Objective. The previous studies have focused mainly on deviant linguistic processing regarding dyslexia, while people's experiences and contextual factors have received less attention. This study gives voice to the dyslexic students who can tell about their own experiences about dyslexia. Additionally, the objective of this study is to examine what kind of difficulties the students face while studying and which strengths they have. This study can bring a new perspective and decrease prejudices towards dyslexia. Method. Focused interview was used as a method of this study. The interviews consisted of questions inspired by the previous literature. Eight students were interviewed, six of them were studying at the university and two of them were studying at the university of applied sciences. The interviews were recorded and transcribed. The transcriptions were analysed with qualitative content analysis. Results and conclusion. On the basis of the analysis the interviews included several positive aspects. Many of the participants told they were quite open about their own dyslexia. They were also used to observe their learning and they had found several useful ways to learn. Many of them used deep learning as their learning method. They had also coped several difficulties and they believed in themselves. Especially organizing big amount of information, learning foreign languages and organizing different studying was challenging for them. Several participants reported that their learning was quite slow. In this study dyslexia was a phenomenon, not only a limitation. All the students have their strengths and limitations, regardless if they have a dyslexia or not.

Aim: People with speaking disabilities have equal rights to functional interaction and communication as people without disabilities. These rights actualize only through the actions and skills of more able communicators. Guiding staff and family members is an important part of every speech and language pathologist's (SLP) job, especially if the client has severe learning disability. However, many SLPs experience guiding difficult and the results of staff communication training have been unsatisfactory. There are different models that can be used to help the process of indirect speech and language therapy. One of them is called Intensive interaction (II). Its role in enhancing interaction skills of more able communicators has only been studied a little. The purpose of this study is to find out if II is a meaningful approach to carry out indirect speech and language therapy. The aim was to find out if and how the interaction skills of a staff member change during an II process. The aim was also to figure out how she saw the significance of II. Methods: This research data were collected in the Communication and Technology Centre Tikoteekki of the Finnish Association on Intellectual and Developmental Disabilities. The data were collected during an II process that took place in 2014 and 2015 in a residential unit for people with learning disabilities. This study had two participants, one of whom was a resident with multiple learning and speaking disabilities, and the other one a staff member. The video material was composed of 14 interaction videos between the resident and the staff member, and one video of guidance discussion between the staff member and the mentoring SLP in the end of the process. The data were analysed according to the themes arising from the data, by mostly qualitative means. The changes in interaction skills were described with different tables and transcriptions. The guidance discussion was transcribed and analysed according to inductive analysis. Results and conclusions: The interaction style of the staff member became more sensitive and present. That change manifested through improvements in four elements of interaction: distance from the interaction partner, touching, quality and quantity of vocalization and tasklessness of interaction. The staff member saw II as a meaningful approach, especially for herself as an employee, but also for her interaction partner with multiple disabilities and more generally. These results suggest that II is a meaningful and effective means of mentoring significant others to become more sensitive, skillful and able interaction partners for persons with severe speaking disabilities. Additionally this study gives premises for further research on II and indirect speech and language therapy. In light of this research II is also important on societal level.

Aphasia is often a chronic impairment. Regaining the premorbid language function is rare. Anomia is the most common residual disorder once the aphasia has stabilized. Earlier studies indicate that transcranial magnetic stimulation (rTMS, repetitive Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation) together with intensive speech therapy improves the outcome of the language rehabilitation. The aim of the current study was to find out what kinds of quantitative and qualitative changes occur in the participants' ability to name noun and verb pictures that were shown during the rTMS/sham-rTMS protocol. All of the participants received two weeks of either rTMS or sham-rTMS treatment and after a one-week break another two weeks of either rTMS or sham- rTMS treatment together with intensive group speech therapy (ILAT, Intensive Language Action Therapy). This is a multiple case study with six participants that have chronic expressive aphasia. The first two groups of a larger study were selected into this study. Group 1 (n=3) received 1Hz- rTMS therapy and group 2 (n=3) received sham-rTMS. rTMS was given to the right hemisphere on the pars triangularis area. Every participant named the same amount of action and object pictures during the rTMS/sham-rTMS treatment. Namings were analysed with a rating system derived for the current study. Each participant received intensive group speech therapy in the latter two-week part of the intervention. Language testing was conducted before, during and three months after the intervention. The naming abilities in all participants seemed to improve in both noun and verb series during the rTMS/sham-rTMS treatment and language tests. Results of the follow-up testing suggest that the positive results are long lasting. The results of this study are promising, even though the amount of participants is too small to draw further conclusions. This study brings positive evidence and reason for further research on the effectiveness of aphasia therapy.

Goals. Event schema, also known as a script, contains information about a structure of a particular event; about the sequences of events and their temporal order. With the information the scripts contain, one can anticipate and plan for future events and actions. People with traumatic brain injury (TBI) can have difficulties in the verbal planning of actions. Previous international research has shown that the scripts produced by people with TBI contain fewer actions central to the schema, than scripts produced by healthy control subjects. The aim of this study is to examine what kind of scripts Finnish speaking subjects with TBI and their healthy control subject counterparts generate in a script generation task consisting of eight scripts. This study also examines whether the script type has influence on the features of the generated scripts. Methods. Fifteen subjects with TBI and fifteen healthy control subjects participated in the study. The researcher collected the research material during the spring and summer 2015. The research material consisted of the scripts generated by the subjects and control subjects, as well as the results of the control tasks (Boston Naming Test, Rapid Automatized Naming Test, semantic and phonemic fluencies). The subjects were asked to generate event schemas for eight everyday tasks belonging to four schema categories. The categories were 'open high frequency' (go shopping, go for a walk), 'open low frequency' (apply for a job, go on a vacation), 'closed high frequency' (make coffee, brush teeth), and 'closed low frequency' (go to a doctor, go to a restaurant). Closed scripts are related to events where the actions involved in their execution are well established and tightly related to each other. Open scripts are less structured and have loose connections between the actions involved. High and low frequency scripts differ on how frequent the event is. Time given for generating each script was 60 seconds. The scripts were scored for the total number of events produced, the number of event repetitions, the informativeness of the script, and the meaningfulness and the centrality of the events. The results of the qualitative analysis were displayed in a statistical form and analyzed with the non-parametrical Mann-Whitney U -test. Results and conclusions. The results showed that the scripts produced by the subjects with TBI were less informative and contained less actions than the scripts produced by the healthy control subjects, regardless of the script type. Closed scripts were found to be more informative than open scripts, and the subjects produced more actions to the closed than to the open scripts. When the high and low frequency scripts generated by the subjects with TBI were examined, no significant difference was found between the two script types. The results of this study can be explained by the disturbances in executive functions, and disturbances in the working memory as well as the episodic memory, all of which can affect the subject's ability to produce a coherent story and recall actions belonging to a certain event.

Autism spectrum disorder (ASD) is a condition that affects social interaction, communication and behavior. Since effective communication and interaction is a prerequisite for learning, the use of augmentative and alternative communication (AAC) methods has been considered necessary in study environments. The education professionals' perspectives and attitudes towards the use of AAC methods have been linked to the extent to which they support the development of communication skills of their pupils using communication aids. The purpose of this study is to describe the experiences of autism classroom teachers and classroom assistants in the use of AAC methods. This topic is examined based on the benefits and challenges that autism education professionals associate with the use of communication aids, the number of factors contributing to the successful use of the AAC methods as well as the development of the students' communication skills. In this study nine education professionals who worked in autism education classrooms and school's afternoon activities in Helsinki were interviewed. The interviews were conducted as semi-structured individual interviews, which discussed the use of AAC methods for students with ASD. The interviews were recorded, transcribed and analyzed by using inductive thematic analysis approach. Finally, the themes of each research question were compared with each other. Based on the results of this study, AAC methods are particularly useful not only for communication between students and education professionals, but also for the students' ability to express themselves, to develop better social skills and to become more independent in their everyday lives. The challenges of using AAC methods related to usability factors, students' developmental abnormalities, education professionals' practices and various resource issues. Professional co-operation, motivation, favorable usability factors of the AAC methods, and factors related to the activities and roles of education professionals were seen to influence the successful use of the AAC methods and to improve the students' communication skills. In addition, the interviewees strongly emphasized the importance of students' spontaneous communication and speech development in the motivation and work satisfaction of education professionals. The autism classroom teachers' and classroom assistants' experiences in the use of AAC methods emphasize the importance of training and multiprofessional co-operation in support of the use of communication aids and development of students' communication skills. Based on the results of this study, the speech therapists' counseling activities can be regarded as significant for the development and maintenance of the education professionals' AAC skills and for constituting positive attitudes related to the use of AAC methods. This study highlights the importance of further research focusing particularly on more specific identification of challenges related to the use of AAC methods in autism classroom education.

Aims. Improved quality of life is considered to be the overarching goal of aphasia rehabilitation based on the social model. Around the world research has been done on the factors that affect the quality of life with people with aphasia. Different kinds of structured quality of life measurements have been developed that aim to enable people with aphasia to self-report quality of life. In Finland research on the subject has been scarce. The aim of this study was to explore the views of Finnish speech and language therapists (SLT) on the quality of life in aphasia rehabilitation and the prevailing clinical practices as well as to investigate how they compare internationally. Methods. For the purposes of this study a questionnaire composed by the Aphasia Committee of the International Association of Logopedics and Phoniatrics (IALP) was translated into the Finnish language. 64 questionnaires were filled out. The Finnish data was analysed by using descriptive statistics and content analysis. The data collected in this survey formed Finland's part of an international survey conducted by IALP, which allowed the comparison between the Finnish and international results. The international survey contained 581 respondents from 16 countries including Finland. The Finnish and international data were compared by cross tabulation and Chi Squared -test. Results and conclusions. According to Finnish SLTs it is important to incorporate into practice with aphasia several quality of life domains, such as communication, affect, in/dependence, social activities, personal outlook and in addition to consider life satisfaction, social support and environment. Almost all of the Finnish SLTs used interviewing as their primary method for assessing the quality of life, only four used structured quality of life measures. Internationally there were mentioned many different structured quality of life assessments. This study indicates explicitly that there is a demand for structured quality of life assessments in Finland. The results can be applied in developing education, research and clinical practice.

Aims. The purpose of this single-case study was to investigate the effects of intensive tablet-based treatment in overall language performance level and in reading and writing processes in mild aphasia. The communicative effectiveness and task performances on the tablet software were also studied. The tablet software included tasks where semantic, syntactic and phonological processing were required; written naming, sentence writing and reading comprehension. Previous studies have indicated improvements in language skills after computer-based treatment (Katz & Wertz, 1997; Wade, Mortley & Enderby, 2003). Especially reading and writing skills can be treated by the computer-based softwares (Katz, 2008). Methods & Procedures. In this single subject research the ABA design was used. The participant in this study was a 47 year old man who had a stroke 2.5 years earlier. He had a mild chronic aphasia with difficulties in writing, reading and naming. The data of this study was formed by linguistic tests and by a self-assessment method as the participant evaluated his communicative effectiveness (CETI). The methods used in the analysis of written and read narratives included assessing rate, authenticity and the types of errors. The analysis of written narratives also included assessing word classes and type-token –ratio. Based on the data by the tablet-based software the rate and the share of errors of task performances were assessed. Results & Conclusions. Based on the Western Aphasia Battery (WAB) results, the severity of the aphasia decreased but the change was not clinically significant. Naming improved but the change wasn't stable until the follow-up. The participant showed positive development in his written and reading production; he made less spelling and reading errors after the treatment. At the same time reading and writing processes became slower. The share of lexical verbs, adjectives, pronouns and numerals increased in written narratives. The communicative effectiveness improved. The task performance on the tablet software was faster during the fourth week compared to the first week. Also the amount of incorrect performances decreased or remained the same. Based on the results, an intensive self-monitored tablet-based language treatment was effective to the subject.

Objectives. Assessment of language development and differential diagnosis between typical bilingual language development and developmental language disorders in bilingual children is difficult due to lack of appropriate diagnostic tools and norms. Dynamic assessment has been proposed as a complementary method in which learning potential is assessed instead of current language skills. Graduated prompting as dynamic assessment method involves helping children with the tasks by presenting graduated prompts. The aim of the study was to add information about the dynamic assessment of language skills in preschool-age children acquiring Finnish as their second language and its applicability in the differential diagnosis. Methods. A dynamic assessment method was translated and adapted into Finnish and piloted with eight bilingual children aged between 4 to 6 years whose home language was not Finnish, Swedish or Sami language. Half of the children were typically developing bilinguals and half were bilinguals with diagnosed or suspected developmental language impairment. Children's language skills and learning of receptive and expressive vocabulary as well as sentence production were assessed. Test scores were analyzed quantitatively and compared between groups and matched pairs. The usefulness of the prompts was analyzed qualitatively. In addition, the usability and the suitability of the method for the assessment of bilingual children were examined. Results and conclusions. The typically developing children scored slightly higher in the dynamic measures of vocabulary. In the static pre- or post measures of vocabulary or in the measures of sentence production no such difference was found. The results of the vocabulary assessment were in line with previous studies stating dynamic assessment having potential as a differential diagnostic tool. Score differences were minor and the sample was small, thus the results cannot be generalized. The assessment method is short enough to be carried out in single assessment session but complicated to use and rate. The used tasks need be improved further. However, new dynamic assessment methods in Finnish can be developed based on the information gathered in the study.

Aim. In conversation mutual understanding is achieved through co-operation of each participant. Mutual understanding might be more at risk in conversation where one or more participants use augmentative and alternative communication (AAC). To be able to support people who use AAC and guide their communication partners, interventionists should understand how communication problems and challenges are being resolved in a natural conversation. The aim of this study is to describe how participants orient to problems in AAC conversation. Conversation partners' other-initiations of repair and the problems these initiations indicate are being studied. Method. The database consists of two videotaped conversations where one aided speaker, a 15-year-old boy with cerebral palsy, talks with a speech-language pathology student (conv 1) and with his speech-language pathologist (conv 2). The data was originally videotaped for speech therapy follow-up. Problems and how they were managed were studied using conversation analysis (CA) and one of its basic organizations, repair organization. CA enables detailed examination of natural interaction. Results and conclusions. Almost every other-initiation of repair fell upon the problems in aided speaker's turn and were initiated by conversation partners. These problems related broadly to speech understanding, more precisely to understandability of utterances. No problems of hearing were raised. Reasons underlying the trouble sources were most often conversation partner's difficulty in understanding the meaning of aided speaker's whole turn or part of a turn, extra words or other mistakes in selecting symbols, or vague reference. From all the conversation partners' other-initiations of repair interpretative means, candidate understandings, were used most often and the initiations of repair were at the same time pointing a problem and trying to resolve it. Interpretation seemed to be explicitly on display in both conversations. It was used to show understanding of AAC turn and to initiate repair. In order to be able to understand how to support AAC users' human agency and active participation in conversation, more research needs to be done on different conversations.

Objectives. Specific language impairment (SLI) is a heterogeneous disorder and its symptoms change with development. For most people it has a profound effect on functional ability, participation, and learning. The symptoms are persistent especially among those with difficulties in speech-reception. Simultaneous learning of multiple languages increases the individual variation in linguistic difficulties. Language functioning of Finnish monolingual and multilingual children at age over 10 years has not been thoroughly investigated. The objective of this study was to describe how SLI manifests itself in 11–12-years-old monolingual and multilingual children. The study focused on language ability and health-related quality of life. The acquired information may help in improving supporting practices. Methods. Four male participants at age of 11–12 years living in the Capital Region of Finland, and with SLI diagnosis (F80.2) were recruited from Helsinki University Central Hospital Audiophoniatric ward 22 for the study. Two participants were monolingual and two were multilingual learning Finnish as their second language. The gathered data consisted of language tests and questionnaires intended for parents, teachers, and the participants. Testing was videotaped and the acquired narratives were transcribed. Results were compared against age norms as well as previous literature. Furthermore, the questionnaire data were grouped based on the content, and the results were analyzed qualitatively. In addition, the test results and questionnaire data were compared to each other. Finally, the differences in language abilities were examined in relation to medical reports written before school age. Results and conclusions. All participants had deficiencies in language abilities, but language symptoms, social ability, academic achievement, and quality of life varied individually. Results were in line with previous studies. Difficulties were observed especially in grammatical and reading abilities, short-term memory and word naming. Moreover, according to parents and teachers, the participants had problems in speech reception, narration, pragmatics, and some of them also in social interactions. Finnish vocabulary among the multilingual participants was smaller than that of their monolingual counterparts. However, differences in other areas were larger at single-level than at group-level. Three of the participants still received substantial support in school. Support of the fourth participant had been discontinued due to favorable progress. Majority of the participants perceived their health-related quality of life slightly weaker than that of controls. Based on the results, it is important to support pragmatic skills at school age since previous studies have shown an association of these to social integration. A Study with a larger sample size and longitudinal setting is needed in the future.