Purpose: Speech-language pathologists (SLPs) and audiologists from around the world were forced to enter the world of telepractice at the start of the COVID-19 pandemic. This study investigated which types of applications SLPs and audiologists used most frequently at that time. It also examined what the main obstacles then were to provide speech, language, and hearing services through telepractice. Method: A short electronic survey with 13 questions was distributed around the world. In total, 1,466 surveys from SLPs and audiologists from 40 countries were used for the analysis. Most of them (77.4%) delivered care through online real-time communication. A minority (40.1%) also delivered care through videos or exercises that they sent to their clients, 37.8% delivered through face-to-face intervention in the same room, 30.0% delivered through telephone without video, and 21.5% provided distant computer-based treatment. Results: The most frequently used applications were those that establish synchronous video communication with the client (60.5%). SLPs and audiologists reported using applications to create exercises more frequently than applications that contain exercises or training (15.0% vs. 12.0%). The most reported obstacle (31.2%) referred to technical problems (poor Internet connection, poor quality, or poor access to resources). Other frequently reported obstacles included the difficulty to perform assessment or treatment procedures (13.8%), concentration issues during sessions (12.4%), and lack of interaction between professional and client or patient (10.9%). Conclusions: Many SLPs and audiologists reported using telepractice technology, mainly in the form of real-time videoconferencing. However, existing barriers included technical problems such as poor Internet connection.
The present study aimed to identify crucial factors that underlie phonological representations in short-term memory (STM) of third-graders with different literacy skills. For this purpose, we used the Nonword Repetition Task (NRT) to disentangle the processing of phonemes’ identity and their serial order. We found no evidence that children’s literacy skills are linked to their capacity for retaining phonemes’ identity. However, their literacy skills are linked to their capacity for retaining phonemes’ serial order. The latter link can be interpreted in terms of a domain-general STM mechanism but is also compatible with the impact of literacy on children’s knowledge of the phonotactic regularities in a language.
Many studies show that poor readers make more errors in nonword repetition than better readers. Although this finding is generally linked to the lower quality of poor readers’ phonological representations in verbal short-term memory, the nature of this poor performance remains unclear. We addressed this issue by focusing on two types of phoneme-related performance in a nonword repetition task: (a) recall of phonemes irrespective of their serial order (phoneme identity) and (b) recall of correctly reproduced phonemes’ serial order (serial order). We tested 91 young adults with and without dyslexia. Generalized linear mixed-effects models demonstrated that controls outperformed individuals with dyslexia in the recall of phonemes’ serial order but failed to detect a difference in the recall of phonemes’ identity. These findings are discussed not only in terms of the nature of or access to phonological representations but also in terms of another concept that has recently been advanced in the literature: a specialized serial order mechanism in verbal short-term memory. We also consider the possibility that individuals with dyslexia may be less sensitive to phonotactic constraints.
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