Introduction to the Forum: Increasing Diversity in the Communication Sciences and Disorders Workforce, Part 1.

Purpose This introduction provides background information about this forum of the and a preview of articles published in this first installment of the forum.

Behavioral and physiological responses to child-directed speech of children with autism spectrum disorders or typical development.

Young boys with autism were compared to typically developing boys on responses to nonsocial and child-directed speech (CDS) stimuli. Behavioral (looking) and physiological (heart rate and respiratory sinus arrhythmia) measures were collected. Boys with autism looked equally as much as chronological age-matched peers at nonsocial stimuli, but less at CDS stimuli.

Evaluating the spectral distinction between sibilant fricatives through a speaker-centered approach.

This study was designed to examine the feasibility of using the spectral mean and/or spectral skewness to distinguish between alveolar and palato-alveolar fricatives produced by individual adult speakers of English. Five male and five female speaker participants produced 100 CVC words with an initial consonant /s/ or /ʃ/. The spectral mean and skewness were derived every 10 milliseconds throughout the fricative segments and plotted for all productions.

Phonological accuracy and intelligibility in connected speech of boys with fragile X syndrome or Down syndrome.

Purpose: To compare the phonological accuracy and speech intelligibility of boys with fragile X syndrome with autism spectrum disorder (FXS-ASD), fragile X syndrome only (FXS-O), Down syndrome (DS), and typically developing (TD) boys.

Method: Participants were 32 boys with FXS-O (3-14 years), 31 with FXS-ASD (5-15 years), 34 with DS (4-16 years), and 45 TD boys of similar nonverbal mental age. We used connected speech samples to compute measures of phonological accuracy, phonological process occurrence, and intelligibility.

Effects of altered fundamental frequency on nasalance during vowel production by adult speakers at targeted sound pressure levels.

Objective: This study investigated the effects of altered fundamental frequency (F0) on nasalance levels of the vowels /i/ and /a/ produced by adults without cleft palate within a controlled sound pressure level (SPL) range.

Design: A prospective group design with convenience sampling from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill was used.

Participants: 20 men and 20 women participated, aged 18 to 55 years.