Speech-language pathologists serving multicultural populations may encounter unfamiliar beliefs about speech disorders among the members of different cultures. This study used a questionnaire to look at attitudes toward four disorders (cleft palate, dysfluency, hearing impairment, and misarticulations) among 166 university students representing English-speaking North American culture and severa...

Dysarthria is a speech disorder caused by difficulties in controlling muscles, such as the tongue and lips, that are needed to produce speech. These differences in motor skills cause speech to be slurred, mumbled, and spoken relatively slowly, and can also increase the likelihood of dysfluency. This includes nonspeech sounds, and ‘stuttering’, defined here as a disruption in the fluency of spee...

Clinicians who are familiar with the general DSM-IV-TR scheme may want to know how to identify whether a child does, or (equally importantly) does not, stutter and what differences there are in the presenting signs for children of different ages. This article reviews and discusses topics in the research literature that have a bearing on these questions. The review compared language, social-envi...

Three cases are presented of peculiar speech and language abnormalities that were evaluated in the context of personal injury lawsuit or workers compensation claims of brain dysfunction after mild traumatic brain injuries. Neuropsychological measures of effort and motivation showed evidence of suboptimal motivation or outright malingering. The speech and language abnormalities of these cases pr...

Periventricular nodular heterotopia (PNH) is a neuronal migration disorder characterized by nodules of gray matter located along the lateral ventricles, which can range from isolated single nodules to bilateral confluent nodules. This malformation of cortical development can be related to genetic or extrinsic factors. Reading dysfluency, epilepsy and normal intelligence are main hallmark. PNH a...

This study investigated the longitudinal improvement in fluency of three Japanese participants who studied at a graduate school in the UK. In addition to quantitative analysis of videotaped conversations focusing on core components of fluency, such as speech rates, dysfluency markers and pauses, qualitative analysis, including protocol analysis and journal analysis, were also employed to discus...

Past research suggests that a categorical event is perceived to be more likely if its subcases are explicitly delineated or "unpacked." In 6 studies, we find that unpacking can often make an event seem less likely, especially when the details being unpacked are already highly accessible. Process evidence shows that the provision of greater detail accompanying unpacking reduces the simplicity of...

Past research suggests that a categorical event is perceived to be more likely if its subcases are explicitly delineated or “unpacked.” In six studies, we find that unpacking can often make an event seem less likely, especially when the details being unpacked are already highly accessible. Process evidence shows that the provision of greater detail accompanying unpacking reduces the simplicity ...