Augmentative and alternative communication (AAC) for nursing students; equipping the next generation of nursing professionals.

Background: Augmentative and alternative communication (AAC) is often used for patients who are temporarily non-speaking. However, considering AAC for these patients in intensive care units (ICUs) has only recently started to gain the attention of health care providers in the hospital setting. Currently, few nursing programs include content in their curricula as relates to this population.

Retelling stories: Grammatical and lexical measures for identifying monolingual spanish speaking children with specific language impairment (SLI).

Children with Specific Language Impairment (SLI) have grammatical and lexical difficulties when telling stories. The aim of this work was to explore whether language productivity measures, such as mean length of utterance (MLU), percentage of ungrammatical sentences (%UGS), total number of words (TNW), and number of different words (NDW) produced by young children during a story retell task, can be used to accurately differentiate monolingual Spanish-speaking children with SLI from children with typical language development (TLD). Fifty monolingual Spanish-speaking children between 4; 0 and 6; 11 years were assigned to one of two groups: 25 children with SLI and 25 TLD age-matched peers.

The effect of Tier 2 intervention for phonemic awareness in a response-to-intervention model in low-income preschool classrooms.

Purpose: This study assessed the effectiveness of a Tier 2 intervention that was designed to increase the phonemic awareness skills of low-income preschoolers who were enrolled in Early Reading First classrooms.

Method: Thirty-four preschoolers participated in a multiple baseline across participants treatment design. Tier 2 intervention for beginning sound awareness was provided twice weekly in small groups over 6 weeks by trained teachers and speech-language pathologists (SLPs).