AbstractThe purpose with this essay is to get knowledge about the consequences that speech-defects bring for children in pre-school ages. I got interested in this matter when I, during my teaching practice, got in touch with children carrying this specific disorder. I chose to apply qualitative interview as a method to investigate this and as a starting-point I used these aspects: How does speech-defects affect learning, understanding, friendship relations, and development in general?I interviewed three pre-school teachers in two different schools. One school in a smaller district and the other one in a middle-sized town, in the middle of Sweden.

At two nursing homes for people with dementia a qualitative study was performed. The purpose was to investigate the therapy dog?s meaning to people with dementia from their perspective. Two women and five men with dementia were interviewed, everyone being somewhere between 60 and 87 years of age. All but one had previously owned a dog at some point in their lives.

The main purpose of this study was to translate Stuttering Severity Instrument 3 and to evaluate its reliability and validity. Five speech-language pathologists assessed 35 adults who stutter with this assessment tool. Overall the results showed a very high inter- and intrarater reliability. A highly significant correlation between Stuttering Severity Instrument 3 and ratings of severity, made by the speech-language pathologists, strengthen the validityof Stuttering Severity Instrument 3. No correlation was found between the total score of Stuttering Severity Instrument 3 and the self-report measure Overall Assessment of the Speaker's Experience of Stuttering, whichindicates a lack of social validity in Stuttering Severity Instrument 3.

There are different ways of developing a second language. The purpose of this qualitative study is to investigate whether and possibly how music, focused on singing, can improve the development of Swedish as a second language. Through interviews with three vocal teachers, from three different schools in Sweden, and observations of one of the vocal teachers, information about how they work and think about the subject has been collected. The vocal teachers teach groups of second language learners by singing songs made especially for second language learning. The vocal teachers consider singing beneficial in the development of the pronunciation and improvement of the prosody, which affects the students? capacity to sound like a native Swedish speaker.

The purpose of this study was to examine if there were anychanges in quality in the voices of speech and language pathology studentsafter four years of study at the University of Gothenburg. Recordings oftwenty student voices from the first and eight semesters were evaluatedperceptually by six speech-language pathologists. The parameters judgedwere: vocal fry, glottal attacks, strain, breathiness and resonant voice, usinga scale from 0 to 10. Acoustical measures were made of F0 mean andmedian to detect possible differences between the two recordings. Theresults show a significant decrease in vocal fry, glottal attacks and strain aswell as an increase in resonant voice and a significant decrease in F0 meanand median.

Prosody can be characterized as the rhythm and the melody of speech. Prosodic features convey emotions, thoughts and geographic origins of each individual. Spoken language without prosody would be monotonous, without variations in loudness and rate. Children with cochlear implants perceive speech in a different way than children with normal hearing. Consequently the speech produced by a child with cochlear implants may sound different.The purpose of this study was to examine prosodic skills in Swedish children with cochlear implants and to compare them with the prosodic skills in Swedish children with normal hearing.

To explore how children use dialect, and whether the dialectal language develops during growth might be of interest from a speech language pathologist?s point of view as the dialect could influence the child?s speech. Previous research is often based on older material and/or examines the speech of adults.  In the present study, everyday language in groups of south- eastern Swedish speaking children was investigated. The aim of the present study was to examine to what extent typically developed children of the ages of  5, 8 and 11 years use dialectal language. A further purpose was to discover which dialectal characteristics that were present in the different age groups, and how they differed.

A speech-based material that early can assess a child's hearing is needed to provide an indication of a hearing impaired child's language development. Being able to identify and discriminate between different sounds is a requirement for interpreting speech. Hearing assessments that examine speech perception can therefore, unlike, for example, pure tone audiometry, examine a hearing impaired child's perceptual language skills and provide a basis for intervention.The purpose of this work is to evaluate a new auditory material on 3-year-old children. The auditory material is based on the Ling-6-sounds and the main question was which of the sounds in the test were adequate for test of discrimination. Furthermore, it was investigated how the test works with children aged 3:0?3:11 years and how age and gender affect the result.Twenty-four children aged 3:0?3:11 years were tested using a computer based test.

Speech anomalies have been described as characteristic symptoms forthe 22q11 deletion syndrome. However, research on speech and voice in adultswith the syndrome is still scarce. Previous research has indicated that speech andvoice anomalies seen in children with the syndrome might have neurologicalcauses. The aim of this study is to investigate speech and voice in a group ofadults diagnosed with the 22q11 deletion syndrome, with extra focus onanomalies with possible neurological cause. The researched group consisted of24 adults between the ages 19 to 38 with a verified 22q11-deletion, 16 womenand 8 men.

This pilot study describes a therapy method for persons withBroca´s aphasia. This method is based on the mapping hypothesis (Schwartz,Saffran & Marin 1980). The mapping hypothesis is based on the assumptionthat agrammatism is caused by an inability to combine syntactic structurewith thematic roles. This study describes a combination of the therapymethod mentioned above and the Everyday life activities photo series (ELA,Stark 1992). The aim of the study was to investigate if therapy based on awritten sentence/picture format is a viable starting-point for future research.The therapy presented combined written sentences with pictures describingeveryday life activities.

Audionomprogrammet.

This retrospective study aimed to examine differences at age fivebetween twenty-six internationally adopted and twenty-six Swedish-bornchildren with cleft lip and palate regarding age of surgery, speech andintervention. Correlation between age of surgery and speechvariables andgender differences was examined. Blind assessment of audio recordedsentence repetition or naming of words was performed by two speechpathologists. Soft palate was closed significantly later for the study groupthan the control group. Age at closure of hard palate did not differ.

All human beings need and have the right to a language. How a language is learned and used depends on the individual conditions. This study considers the work to development the language done by pedagogues in a special school for mentally retarded children. How do pedagogues work to develop the language in children who are so different and have so different conditions and needs? That is the central aim of this study.

The purpose of this study is to see how preschool teachers are working with supportive signs and if it is a working tool for children's language development. Is the supportive signing just for kids with special need for support or can it be good for all children?I've done the study by interviewing preschool teachers that is working with supportive signs in preschool. I also had a questionnaire for parents that yielded less fruitful results. I have chosen to use children's language and constructivist and socio-cultural theories.What I came up with is that the supportive signs are very helpful in preschools, but it requires a lot from the one doing it.

The purpose of this study is to determine if and how male or female everyday languagesdiffer. The study is based on ten interviews with five men and five women living inHalmstad, who are between the ages of 22-29. The interview results were analyzed andcompared with previous research on the subject. The result shows that there is adifference between the male and female informants use of language. Women laughing,using italics, hedges, the word så ?so? and response signals to a greater degree than men.The reason may be that men and women basically use different conversation styleswhen they communicate, that men prefer a public speech, intended to provideinformation and knowledge.