Speech therapy with a group of hearing-impaired adolescents. III. Duration of vocalizations and length of utterances in therapy sessions

Abstract

Speech therapy conversations between five dyads, consisting of senior speech pathology students and hearing-impaired adolescents enrolled in a Total Communication programme, were videorecorded for five weekly sessions. Samples over one-minute intervals at the start, middle, and end of the sessions were analysed for durations of vocalizations (to the nearest 0.1 second) and for lengths of utterances (by morphemic counts). Statistical analyses examined differences between dyads, conversational partners, sessions, and intervals, and the related interactions. The impli cations of the outcomes for speech therapy instructionlintervention pro grammes are discussed.