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Carla J Johnson

Publications and source records attributed to Carla J Johnson.

3 recordsLinked to original sources

Getting started in evidence-based practice for childhood speech-language disorders.

PURPOSE: Evidence-based practice (EBP) entails a critical mindset and rigorous methods that foster the judicious integration of scientific evidence into clinical decision making. The purpose of this tutorial is to present strategies, resources, and examples to help speech-language pathologists get started in EBP for childhood speech and language disorders. METHOD: The tutorial begins with an overview of key principles of EBP, including potential benefits and challenges, and other initial considerations. Five recommended steps for implementing EBP are then presented: posing a question, locating the evidence, appraising the evidence, making and implementing clinical decisions, and evaluating those decisions. Included is a compilation of synthesized evidence resources, such as systematic reviews/meta-analyses and EBP guidelines. Finally, illustrative examples are provided to assist practitioners with integrating research evidence into clinical decision making in childhood speech-language disorders. CONCLUSIONS: Speech-language pathologists who work with children are encouraged to adopt EBP for clinical decision making.

Child↗

The role of phonological recoding in orthographic learning.

The objective of this research was to explore whether orthographic learning occurs as a result of phonological recoding, as expected from the self-teaching hypothesis. The participants were 32 fourth- and fifth-graders (mean age = 10 years 0 months, SD = 7 months) who performed lexical decisions for monosyllabic real words and pseudowords under two matched experimental conditions: a read aloud condition, wherein items were named prior to lexical decision to promote phonological recoding, and a concurrent articulation condition, presumed to attenuate phonological recoding. Later, orthographic learning of the pseudowords was evaluated using orthographic choice, spelling, and naming tasks. Consistent with the self-teaching hypothesis, targets learned with phonological recoding in the read aloud condition yielded greater orthographic learning than those learned with concurrent articulation. The research confirms the critical nature of phonological recoding in the development of visual word recognition skills and an orthographic lexicon.

Child↗

Single-word and conversational measures of word-finding proficiency.

Two studies with young adults as participants evaluated the relationship, presumed in the word-finding literature to exist, between slow, inaccurate performances in single-word-naming and semantic-retrieval tasks and disruptions to conversational fluency. The measures evaluated were the frequency of conversational disruptions and the scores from 3 single-word tasks: total time from the Rapid Automatized Naming task (RAN; M. B. Denckla and R. G. Rudel, 1976), standard score from the Brief Test of the Test of Adolescent/Adult Word Finding (TAWF; D. J. German, 1990), and total unique words from the Controlled Oral Word Association task (FAS; A. L. Benton and K. Hamsher, 1978). RAN time was the only significant predictor of the frequency of conversational disruptions, although this relationship was weak (R(2) =.11). In addition, single-word performances did not discriminate between groups of participants with differing levels of conversational fluency. Clinicians are cautioned against identifying word-finding deficits using single-word measures alone. Moreover, the theoretical construct of word-finding difficulties requires additional validation.

Adolescent↗