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This study evaluated the validity of the Spanish edition of the Preschool Language Scale-3 (I. L. Zimmerman, V. G. Steiner, & R. E. Pond, 1993). As a preliminary step, the authors reviewed the test to determine whether it met psychometric criteria established by McCauley and Swisher (1984) and Hutchinson (1996). Examination of the test's psychometric characteristics revealed that the test met only 4 out of 10 criteria proposed by McCauley and Swisher and none of the additional criteria from Hutchinson. Problems were evident in the test's norming and in the lack of reliability and validity data. The authors then investigated whether, despite the test's psychometric shortcomings, it was useful for the assessment of Spanish/English-speaking children. Results revealed that the children studied performed approximately 1.5 SD below the mean. Moreover, the children's performance on the subtests did not reflect an even progression of item difficulty, indicating limited evidence of construct and content validity.

The majority of work that suggests a relationship between syntactic complexity and the frequency of stuttering has been carried out with young children. In this paper, we investigate whether or not syntactic complexity exerts an influence on the frequency of stuttering in adolescent speech. Fourteen adolescents, 7 of whom stuttered, and 7 of whom were normally fluent, ages 10-18 years, participated in a sentence imitation task in which stimuli were divided into three classes of grammatical complexity. Results indicated that for both groups of speakers, normal disfluencies and errors in repetition accuracy increased as syntactic complexity increased. However, stuttering frequency did not appear to be affected by changes in the syntactic complexity of the target stimuli. Such findings suggest either a diminution of the effects of syntactic complexity on stuttering over the course of language acquisition or changes in the mix of chronic and nonchronic stuttering speakers from those used in earlier studies of the effects of linguistic structure on stuttering in children.

There has been clinical speculation that parents of young stuttering children have expectations of their children's communication abilities that are not well-matched to the children's actual skills. We appraised the language abilities of 15 children close to the onset of stuttering symptoms and 15 age-, sex-, and SES-matched fluent children using an array of standardized tests and spontaneous language sample measures. Parents concurrently completed two parent-report measures of the children's communicative development. Results indicated generally depressed performance on all child speech and language measures by the children who stutter. Parent report was closely attuned to child performance for the stuttering children; parents of nonstuttering children were less accurate in their predictions of children's communicative performance. Implications for clinical advisement to parents of stuttering children are discussed. T he role of the environment in the onset and evolution of stuttering symptoms continues to generate debate. Although there is little current research literature to suggest that parental beliefs or behaviors differentiate families in which children stutter from those in which children do not (Yairi, 1997), clinical advisement continues to emphasize the possible role of parental attitudes and behaviors in shaping stuttering behavior in childhood (e.g., Conture & Melnick, 1999;Gottwald & Starkweather, 1999;Guitar, 1998;Shapiro, 1999;Starkweather, Gottwald, & Halfond, 1993;Wall & Myers, 1995). Yairi (1997) summarizes much of the available literature on the beliefs of parents whose children stutter. It is, in general, an aging body of work, most of which targeted rather global measures of parental attitude and behavior. Older research suggested that some parents of stuttering children held unrealistic expectations of them: Darley (1955) found that mothers of children who stutter believed that their children were not achieving as expected in speech/language development or in school. Goldman and Shames (1964) asked parents to predict how well their child would perform on a motor coordination task and a language sample task (story telling). Parents of children who stutter, most notably fathers, tended to overestimate their child's performance relative to actual outcomes. However, Quarrington, Seligman, and Kosower (1969) failed to replicate this finding. Instead, mothers of children who stuttered set lower goals for their children than parents of the comparison group.Ratner: Parents' Perceptions at Stuttering Onset 1253Inappropriate parental expectations could be expected to demonstrate themselves in behaviors that are either fluency-disrupting or nonconducive to recovery from stuttering. Clinical advisement to parents appears to reflect a wide range of interpretations of existing data and clinical impressions. In particular, the linguistic environment of the child who stutters has been a frequent target of clinical comment. Guitar (1998) lists "stressful adult speech models" (defined by speech rate, pol...

Background: Important to the assessment of aphasia are analyses of discourse production and, in particular, lexical diversity analyses of verbal production of adults with aphasia. Previous researchers have used type-token ratio (TTR) to measure conversational vocabulary in adults with aphasia; however, this measure is known to be sensitive to sample size, requiring that only samples of equivalent length be compared. The number of different words (NDW) is another measure of lexical diversity, but it also requires input samples of equivalent length. An alternative to these measures, D, has been developed (Malvern & Richards, 1997) to address this problem. D allows for comparisons across samples of varying lengths. Aims: The first objective of the current study was to examine the relationships among three measures of productive vocabulary in discourse for adults with aphasia: TTR, NDW, and D. The second objective was to use these measures to determine in what ways, and to what degree, they each can differentiate fluent and nonfluent aphasia. Methods & Procedures: Eighteen adults with aphasia participated in this study (nine with nonfluent aphasia; nine with fluent aphasia). Participants completed the Western Aphasia Battery (WAB) and produced language samples consisting of conversation and picture description. Samples were then subjected to the three lexical diversity analyses. Outcomes & Results: Results indicated that, although the measures generally correlated with each other, adults with fluent aphasia evidenced significantly higher D and NDW values than those with nonfluent aphasia when whole samples were subjected to analyses. Once samples were truncated to 100-and 200-word samples, groups differed significantly for all three measures. Conclusions: These findings add further support to the notion that because TTR and, although to a lesser extent, NDW are sensitive to sample size, length differences across samples tend to confound results. As an alternative to these measures, the use of D for the measurement of conversational vocabulary of adults with aphasia enables the analysis of entire language samples, so that discarding language sample data is not necessary. In the present study, D values differed for fluent and nonfluent aphasia samples.