A methodological contribution to the assessment of nonword repetition – a comparison between children with specific language impairment and hearing-impaired children with hearing aids or cochlear implants

from Logopedics Phoniatrics Vocology

Poor nonword repetition is considered as a clinical marker of specific language impairment (SLI). In children with expressive language problems, the analysis and scoring procedures are often insufficiently described. We argue for a combined analysis of segmental and suprasegmental accuracy in nonword repetition tasks as well as an appreciation of gender differences. The view is taken based on empirical findings in a comparison between children with specific language impairment, children with mild/moderate hearing impairment and hearing aids (HI), and children with severe to profound hearing impairment with cochlear implants (CI). With age and gender taken into consideration, the main effects of both group and syllable level on a combined measure of segmental and suprasegmental accuracy remained. Although not necessarily an index of limited working memory capacity, persistently poor imitation of nonwords might be an indication of language impairment in children with mild/moderate HI and in children with CI.

The effect of intellectual disability on the adherence of child witnesses to a “story grammar” framework

from the Journal of Intellectual & Developmental Disability

Background This study examined the ability of 78 children (aged 9-12 years) with an intellectual disability (ID) to provide a narrative account of a staged event they had participated in four days earlier.

Method The children were interviewed using open-ended questions. The quality of their responses (using a story grammar framework) was compared with that of two control groups: mainstream children matched for mental and chronological age.

Results While the children with an ID and those matched for mental age provided narratives of similar length and used similar proportions of each story grammar element, the ID group was less likely than both control groups to provide a narrative account at all. Among those children with an ID who did provide a narrative account, their accounts included proportionately fewer story grammar elements than those of both control groups.

Conclusion Children with an ID are disadvantaged as witnesses with respect to their ability to provide a detailed and coherent narrative account of events under optimal investigative interviewing conditions.

Measuring outcome from Vestibular Rehabilitation, Part I: Qualitative development of a new self-report measure

from the International Journal of Audiology

Research suggests that Vestibular Rehabilitation (VR) is an effective treatment for dizziness, but there is currently no measure specifically designed to assess treatment outcome. A review of existing self-report measures of dizziness indicates that no measure has been designed for longitudinal application and all suffer from limitations which restrict their usefulness in measuring VR outcome. A need for a psychometrically robust patient-oriented measure of quality of life benefit from VR is identified. The aim of the present study was to explore dimensions relevant to VR with a view to developing a measure of outcome. Eighteen adults receiving VR participated in interviews about the quality of life impact of dizziness. Qualitative analysis revealed 64 themes describing self-perceived quality of life impact. Themes were developed into potential questionnaire items and 35 were selected to represent the quality of life impact of dizziness in a prototype questionnaire. A quarter of items in the prototype questionnaire refer to issues not addressed by existing measures; the remaining items draw together issues covered by the range of questionnaires currently in use.

Reading Comprehension in Aging: The Role of Working Memory and Metacomprehension

from Aging, Neuropsychology, and Cognition

This study examines age-related differences in reading comprehension analyzing the role of working memory and metacomprehension components in a sample of young (18-30 years), young-old (65-74 years), and old-old (75-85 years) participants. Text comprehension abilities were measured by a standardized test, including two texts: a narrative and an expository text. The elderly’s reading comprehension performance, when compared to the norm, emerged to be adequate. More specifically, the young-old showed an equivalent level of comprehension as the young adults for the narrative text. However, a clear age-related decline was found in the case of the expository text. Hierarchical regression analyses showed that working memory capacity, as well as different metacomprehension components but not age, are the key aspects in explaining the different patterns of changes in the comprehension of narrative and expository texts.

Exploring the elements of narrative that emerge in the interactions between an 8-year-old child who uses an AAC device and her teacher

from AAC: Augmentative and Alternative Communication

Narrative abilities have been identified as a link to successful school achievement and, in particular, to the acquisition of literacy. Children who use AAC may be at risk of impaired narrative facility due to the differences in their language learning experiences, limitation of their AAC systems, and limitations from constrained access to physical and social environments. In this study, the elements of narrative that emerged in the interactions between an 8-year-old child who used an AAC device and her teacher are described. This assessment was achieved through use of the Narrative Assessment Profile (Bliss, McCabe, & Miranda, 1998) in the context of five tasks designed to elicit a spectrum of narrative features. Results indicate that the interactions between the child and her teacher made it difficult to assess whether or not the child had control of certain features of narrative. From a purely structural analysis, most narrative discourse dimensions appeared to be severely compromised and therefore in need of immediate intervention. Discussion includes aspects of narrative intervention and suggested topics for further research.

Effects of Noise on Identification and Serial Recall of Nonsense Syllables in Older and Younger Adults

from Aging, Neuropsychology, and Cognition

The present experiment investigated the hypothesis that age-related declines in cognitive functioning are partly due to a decrease in peripheral sensory functioning. In particular, it was suggested that some of the decline in serial recall for verbal material might be due to even small amounts of degradation due to noise or hearing loss. Older and younger individuals identified and recalled nonsense syllables in order at a number of different speech-to-noise ratios. Performance on the identification task was significantly correlated with performance on a subsequent serial recall task. However, this was restricted to the case in which the stimuli were presented in a substantial amount of noise. These data show that even small changes in sensory processing can lead to real and measurable declines in cognitive functioning as measured by a serial recall task.

Helping the Deaf Hear Music

from Technology Review

John Redden is a deaf professional musician. He can sing on key, harmonize on key, and hear musical intervals well enough to reproduce them. He does this with a cochlear implant, which is a computer chip surgically embedded in his skull. The chip drives 16 tiny electrodes threaded into his inner ear that stimulate his auditory nerves. It gets auditory data from an external computer sitting on his ear that looks like a hearing aid. Instead of amplifying sound, though, it digitizes it and sends it to the implant by radio through the skin.

Switching language switches mind: linguistic effects on developmental neural bases of ‘Theory of Mind’

from Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience

Theory of mind (ToM)—our ability to predict behaviors of others in terms of their underlying intentions—has been examined through false-belief (FB) tasks. We studied 12 Japanese early bilingual children (8–12 years of age) and 16 late bilingual adults (18–40 years of age) with FB tasks in Japanese [first language (L1)] and English [second language (L2)], using fMRI. Children recruited more brain regions than adults for processing ToM tasks in both languages. Moreover, children showed an overlap in brain activity between the L1 and L2 ToM conditions in the medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC). Adults did not show such a convergent activity in the mPFC region, but instead, showed brain activity that varied depending on the language used in the ToM task. The developmental shift from more to less ToM specific brain activity may reflect increasing automatization of ToM processing as people age. These results also suggest that bilinguals recruit different resources to understand ToM depending on the language used in the task, and this difference is greater later in life.

Youngest patient worldwide to have auditory implant in the brain stem

from EurekAlert.org

A team of ear, nose and throat specialists and neurosurgeons at the University Hospital of Navarra, led by doctors Manuel Manrique Rodríguez, specialist in ear, nose and throat surgery and Bartolomé Bejarano Herruzo, specialist in paediatric neurosurgery, have successfully operated on a 13 month-old girl from Murcia, who had been born deaf due to the lack of auditory nerves. She is the youngest patient in the world who has received an auditory implant in the brain stem. As a result of the operation, the child has begun to hear and started language development.

Language problems seen with anti-migraine drug

from Reuters

Migraine patients taking topiramate, a drug used to stave off the debilitating headaches, may experience disturbances in language, according to a recent report.

The Double-Deficit Hypothesis in Spanish Developmental Dyslexia

from Topics in Language Disorders

This study was designed to explore the double-deficit hypothesis (DDH) of developmental dyslexia in a sample of 133 Spanish children between the ages of 7 and 12 years. Four groups were formed on the basis of their performance in phonemic awareness and rapid automatized naming (RAN): (1) one group with low performance in naming speed (NS), but average in phonological awareness (PA; naming deficit subtype); (2) a second group with low performance in PA, but normal in NS (phonological deficit subtype); (3) a third group with low performance in both variables (double-deficit subtype); and (4) a fourth group with no deficit in PA and NS (control group). The four groups were compared on measures of lexical access (naming word and pseudowords), fluency, orthographic abilities, and reading comprehension. The double-deficit subtype showed the most difficulties with reading, and the presence of deficit in RAN in naming deficit subtype affected measures of fluency but not orthographic abilities. However, fewer differences were noted between single-deficit subgroups. These results are partially consistent with the predictions of the DDH.

Morphological Awareness Skills of English Language Learners and Children With Dyslexia

from Topics in Language Disorders

The purpose of this study was to examine the relation of morphological awareness to reading and spelling skills of children with dyslexia, children who are typical readers, and children who are English language learners (ELLs). Morphological awareness was defined by sensitivity to derivational morphemes, for example, ness, signifying a noun, ize, signifying a verb. The participants were 1,238 students in Grade 6, including 309 ELL students and 929 students who had English as a first language (L1). Morphological awareness was significantly related to reading and spelling over and above the contribution of phonological awareness and oral language skills. Individuals with dyslexia had significantly lower scores than normally achieving readers on the morphological awareness tasks. No differences were reported between the ELL and the English L1 students. All students were less sensitive to derivational morphology when they were required to recognize the appropriate endings on pseudowords, which required a higher level of morphological awareness than real words. Lack of morphological awareness may be a significant contributor to the deficits in reading and spelling characteristic of dyslexic readers and spellers. These results suggest that morphological awareness assessment and training should be administered in children with reading difficulties.

Use of Event-Related Potentials to Identify Language and Reading Skills

from Topics in Language Disorders

Research findings from studies using event-related potential measures of phonological processing support the importance of these measures as correlates and predictors of language and reading skills in school-aged children. A research study is reported focusing on preschool-aged children to understand how event-related potential measures of phonological processing relate to oral language and emergent literacy skills. In this study, 33 preschool-aged children (42–54 months) participated in assessments of receptive and expressive language skills from the Preschool Language Scale and assessment of letter identification from the Wide Range Achievement Test. On the basis of previous findings with older children, it was expected that event-related potential responses would discriminate differences in childrenʼs skills. The results of both analysis of variance and discriminant function analyses showed that event-related potential responses identify differences in letter naming but not receptive language skills as measured in this study.

Exploring the Potential of Constructionist Therapy: Deaf Clients, Hearing Therapists and a Reflecting Team

from the Journal of Deaf Studies and Deaf Education

This article explores the use of constructionist therapy with a reflecting team of hearing therapists seeing deaf clients. Using findings from two in-depth interviews, postsession reflections and a review of the literature, we propose that this model has the potential to cater to the diversity of the lived experiences of deaf people and also to address issues of power and tensions between medical, social, and cultural models of deafness. The interviews found there was real value in sharing multiple perspectives between the reflecting team of hearing therapists and these deaf clients. In addition, the clients reported feeling safe and comfortable with this model of counseling. Other information that emerged from the interviews supports previous findings regarding consistency in interpreting and the importance of hearing therapists having an understanding of the distinctions between Deaf and hearing worlds. As the first investigation of its kind in Australia, this article provides a map for therapists to incorporate reflecting teams with interpreters, deaf clients, and hearing therapists. The value of this article also lies in providing a much needed platform for future research into counseling outcomes and the efficacy of this constructionist model of therapy.

South Africa: Learning Disorder ‘Miracle Cure’ in Spotlight

from allAfrica.com

MIRACLE cure or expensive sham, the jury is out on the Dore Program — which promises “astounding” and “long-term” results for learning difficulties from dyslexia and dyspraxia to autism — that has reached SA.