Introduction. A newly discovered SARS-CoV-2 virus that causes an infectious disease called Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19) has spread around the world. Objectives. The study aims to explore the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on speech-language pathologists (SLPs) clinical service delivery. Accordingly, this study aims to determine which modifications were used in the provision of speech-language pathology (SLP) services and which procedures were used by SLPs in their clinical practice in Bosnia and Herzegovina (B&H) during the third pandemic wave. The second aim of the study was to analyze how many SLPs from B&H used telepractice and what are the barriers to performing this type of work. Methods. The study included 107 SLPs, who voluntarily joined the survey, after sending the questionnaire directly to the e-mail or placing the questionnaire in online SLPs groups. The survey comprised questions to assess participants' demographics, personal protective equipment, procedures, provision of telepractice, and barriers and limitations to telepractice implementation. Results. Results showed that 93.4% of SLPs reported they use measures to prevent and control the COVID-19 pandemic. Only 28% of SLPs used telepractice in their work, which is a very low rate. The majority of SLPs (59.2%) reported that they did not receive the appropriate education about using telepractice. Conclusion. The COVID-19 pandemic led to a change in service delivery by SLPs requiring them to modify their work or to provide services through telepractice.

The aim of this paper was to analyze the spelling errors of children with dyslexia, in order to determine whether they have a specific pattern of spelling errors or are simply late in acquiring spelling skills. The sample included 30 children with dyslexiaand 30 spelling-level-matched younger children. The research was conducted in the area of Sarajevo Canton and Tuzla Canton in the period from March to May 2022. The results showed that children with dyslexia make similar patterns of errors as spelling-level-matched group. The obtained results show that children with dyslexia in transparent orthography do not have a specific deficit in spelling, but rather delay in acquiring spelling skills. Key words:dyslexia, transparent orthography, spelling errors, specific deficit, delay.

The main objective of the study was to determine the developmental abilities of preschool children before and after six months of speech therapy treatment, and to examine the impact of the time of initiation of speech therapy treatment on the developmental abilities of children. The sample consisted of 35 children (20 male children and 15 female children), and all respondents reported early intervention due to speech and language difficulties. The age of the respondents ranged from 25 to 60 months. After conducting interviews with parents, taking anamnestic data, professional speech therapy diagnosticobservational procedure and determining speech-language disorders, the children underwent speech therapy treatment. After six months, a final assessment was made and the results showed statistically significant progress in all variables describing developmental abilities in children. The predictor “Time of treatment initiation” also had a statistically significant impact on all tested variables of developmental abilities of preschool children. The results showed that speech therapy treatment enables significant progress in all developmental areas in children, i.e. that progress in one development area follows the development of other areas.

Abstract The main purpose of this study was to examine the phonological skills among children with reading disabilities of the Bosnian/Croatian/Serbian language, where each phoneme is represented by a grapheme following a certain phonemic principle. The sample consists of 15 children with reading disabilities and 15 children without reading disabilities, where "The diagnostic set for examination of the speech, language, reading and writing abilities among children" was used for examination of their phonological capacity. Phonological skills in children are very important for reading and writing acquisition. The results of the study showed that children with reading disabilities achieved poorer results in all tasks examining the phonological skills, compared to children without reading difficulties. The results of our study comply with results of studies conducted for other languages. The study highlights the importance of the mentioned skills for acquiring reading skills in the Bosnian/Croatian/Serbian language and the significance of deficient phonological abilities for the etiology of reading disabilities. Based on the conducted study, it can be concluded that phonological skills are very important for acquiring reading and writing abilities. Key words: reading disabilities, phonological skills, phonemic synthesis and analysis 1. Introduction Phonology deals with the system of sounds that exist within a specific language, whereas phonetics deals with the physical reality of the speech sounds, independently of their meaning and function (1). Phonological skills involve the manipulation of phonological constituents of the spoken words in tasks such as blending, segmenting and rhyming. Different researchers reported that children who learn to read well can rhyme at the age of four and they can blend and segment orally presented words and sounds by the end of first grade (2). A number of longitudinal studies found that children who show poor phonological awareness before they have learned to read are at risk of developing a reading disability (3). Reading accuracy is well predicted by early phonological and language skills (4). The relationship between phonemic awareness and learning to read is a two-way process: phonemic awareness is a precondition for learning to read and learning to read facilitates further progress of phonemic awareness (5). Results of different studies showed that phonemic awareness does not develop itself spontaneously, but it partly depends on the literacy (6). When the child learns to read, he/she must be able to detect phonemes that make up spoken words in order to understand that these separate sound units can be represented by letters or group of letters, that is, graphemes in the written language. If the child has not mastered phoneme segmenting, it will be very difficult for him/her to achieve reading and writing fluency (7). In the past 15 years, it has been considered that deficient phonological processing represents the main cause of reading and writing difficulties (8). Most cases of reading disabilities arise because of difficulties in the process of word recognition. These difficulties occur due to deficiencies in the processes of phonological coding, where letter patterns are transformed into phonological codes (9). Dyslexia involves deficiency within the language system, especially at the level of a phonological module. Children with dyslexia need more time to retrieve appropriate phonemes and sometimes while speaking these children retrieve a phoneme that sounds similar to the one they intended to pronounce. The children with dyslexia lack phonemic awareness and they experience difficulty noticing basic sounds - phonemes that make up all spoken and written words (10). The majority of studies about phonological skills among children with dyslexia have been conducted in English speaking countries. The Bosnian language is characterized with a phonemic alphabet, where each letter conesponds to one sound. …