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The present study evaluated the effectiveness of three service delivery models in the elementary school setting. Differences were investigated between (a) a collaborative approach, (b) a classroom-based intervention model with the speech-language pathologist (SLP) and classroom teachers working independently, and (c) a traditional pull-out model for children in kindergarten through third grade who qualified for speech or language services. The same curricular vocabulary targets and materials were used in all conditions. This study also examined the vocabulary skills of regular education children who participated in the collaborative approach, the independent classroom-based model, or received instruction from only classroom teachers, without the SLP’s involvement. Results indicated the collaborative model was more effective for teaching curricular vocabulary to students who qualified for speech or language services than a classroom-based model (teacher-SLP independent) or a traditional pull-out model. The findings for students who were not enrolled in speech or language services indicated the collaborative and classroom-based models increased vocabulary skills to a significantly greater degree than receiving only regular instruction from the classroom teacher. The results are congruent with the theoretical advantages of the collaborative model reported in the literature and support the use of integrated service delivery models for intervention in the school setting.

, "Relation between phonologic difficulty and the occurrence of disfluencies in the early stage of stuttering" (1994). Faculty Research and Creative Activity. 6.

The purpose of this study was to examine the relationship between articulation rate, frequency and duration of disfluencies of different types, and temperament in preschool children who stutter (CWS). In spontaneous speech samples from 19 children CWS (mean age = 3:9; years: months), we measured articulation rate, the frequency and duration of (a) sound prolongations; (b) soundsyllable repetitions; (c) single syllable whole word repetitions; and (d) clusters. Temperament was assessed with the Children's Behavior Questionnaire (Rothbart et al., 2001). There was a significant negative correlation between articulation rate and average duration of sound prolongations (p<0.01), and between articulation rate and frequency of stuttering-like disfluencies (SLDs) (p<0.05). No other relationships proved statistically significant. Results do not support models of stuttering development that implicate particular characteristics of temperament as proximal contributors to stuttering; however, this is likely due to the fact that current methods, including the ones used in the present study, do not allow for the identification of a functional relationship between temperament and speech production. Findings do indicate that for some CWS, relatively longer sound prolongations co-occur with relatively slower speech rate, which suggests that sound prolongations, across a range of durations, may represent a distinct type of SLD, not just in their obvious perceptual characteristics, but in their potential influence on overall speech production at multiple levels.