, like using a microphone or amplifier to make sounds louder and clearer.