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Purpose: Stuttering is a speech condition that can have a major impact on a person's quality of life. This descriptive study aimed to identify subgroups of people who stutter (PWS) based on stuttering burden and to investigate differences between these subgroups on psychosocial aspects of life. Method: The study included 618 adult participants who stutter. They completed a detailed survey examining stuttering symptomatology, impact of stuttering on anxiety, education and employment, experience of stuttering, and levels of depression, anxiety, and stress. A two-step cluster analytic procedure was performed to identify subgroups of PWS, based on self-report of stuttering frequency, severity, affect, and anxiety, four measures that together inform about stuttering burden. Results: We identified a high- (n = 230) and a low-burden subgroup (n = 372). The high-burden subgroup reported a significantly higher impact of stuttering on education and employment, and higher levels of general depression, anxiety, stress, and overall impact of stuttering. These participants also reported that they trialed more different stuttering therapies than those with lower burden. Conclusions: Our results emphasize the need to be attentive to the diverse experiences and needs of PWS, rather than treating them as a homogeneous group. Our findings also stress the importance of personalized therapeutic strategies for individuals with stuttering, considering all aspects that could influence their stuttering burden. People with high-burden stuttering might, for example, have a higher need for psychological therapy to reduce stuttering-related anxiety. People with less emotional reactions but severe speech distortions may also have a moderate to high burden, but they may have a higher need for speech techniques to communicate with more ease. Future research should give more insights into the therapeutic needs of people highly burdened by their stuttering.

Even with increased efforts to close the academic gap by providing appropriate services to students with disabilities, there is still a gap in outcomes that requires identification of possible contributing factors. One often hypothesized mechanism for these continued disparities is the stigma associated with disability categorization or "labeling bias." However, there is paucity of scholarship that addresses effective ways to reduce labeling bias within the classroom. This study draws from the dual-process model to experimentally investigate if a short video clip moves participants from System 1 implicit thinking to System 2 deliberate thinking resulting in reduced biases in expectations of behavior. This study utilized an experimental, between-subjects, vignette factorial design to measure pre-service educator perceptions of inappropriate behaviors between students with and without an identified disability label. The results of analysis of covariance and "post hoc" testing indicate significant interaction effects between the label of the student and the video clip. Specifically, biased responses by disability label were dependent on whether the participant was assigned to the video clip condition. Participants in the video condition indicated an expectation of reduced behaviors for the positively associated label condition and increased behaviors for the negatively associated label condition. Practical implications and limitations are discussed.

Purpose: The aim of this study is to establish which specific cognitive abilities are phenotypically related to reading skill in adolescence and determine whether this phenotypic correlation is explained by polygenetic overlap. Method: In an Australian population sample of twins and non-twin siblings of European ancestry (734 [less than or equal to] N [less than or equal to] 1542 [50.7% < F < 66%], mean age = 16.7, range = 11-28 years) from the Brisbane Adolescent Twin Study, mixed-effects models were used to test the association between a dyslexia polygenic score (based on genome-wide association results from a study of 51,800 dyslexics versus >1 million controls) and quantitative cognitive measures. The variance in the cognitive measure explained by the polygenic score was compared to that explained by a reading difficulties phenotype (scores that were lower than 1.5 SD below the mean reading skill) to derive the proportion of the association due to genetic influences. Results: The strongest phenotypic correlations were between poor reading and verbal tests R[superscript 2] up to 6.2%); visuo-spatial working memory was the only measure that did not show association with poor reading. Dyslexia polygenic scores could completely explain the phenotypic covariance between poor reading and most working memory tasks and were most predictive of performance on a test of arithmetic (R[superscript 2] = 2.9%). Conclusion: Shared genetic pathways are thus highlighted for the commonly found association between reading and mathematics abilities, and for the verbal short-term/working memory deficits often observed in dyslexia.

After-school youth development programs support social-emotional functioning which leads to better academic and behavioral outcomes. This article examines three common predictors of social-emotional functioning individually and concurrently to better understand the role of these predictors in the after-school setting. The common predictors are staff/student relationships, sense of belonging, and program engagement. That data came from 144, 3rd through 8th grade, students across 9 different elementary and middle school sites who regularly attended a large youth development program. Regression analyses were run and the results indicated that each variable was an individually significant predictor of social-emotional functioning. Results from multiple regression analyses demonstrated that there was a better model fit when including all three variables in the same model. Interestingly, the results indicated that program engagement was a strong predictor above and beyond staff/student relationships and sense of belonging on self-management and self-efficacy. Sense of belonging and program engagement both predicted social awareness. Implications of these findings for after-school program planning and development are discussed.

Several abilities outside literacy proper are associated with reading and spelling, both phenotypically and genetically, though our knowledge of multivariate genomic covariance structures is incomplete. Here, we introduce structural models describing genetic and residual influences between traits to study multivariate links across measures of literacy, phonological awareness, oral language, and phonological working memory (PWM) in unrelated UK youth (8-13 years, N = 6453). We find that all phenotypes share a large proportion of underlying genetic variation, although especially oral language and PWM reveal substantial differences in their genetic variance composition with substantial trait-specific genetic influences. Multivariate genetic and residual trait covariance showed concordant patterns, except for marked differences between oral language and literacy/phonological awareness, where strong genetic links contrasted near-zero residual overlap. These findings suggest differences in etiological mechanisms, acting beyond a pleiotropic set of genetic variants, and implicate variation in trait modifiability even among phenotypes that have high genetic correlations.