Examiner and child contributions to therapy Rebecca Lyrenmann , University of Iowa Follow

[摘要] The purpose of this research was to analyze child and clinician factors affecting language therapy outcomes and to analyze the potential bi-directional relationship between child and clinician factors. Transcripts of intervention sessions with one child and one trained examiner were coded for factors relating to children"s language ability, examiners" strategies for reaching session targets, and differences in examiners" interactional styles. It was found that differences in children"s language ability and examiners" interactional styles did not have a strong relationship with therapy outcomes. Differences were observed in the overall frequency of examiners" strategy use across children; however, examiners were not sensitive to individual children"s responsiveness to particular strategies. This is a secondary data analysis on an intervention study, which affects interpretation of the results: variability in examiner and child behaviors was decreased due to adherence to intervention protocol. However, the mismatch between examiner strategies and child responses is of interest. Making clinicians explicitly aware of the many types of elicitation and response strategies available may increase examiners" effectiveness, efficiency, or responsiveness.