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Biomedical subjects

E P Paden

Publications and source records attributed to E P Paden.

18 recordsLinked to original sources
PubMed1999

Early childhood stuttering II: initial status of phonological abilities.

Research on the relation between stuttering and phonological/articulation deficits has been reported in the literature over several decades. Yet virtually none of these investigations has taken into account that "children who stutter" includes a large number who spontaneously recover within a few months or years after onset. Thus, little attention has been given to differences between the phonological abilities of children whose stuttering persists and those who recover. This investigation compares these two groups soon after stuttering onset, before it was possible to classify them as members of either group, on a number of phonological characteristics, including mean percentage of error, relative levels of severity of phonological impairment, error on specific phonological patterns, progress in development of key patterns, and the children's strategies for coping with unmastered patterns. The results indicate that the children whose stuttering would be persistent had poorer mean scores on each of our measures than did the children who would recover from stuttering. Both groups, however, showed progression in phonological development that followed the expected order, and they used typical strategies when patterns had not yet been acquired. The persistent group was moving more slowly, however, so phonological development was more delayed than in the children who would recover from stuttering. Our findings support the assumption that most previous studies probably have compared children with persistent stuttering to normally fluent children, and that those who recovered early were not considered differentially.

Adaptation, Psychological↗
PubMed1996

Phonological characteristics of children whose stuttering persisted or recovered.

Among children who stutter, more will be identified with articulation/phonological deficiencies than among normally fluent children of the same ages. Most current literature has focused on phonological differences between those children who stutter and those who do not. The present study examines early phonological differences between young children whose stuttering persisted and those who recovered from early stuttering. Thirty-six children, 12 whose stuttering persisted, 12 who recovered early, and 12 who recovered later, had been assessed by means of the Assessment of Phonological Processes--Revised (Hodson, 1986) soon after they were identified as exhibiting stuttering. After many months of longitudinal evaluation of their stuttering that led to their classification into the three groups, the early phonological assessments of these children were re-examined to identify differences. Overall mean percentage of error scores as well as error scores on specific phonological patterns showed that the persistent group differed significantly from normally fluent control subjects matched by age and sex. Scores of the two groups who recovered and their matched controls, however, did not differ significantly. Although poor phonological ability in the early stage of stuttering appears to be a contributing factor to the differentiation of persistence and recovery, the wide individual variations in scores within groups suggest that additional factors are necessary for reliable prediction.

Age Factors↗
PubMed1994

Relation between phonologic difficulty and the occurrence of disfluences in the early stage of stuttering.

People who stutter, especially children, have often been reported to exhibit a wide range of concomitant communication problems including articulation and phonologic deficiencies. This study investigated the relation between the phonologic difficulty of words and the point at which stuttering-like disfluencies occurred in the speech of preschool children identified as having a stuttering problem (n = 24). The children were divided into subgroups according to stuttering severity and phonologic ability. A spontaneous speech sample of approximately 1,000 words was tape-recorded from each child, and perceived disfluencies were identified. The phonologic difficulty of each word on which there was a stuttering-like disfluency and of each fluent word immediately following such a disfluency was categorized. The proportion of words in each child's speech sample that contained each category of phonologic difficulty was determined. The data showed that the proportion of disfluent and immediately following words in each type of phonologic difficulty closely resembled the proportion of words in the speech sample of the same type of difficulty. There were no significant differences between the subgroups of stutterers. We concluded, therefore, that the phonologic difficulty of the disfluent word, and the fluent word following it, did not contribute to fluency breakdown regardless of the children's stuttering severity or phonologic ability.

Age of Onset↗
PubMed1989

Recovery from OME-related phonologic delay following tube placement.

Subjects with documented histories of frequent or persistent otitis media with effusion (OME) who were judged to be below age level phonologically prior to placement of pressure equalization (PE) tubes were reassessed at 4-month intervals. Group A (n = 22) subjects caught up with their peers by the age of 4 years; Group B (n = 14) subjects' progress was delayed and phonologic intervention was advised. At initial testing the two groups were found to differ significantly in scores on postvocalic singleton obstruent omission, velar deviation, and stridency deletion. Elapsed time between initial diagnosis of OME and beginning of the first remission of 6 months or more also differed significantly, as did scores on the first phonologic reassessment. Subject scores on initial phonologic adequacy, retest adequacy, and elapsed time from diagnosis to remission appropriately classified all but 2 subjects by group. A formula is provided that appears to make early prediction of eventual need for phonologic intervention a practical possibility.

Articulation Disorders↗
PubMed1988

Developmental phonology: 18-29 months.

Utterances of 60 normally developing children, who were within 6 months of their second birthdays, were analyzed for occurrences of phonological processes. The subjects were divided equally into three chronological age groups: (a) 1:6-1:9, (b) 1:10-2:1, and (c) 2:2-2:5. The most prevalent phonological processes evidenced by all three groups were cluster reduction and deviations involving liquids (e.g., gliding). Phonological process percentage-of-occurrence means were considerably lower for the middle group than for the youngest group, with the most dramatic differences occurring for syllable reduction and postvocalic singleton omission. Potential clinical applications of the data for ascertaining what constitutes disordered phonological development in preschool children are discussed, as well as implications for specifying remediation priorities.

Child Language↗
PubMed1987

Predictors of phonologic inadequacy in young children prone to otitis media.

Children who have experienced recurrent or persistent otitis media with effusion (OME) at an early age often evidence deficient phonological skills in preschool that require remediation. If it were possible to identify these children before age 3, speech stimulation procedures and/or medical preventive measures might be considered. Forty children between the ages of 18 and 35 months who were scheduled for tympanostomy and tube placement were assessed audiologically and phonologically, data from their medical histories were tabulated, and parental educational and occupational status were determined. The subjects were reexamined at intervals of 3-4 months until their phonological performance reached a level indicating that broad phoneme-class or syllable-position remediation would not be necessary, or they had passed their third birthday. Discriminant analysis and multiple regression procedures indicated that certain measures or conditions, in combination, are good predictors of later phonologic inadequacy. Low age-weighted scores on production of velars, liquids, and postvocalic singleton obstruents, along with elevated thresholds at 500 Hz and a history of early onset and late remission from OME, were the most important variables characterizing children who did not catch up phonologically by age 3. Importantly, data from no one area alone could identify these children as reliably as combined data from the three areas.

Age Factors↗
PubMedDate not supplied

Predictive factors of persistence and recovery: pathways of childhood stuttering.

This article presents broad preliminary findings from a longitudinal study of stuttering pertaining to differentiation of developmental paths of childhood stuttering, as well as possible early prediction of High Risk, Low Risk, and No Risk for chronic stuttering. More than 100 preschool children who stutter have been closely followed for several years from near the onset of stuttering using a multiple data collection system, with 45 nonstuttering children serving as controls. Thirty-two stuttering and 32 control subjects who have progressed through several stages of the investigation were identified for the present indepth analyses. They represent four subgroups: I. Persistent Stuttering; II. Late Recovery; III. Early Recovery; IV. Control. Comparative data for the groups with special reference to differences in frequency of disfluency, acoustic features, phonologic skills, language development, nonverbal skills, and genetics are presented. The results suggest several promising predictors of recovery and chronicity.

Age of Onset↗