M.A. Comprehensive Examination Study Guides
Some faculty supply a study guide for the M.A. Comprehensive exams,
while other faculty do not. Should new study guides become
available, they will be posted here.
*PLEASE NOTE that study guides provided for the comprehensive examination are only general guidelines and do not in any way guarantee which topic areas/questions will or will not be covered on the examination.
Electives:
Aphasia
(Dr. Shah)
Students should be able to discuss:
- different aphasia subtypes, their symptoms, lesions and treatment procedures.
- different assessment techniques and tests.
- differential diagnosis of aphasia with other adult neurological conditions such as dementia, right hemisphere, dysarthria, apraxia and TBI.
- aphasic deficits along linguistic domains (phonological, lexical-semantic, syntactic, pragmatic).
- appropriate therapy procedures when given a case-scenario.
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Phonological and Articulatory Disorders
(Ms. Worthington)
Students should be able to discuss the following:
- Normal speech production with regard to relevant anatomy and physiology
- Typical development of speech in infants/young children from birth to 1 year
- Range of analytic approaches to assessment of speech sound differences
- At least five etiologies which are associated with distinctive patterns of sound errors
- Range of therapeutic approaches to remediation of speech sound errors
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Childhood Language Disorders
(Dr. Roth)
No Study Guide provided.
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Fluency Disorders
(Dr. Ratner)
Be able to:
- evaluate major forms of therapy, including fluency shaping, stuttering modification, operant and indirect approaches, with attention to specific populations and circumstances that might suggest the value of one over another.
- evaluate the adequacy of major models of stuttering in guiding the development and evaluation of therapy approaches.
- discuss differential diagnostic and therapeutic techniques for addressing acquired fluency disorders and cluttering.
- discuss ways in which linguistic demand affects stuttering, and ways in which stuttering in the presence of concomitant linguistic and/or phonological disorder might be addressed.
- evaluate the role of spontaneous remission in the decision to treat stuttering early in childhood.
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Voice
(Dr. Samlan)
Be prepared to:
- compare the anatomy and physiology of voice production in normal and disordered states (muscle tension dysphonia, benign lesions, and neurological disorders).
- describe the contributions of respiration, phonation, and resonance to voice production.
- discuss the components of a voice evaluation (case history, auditory perceptual exam, tactile exam, patient measures, aerodynamic measures, acoustic measures, videostroboscopy, trial therapy), demonstrating your understanding of the contribution of each to the total diagnostic picture.
- describe how to use common voice therapy techniques and how the techniques alter vocal physiology.
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Acoustic & Perceptual Phonetics
(Dr. Newman)
Be able to:
- describe, draw, & recognize the spectrographic
patterns that characterize different types of speech sounds.
- describe the acoustic cues that differentiate phonemic
distinctions.
- describe how different types of speech sounds
are produced (their articulation).
- describe how and why different articulatory
movements result in different acoustic properties.
- discuss major issues in speech perception,
such as the lack of invariance (and different sources
of variability), categorical perception, and segmentation.
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Aural Rehabilitation
(Sarah Friedman)
No Study Guide provided.
Neurological Bases of Communication
(Dr. Shah)
Be able to:
-
discuss various neuroimaging and electrophysiological methods of studying brain activity
-
discuss the broad functions of different brain lobes with special reference to hemispheric differences
-
discuss impairments of cortical function (apraxia, agnosia, aphasia)
-
discuss cranial nerves relevant for communication
-
discuss neural mechanisms for language
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Research Design
(Dr. Newman)
Be able to:
- identify how the design of the study limit its conclusions (e.g., ceiling and floor effects, presence of confounding variables, poor generalizeabilty ), and write a discussion about the results of a study taking its limitations into account. You should be able to consider problems of both internal and external validity.
- describe results of ANOVAs (presented in text, table, or figure form) in terms of main effects and interactions Be able to interpret results based on t-tests and correlations.
- identify the dependent and independent variables of a study, and the levels of each.
- discuss principles of subject selection/sampling and group assignment.
- identify the measurement type (nominal, ordinal, etc) of the dependent variable.
- identify the type of design a study has.
- recommend a statistical test for analyzing the results of a study (e.g., ANOVA, t-test for dependent and independent groups).
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