Browsing by Person "Finlayson, Ian R."

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A national study to investigate the clinical use of standardised instruments in autism spectrum disorder assessment of children and adults in Scotland
(Elsevier, 2016-07-07) Rutherford, Marion; McKenzie, Karen; McClure, Iain; Forsyth, Kirsty; O'Hare, Anne; McCartney, Deborah; Finlayson, Ian R.; Scottish Government
Background: There are few large scale studies about the nature and extent of the actual use of standardised assessments for Autism Spectrum Disorder diagnosis in clinical practice. This study compares and contrasts practice in diagnostic services for both adults and children. Method: We conducted an analysis of retrospective case notes from 150 cases (70 adult, 80 children) assessed for Autism Spectrum Disorder by 16 diagnostic services. Results: We found differences between adult and child services in staff training and use of standardised assessment during diagnosis. All child services had staff trained in and regularly using standardised assessments. Most adult services had staff trained in using instruments but only half used them regularly. Administration of standardised ASD assessments was ten times more likely in children than in adults (OR = 10.1; CI = 4.24, 24.0). Child services selected the ADOS as the standardised tool and Adult services selected the DISCO, with very little overlap. Decisions to administer standardised tools were not based on case complexity but rather the same process was applied to all referrals within a service. The three recommended components of assessment (clinical history, clinical observation and contextual information) were included for the majority of cases, although clinical observation was more frequently used with children than with adults. Conclusions: Based on the findings, we suggest a need for a wider range of appropriate assessments for use with adults, particularly those with an intellectual disability and for further research into the reasons behind the choices clinicians make during the assessment process. For child services in Scotland, there is a need for more training in use of current diagnostic interviews. Clinicians did not vary tools used based on complexity, suggesting that this is a notion still to be clearly defined and operationalised in clinical decision making about the use of standardised assessments.
Disfluency in dialogue: An intentional signal from the speaker?
(Psychonomic Society, 2012) Finlayson, Ian R.; Corley, Martin
Disfluency is a characteristic feature of spontaneous human speech, commonly seen as a consequence of problems with production. However, the question remains open as to why speakers are disfluent: Is it a mechanical by-product of planning difficulty, or do speakers use disfluency in dialogue to manage listeners' expectations? To address this question, we present two experiments investigating the production of disfluency in monologue and dialogue situations. Dialogue affected the linguistic choices made by participants, who aligned on referring expressions by choosing less frequent names for ambiguous images where those names had previously been mentioned. However, participants were no more disfluent in dialogue than in monologue situations, and the distribution of types of disfluency used remained constant. Our evidence rules out at least a straightforward interpretation of the view that disfluencies are an intentional signal in dialogue. 2012 Psychonomic Society, Inc.
Mixed effects modelling and longitudinal data analysis
(Routledge, 2015-07) Cunnings, Ian; Finlayson, Ian R.; Plonsky, Luke
Testing the roles of disfluency and rate of speech in the coordination of conversation
(Queen Margaret University, Edinburgh, 2014) Finlayson, Ian R.
This thesis is concerned with two different accounts of how speakers coordinate conversation. In both accounts it is suggested that aspects of the manner in which speech is performed (its disfluency and its rate) are integral to the smooth performance of conversation. In the first strand, we address Clark's (1996) suggestion that speakers design hesitations, such as filled pauses (e.g. uh and um), repetitions and prolongations, to signal to their audience that they are experiencing difficulties during language production. Such signals allow speakers to account for their use of time, particularly when they experience disruptions during production. The account is tested against three criteria, proposed by Kraljic and Brennan (2005), for evaluating whether a feature of speech is being designed: That it be produced with regularity, that it be interpretable by listeners, and that its production varies according to the speaker's communicative intention. While existing literature offers support for the first two criteria, neither an experiment with dyads nor analyses of dialogue in the Map Task Corpus (MTC; Anderson et al., 1991) found support for the third criterion. We conclude that, rather than being signals of difficulty, hesitations are merely symptoms which listeners may exploit to aid comprehension. In the second strand, we tested Wilson and Wilson's (2005) oscillator theory of the timing of turn-taking. This suggests that entrainment between conversational partners' rates of speech allow them to make precise predictions about when each others' turns are going to end, and, subsequently, when they can begin a turn of their own. As a critical test of the theory, we predicted that speakers who were more tightly entrained would produce more seamless turn-taking. Again using the MTC, we found no evidence of a relationship between how closely entrained speakers were and how precisely they timed the beginning of their turns relative to the ends of each others' turns.