PubMed Health⌕ Search

Biomedical subjects

N Hewlett

Publications and source records attributed to N Hewlett.

7 recordsLinked to original sources
PubMed2001

The gender imbalance among speech and language therapists and students.

Speech and language therapy is still a predominantly female profession. This paper reports the numbers and percentages of males among the population of student speech and language therapists in the UK in 1999-2000. The numbers imply that there is no prospect of redressing the gender imbalance in the near future. Information was gathered by means of a questionnaire to male speech and language therapy students and male therapists on the reasons for their career choice and their occupation-related experience concerning their gender. Most therapists reported advantages from their gender but a minority reported difficulties arising from being a man in the speech and language therapy profession. The issue of working alone with children is identified as being in urgent need of resolution.

Career Choice↗
PubMed1998

DDK rates in the paediatric clinic: a methodological minefield.

There are substantial differences in the norms reported for speech diadochokinetic (DDK) rates among several published studies. These may well be due to differences in type of data used, methods of data collection and DDK rate calculation. Such differences doubtless also exist in the calculation of DDK rate in routine clinical assessment. Methodological problems in DDK rate measurement are identified and discussed and a detailed protocol for DDK measurement is described.

Adolescent↗
PubMed1998

Perceptual strategies in phonological disorder: assessment, remediation and evaluation.

Evidence is presented that immature perceptual strategies are a contributory factor to developmental phonological disorder. The findings endorse the current re-focusing of attention on the role of perception in disordered speech and language acquisition and also highlight the need for more precise assessment and remediation techniques. Technical developments working towards providing these are reviewed and implications for future clinical practice discussed.

Auditory Perceptual Disorders↗
PubMedDate not supplied

When is a velar an alveolar? Evidence supporting a revised psycholinguistic model of speech production in children.

Speech data from a single child with a phonological impairment were analysed with a view to assessing the influence of utterance mode (spontaneous vs. confrontation naming vs. repetition), lexical status (word vs. non-word) and phonological context (voicing status and position in word) on the accuracy of production of velar targets. Under these conditions, accuracy was found to vary between 'correct' velar and 'incorrect' alveolar place of articulation. First, accuracy increased over four conditions, from spontaneous speech to confrontation naming to real word repetition to non-word repetition. Second, there was a higher incidence of correct velar targets in initial than final position in the word, and a higher incidence of correct /k/ targets than /g/ targets. These findings are discussed in relation to a proposed model of child speech production, the configuration of which borrows heavily from similar models described recently in the literature. The model attempts to explain how a child represents and processes word-forms, and over time revises their pronunciation. The explanation offered for these findings entails a claim that speech articulations are concerned directly with reproducing perceptual phenomena and that their ability to do so accurately may be constrained by processing load.

Child, Preschool↗