Commentary: School Psychologists as Advocates for Racial Justice and Social Justice: Some Proposed Steps

I am extremely honored to have this opportunity to comment on the articles in this special issue of School Psychology Forum (SPF). Social justice and racial justice are critical frameworks from which to view school psychology. Individually and collectively, the works in this issue of SPF are a tremendous service to the field

A Multiyear Investigation of Combating Bullying in Middle School: Stakeholder Perspectives

Working collaboratively to address bullying among middle school students is an ongoing challenge. This study used participatory action research to collaborate with key stakeholders within a middle school to identify needs and implement more effective practices. Extensive qualitative and quantitative data are presented, along with process recommendations for bringing different stakeholders together for a sustained change effort

Using Student Voice to Respond to Middle School Bullying: A Student Leadership Approach

Bullying prevention and intervention are ongoing challenges for all educators, school psychologists included. A lack of research exists regarding the potential role of middle school students as direct actors in bullying prevention and intervention. This article describes a novel student leadership group for seventh graders in which the primary leadership task was the creation of bullying prevention ideas for their school. The details of this group are described, as are the results of postgroup student interviews. Results indicate that the students found the group to be valuable. However, the broader collaborative effort between educators at this school and the university researchers to maintain a comprehensive bullying prevention system did not survive the school’s reorganization. This article addresses the lessons learned and the potential implication of this project for school psychology practice

Dialogue Act Modeling for Automatic Tagging and Recognition of Conversational Speech

We describe a statistical approach for modeling dialogue acts in conversational speech, i.e., speech-act-like units such as Statement, Question, Backchannel, Agreement, Disagreement, and Apology. Our model detects and predicts dialogue acts based on lexical, collocational, and prosodic cues, as well as on the discourse coherence of the dialogue act sequence. The dialogue model is based on treating the discourse structure of a conversation as a hidden Markov model and the individual dialogue acts as observations emanating from the model states. Constraints on the likely sequence of dialogue acts are modeled via a dialogue act n-gram. The statistical dialogue grammar is combined with word n-grams, decision trees, and neural networks modeling the idiosyncratic lexical and prosodic manifestations of each dialogue act. We develop a probabilistic integration of speech recognition with dialogue modeling, to improve both speech recognition and dialogue act classification accuracy. Models are trained and evaluated using a large hand-labeled database of 1,155 conversations from the Switchboard corpus of spontaneous human-to-human telephone speech. We achieved good dialogue act labeling accuracy (65% based on errorful, automatically recognized words and prosody, and 71% based on word transcripts, compared to a chance baseline accuracy of 35% and human accuracy of 84%) and a small reduction in word recognition error.Comment: 35 pages, 5 figures. Changes in copy editing (note title spelling changed

A Nonword Repetition Task for Speakers with Misarticulations: The Syllable Repetition Task (SRT)

Purpose. Conceptual and methodological confounds occur when non(sense) repetition tasks are administered to speakers who do not have the target speech sounds in their phonetic inventories or who habitually misarticulate targeted speech sounds. We describe a nonword repetition task, the Syllable Repetiton Task (SRT) that eliminates this confound and report findings from three validity studies. Method. Ninety-five preschool children with Speech Delay and 63 with Typical Speech, completed an assessment battery that included the Nonword Repetition Task (NRT: Dollaghan & Campbell, 1998) and the SRT. SRT stimuli include only four of the earliest occurring consonants and one early occurring vowel. Results. Study 1 findings indicated that the SRT eliminated the speech confound in nonword testing with speakers who misarticulate. Study 2 findings indicated that the accuracy of the SRT to identify expressive language impairment was comparable to findings for the NRT. Study 3 findings illustrated the SRT’s potential to interrogate speech processing constraints underlying poor nonword repetition accuracy. Results supported both memorial and auditory-perceptual encoding constraints underlying nonword repetition errors in children with speech-language impairment. Conclusion. The SRT appears to be a psychometrically stable and substantively informative nonword repetition task for emerging genetic and other research with speakers who misarticulate

Speech and Prosody Characteristics of Adolescents and Adults With High-Functioning Autism and Asperger Syndrome

Speech and prosody-voice profiles for 15 male speakers with High-Functioning Autism (HFA) and 15 male speakers with Asperger syndrome (AS) were compared to one another and to profiles for 53 typically developing male speakers in the same 10- to 50-years age range. Compared to the typically developing speakers, significantly more participants in both the HFA and AS groups had residual articulation distortion errors, uncodable utterances due to discourse constraints, and utterances coded as inappropriate in the domains of phrasing, stress, and resonance. Speakers with AS were significantly more voluble than speakers with HFA, but otherwise there were few statistically significant differences between the two groups of speakers with pervasive developmental disorders. Discussion focuses on perceptual-motor and social sources of differences in the prosody-voice findings for individuals with Pervasive Developmental Disorders as compared with findings for typical speakers, including comment on the grammatical, pragmatic, and affective aspects of prosody

Prosodic modulation in the babble of cochlear implanted and normally hearing infants: a perceptual study using a visual analogue scale

This study investigates prosodic modulation in the spontaneous canonical babble of congenitally deaf infants with cochlear implants (CI) and normally hearing (NH) infants. Research has shown that the acoustic cues to prominence are less modulated in CI babble. However acoustic measurements of individual cues to prominence give incomplete information about prosodic modulation. In the present study, raters are asked to judge prominence since they simultaneously take into account all prosodic cues. Disyllabic utterances produced by CI and NH infants were presented to naive adult raters who had to indicate the degree and direction of prosodic modulation between syllables on a visual analogue scale. The results show that the babble of infants with CI is rated as having less prosodic modulation. Moreover, segmentally more variegated babble is rated as having more prosodic modulation. Raters do not perceive the babble to be predominantly trochaic, which indicates that the predominant stress pattern of Dutch is not yet apparent in the children’s productions

Multipoint genome-wide linkage scan for nonword repetition in a multigenerational family further supports chromosome 13q as a locus for verbal trait disorders

Verbal trait disorders encompass a wide range of conditions and are marked by deficits in five domains that impair a person’s ability to communicate: speech, language, reading, spelling, and writing. Nonword repetition is a robust endophenotype for verbal trait disorders that is sensitive to cognitive processes critical to verbal development, including auditory processing, phonological working memory, and motor planning and programming. In the present study, we present a six-generation extended pedigree with a history of verbal trait disorders. Using genome-wide multipoint variance component linkage analysis of nonword repetition, we identified a region spanning chromosome 13q14–q21 with LOD = 4.45 between 52 and 55 cM, spanning approximately 5.5 Mb on chromosome 13. This region overlaps with SLI3, a locus implicated in reading disability in families with a history of specific language impairment. Our study of a large multigenerational family with verbal trait disorders further implicates the SLI3 region in verbal trait disorders. Future studies will further refine the specific causal genetic factors in this locus on chromosome 13q that contribute to language traits

Speech production deficits in early readers: predictors of risk

Speech problems and reading disorders are linked, suggesting that speech problems may potentially be an early marker of later difficulty in associating graphemes with phonemes. Current norms suggest that complete mastery of the production of the consonant phonemes in English occurs in most children at around 6–7 years. Many children enter formal schooling (kindergarten) around 5 years of age with near-adult levels of speech production. Given that previous research has shown that speech production abilities and phonological awareness skills are linked in preschool children, we set out to examine whether this pattern also holds for children just beginning to learn to read, as suggested by the critical age hypothesis. In the present study, using a diverse sample, we explored whether expressive phonological skills in 92 5-year-old children at the beginning and end of kindergarten were associated with early reading skills. Speech errors were coded according to whether they were developmentally appropriate, position within the syllable, manner of production of the target sounds, and whether the error involved a substitution, omission, or addition of a speech sound. At the beginning of the school year, children with significant early reading deficits on a predictively normed test (DIBELS) made more speech errors than children who were at grade level. Most of these errors were typical of kindergarten children (e.g., substitutions involving fricatives), but reading-delayed children made more of these errors than children who entered kindergarten with grade level skills. The reading-delayed children also made more atypical errors, consistent with our previous findings about preschoolers. Children who made no speech errors at the beginning of kindergarten had superior early reading abilities, and improvements in speech errors over the course of the year were significantly correlated with year-end reading skills. The role of expressive vocabulary and working memory were also explored, and appear to account for some of these findings