Compendium of Auditory and Speech Tasks – Children′s Speech and Literacy Difficulties 4 +CD: Children′s Speech and Literacy Difficulties 4 with CD–ROM - Softcover

The book summarises research findings from a range of projects using a set of auditory and speech procedures designed for the psycholinguistic framework developed by Stackhouse and Wells (1997). These procedures have been used with children and adolescents with a range of difficulties associated with cleft lip and palate, dysarthria, dyspraxia, phonological impairment, Down syndrome, dyslexia, stammering, autism, semantic-pragmatic difficulties, general learning difficulties, and disadvantaged backgrounds. The procedures have also been used with normally developing children in the age range of 3-7 years. As a result, the book includes descriptions of typical performance on the procedures so that atypical can be identified more easily. In addition, as the materials were used in a longitudinal study of children's speech and literacy development between the age of 4 and 7 years we can highlight which procedures will help in identifying children a) who are likely to persist with their speech difficulties and b) have associated literacy difficulties.

Compendium of Auditory and Speech Tasks investigates input and output speech processing skills in children with typical and atypical development. This practical handbook

• presents 30 auditory and speech tasks designed for use with the psycholinguistic framework presented in the first book of this series (Stackhouse and Wells, 1997);

includes four questionnaire formats for collecting background information from parents and teachers;

• matches items across tasks, permitting detailed profiling of a client's strengths and weaknesses;

• focuses on typical development as a basis for identifying atypical performance;

• summarises research findings from projects which have used these auditory and speech tasks with a range of participants having a variety of problems.

Each task has instructions, pictures where appropriate, scoring procedures and sheets, normative data, a description of typical performance, and guidelines on interpretation of results. While most of the normative data are from children from 3-7 years, the tasks can be used with older children and adolescents with speech and literacy difficulties; indeed the principles described enable practitioners to develop tasks for clients of any age. Two chapters focus on how the tasks and questionnaires can be used to identify children at risk of persisting speech difficulties and associated literacy problems, and the final chapter shows how the data can be used as a basis for planning intervention and for deciding whether a speech difficulty has really been 'resolved'.