Monthly Archives: July 2009
Progressive language impairments: Definitions, diagnoses, and prognoses
Conclusions: The range of classification systems in use emphasise the importance of specifying the criteria used to reach a particular diagnosis, and the clinical symptoms on which the diagnosis is based. As pharmacological or other treatments become available to target the neuropathological mechanisms in these diseases, a primary diagnostic goal will be to identify the likely neuropathology in order to match clients to appropriate therapies at the earliest opportunity.
from Aphasiology
Speech pathology services for primary progressive aphasia: Exploring an emerging area of practice
Conclusion: PPA appears to be an area of under-referral for speech pathologists in NSW. We would like to see increased referrals to speech pathology services and promotion of the role of the speech pathologist on dementia care teams. There is evidence that speech pathology intervention with this population can be effective. It is recommended that intervention targets both impairment and activity-participation levels but also we stress the importance of education and support that is specifically tailored to those with progressive language disorders.
from Aphasiology
When nouns and verbs degrade: Facilitating communication in semantic dementia
Conclusions: Targeting conversational effectiveness in terms of communicative functions offers a promising and ecologically valuable intervention for people with semantic dementia, as it allows individuals with this form of dementia to connect meaningfully with people in their immediate surroundings well into the later stages of the disease.
from Aphasiology
Learning Disabilities, Dyslexia, and Vision
Learning disabilities, including reading disabilities, are commonly diagnosed in children. Their etiologies are multifactorial, reflecting genetic influences and dysfunction of brain systems. Learning disabilities are complex problems that require complex solutions. Early recognition and referral to qualified educational professionals for evidence-based evaluations and treatments seem necessary to achieve the best possible outcome. Most experts believe that dyslexia is a language-based disorder. Vision problems can interfere with the process of learning; however, vision problems are not the cause of primary dyslexia or learning disabilities. Scientific evidence does not support the efficacy of eye exercises, behavioral vision therapy, or special tinted filters or lenses for improving the long-term educational performance in these complex pediatric neurocognitive conditions. Diagnostic and treatment approaches that lack scientific evidence of efficacy, including eye exercises, behavioral vision therapy, or special tinted filters or lenses, are not endorsed and should not be recommended.
from Pediatrics
Meta-Analysis of Neurobehavioral Outcomes in Very Preterm and/or Very Low Birth Weight Children
CONCLUSIONS: Very preterm and/or VLBW children have moderate-to-severe deficits in academic achievement, attention problems, and internalizing behavioral problems and poor EF, which are adverse outcomes that were strongly correlated to their immaturity at birth. During transition to young adulthood these children continue to lag behind term-born peers.
from Pediatrics
Personal power and positional power in a power-full `I’: a discourse analysis of doctoral dissertation supervision
This article explicates the specific manners in which professorial power is indexed and implemented in the first personal pronoun `I’ in academic discourse. The matter of analytic interest is to find out how the semiotic sign `I’ acquires its semantic property of power in the pragmatic context of doctoral supervision. The data under consideration consist of two dyadic interactions conducted respectively by a PhD candidate with her two supervisors in an American university. The data analyses reveal that professorial power may be performed in two different ways (personal and positional) in three types of communicative acts — directive, evaluative, and explanative. The findings here may have some important implications for academic supervision in terms of the relationship between language and power.
Health Tip: Wax Buildup May Cause Hearing Loss
HealthDay News) — Inside your ear, there are glands that produce a waxy oil called cerumen. This helps protect your ear from dust, germs and other foreign substances, but too much wax buildup can trigger hearing loss.
The U.S. National Library of Medicine offers these warning signs of wax buildup in the ear:
Pain in the ear.
Hearing loss that tends to worsen over time.
Ringing in the ear.
A feeling that the ear is plugged or clogged.
A feeling of fullness or pressure inside the ear.
Copyright © 2009 Elsevier Ltd All rights reserved. Voice perception in blind persons: A functional magnetic resonance imaging study
Early blind persons have often been shown to be superior to sighted ones across a wide range of non-visual perceptual abilities, which in turn are often explained by the functionally relevant recruitment of occipital areas. While voice stimuli are known to involve voice-selective areas of the superior temporal sulcus (STS) in sighted persons, it remains unknown if the processing of vocal stimuli involves similar brain regions in blind persons, or whether it benefits from cross-modal processing. To address these questions, we used fMRI to measure cerebral responses to voice and non-voice stimuli in blind (congenital and acquired) and sighted subjects. The global comparison of all sounds vs. silence showed a different pattern of activation between blind (pooled congenital and acquired) and sighted groups, with blind subjects showing stronger activation of occipital areas but weaker activation of temporal areas centered around Heschl’s gyrus. In contrast, the specific comparison of vocal vs. non-vocal sounds did not isolate activations in the occipital areas in either of the blind groups. In the congenitally blind group, however, it led to a stronger activation in the left STS, and to a lesser extent in the fusiform cortex, compared to both sighted participants and those with acquired blindness. Moreover, STS activity in congenital blind participants significantly correlated with performance in a voice discrimination task. This increased recruitment of STS areas in the blind for voice processing is in marked contrast with the usual cross-modal recruitment of occipital cortex.
from Brain and Language
Agrammatic comprehension caused by a glioma in the left frontal cortex
It has been known that lesions in the left inferior frontal gyrus (L. IFG) do not always cause Broca’s aphasia, casting doubt upon the specificity of this region. We have previously devised a picture–sentence matching task for a functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) study, and observed that both pars triangularis (L. F3t) of L. IFG (extending to pars opercularis (L. F3op)) and the left lateral premotor cortex (L. LPMC) are selectively involved in syntactic processing. The present study with lesion-symptoms mapping was conducted to examine whether the function of these regions is indeed critical for syntactic comprehension. Using the same picture–sentence matching task, we examined 21 patients with a glioma in the left frontal cortex but with no apparent disability in verbal/written communication or intelligence quotient. This task included three main conditions of sentence types: canonical/subject-initial active sentences, non-canonical/subject-initial passive sentences, and non-canonical/object-initial scrambled sentences. The patients preoperatively underwent a high-resolution 3D-MRI, and voxel-based lesion-symptom mapping was employed for the error rates data. We found that the patients with a lesion in L. F3op/F3t or L. LPMC showed differential patterns of condition-selective deficits in the comprehension of sentences. More specifically, the L. F3op/F3t-damaged patients had more profound deficits in the comprehension of non-canonical sentences, whereas the L. LPMC-damaged patients had more profound deficits in the comprehension of object-initial scrambled sentences. These results establish that a lesion in L. F3op/F3t or L. LPMC is sufficient to cause agrammatic comprehension.
from Brain and Language
How well do poor language scores at ages 3 and 4 predict poor language scores at age 6?
Abstract
The purpose of this study was to describe findings and associations at the group level, and predictive accuracy at the individual level, for three measures of language obtained from a single prospective cohort of US children assessed at three ages during another investigation. Participants comprised all children (n = 414) who had a score at each of three ages (3, 4, and 6 years) on three language measures: Peabody Picture Vocabulary Test-Revised (PPVT); mean length of utterance in morphemes (MLU); and total percentage of phonemes correct (TOTPPC) in a nonword repetition task. At the group level, mean differences and correlations over ages were calculated. At the individual level, the extent to which low scores (1.5 SDs or more below the sample mean) at an earlier age increased the relative risk (R’) of low scores at a later age was calculated. At the group level, scores on all measures increased significantly with age. Earlier and later scores on each measure were significantly correlated; r2 values were generally modest (12-59%). A low score at age 3 did not increase the risk of a low score age 4 or age 6 for any of the measures; a low PPVT score at age 4 significantly increased the risk (R’ = 5.0) of a low PPVT score at age 6. For these generally healthy children and these language measures, predictive accuracy at the individual level was generally poor between the ages of 3, 4, and 6 years. Large, longitudinal studies are needed to identify and validate measures for use in identifying preschool children at risk for later language deficits.
Copyright © 2009 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. Letter-transposition effects are not universal: The impact of transposing letters in Hebrew
We examined the effects of letter-transposition in Hebrew in three masked-priming experiments. Hebrew, like English has an alphabetic orthography where sequential and contiguous letter strings represent phonemes. However, being a Semitic language it has a non-concatenated morphology that is based on root derivations. Experiment 1 showed that transposed-letter (TL) root primes inhibited responses to targets derived from the non-transposed root letters, and that this inhibition was unrelated to relative root frequency. Experiment 2 replicated this result and showed that if the transposed letters of the root created a nonsense-root that had no lexical representation, then no inhibition and no facilitation were obtained. Finally, Experiment 3 demonstrated that in contrast to English, French, or Spanish, TL nonword primes did not facilitate recognition of targets, and when the root letters embedded in them consisted of a legal root morpheme, they produced inhibition. These results suggest that lexical space in alphabetic orthographies may be structured very differently in different languages if their morphological structure diverges qualitatively. In Hebrew, lexical space is organized according to root families rather than simple orthographic structure, so that all words derived from the same root are interconnected or clustered together, independent of overall orthographic similarity.
from the Journal of Memory and Language
Echo-Location In Humans Developed By Spanish Scientists
A team of researchers from the University of Alcalá de Henares (UAH) has shown scientifically that human beings can develop echolocation, the system of acoustic signals used by dolphins and bats to explore their surroundings. Producing certain kinds of tongue clicks helps people to identify objects around them without needing to see them, something which would be especially useful for the blind.
“In certain circumstances, we humans could rival bats in our echolocation or biosonar capacity”, Juan Antonio Martínez, lead author of the study and a researcher at the Superior Polytechnic School of the UAH, tells SINC. The team led by this scientist has started a series of tests, the first of their kind in the world, to make use of human beings’ under-exploited echolocation skills.
In the first study, published in the journal Acta Acustica united with Acustica, the team analyses the physical properties of various sounds, and proposes the most effective of these for use in echolocation. “The almost ideal sound is the ‘palate click, a click made by placing the tip of the tongue on the palate, just behind the teeth, and moving it quickly backwards, although it is often done downwards, which is wrong”, Martínez explains.
Children with autism need to be taught in smaller groups, pilot study confirms
NEW YORK, July 1, 2009 – Since the 1970s, there has been much debate surrounding the fact that individuals with autism have difficulty in understanding speech in situations where there is background speech or noise.
Today, at the annual meeting of the International Multisensory Research Forum (June 29th – July 2nd) being held at The City College of New York (CCNY), neuroscientists announced conclusive evidence to verify this fact.
Speaking at the conference, Dr. John J. Foxe, Professor of Neuroscience at CCNY said: “Sensory integration dysfunction has long been speculated to be a core component of autism spectrum disorder (ASD) but there has been precious little hard empirical evidence to support this notion. Viewing a speaker’s articulatory movements can greatly improve a listener’s ability to understand spoken words, and this is especially the case under noisy environmental conditions.”Delegates to the 10th annual meeting of the International Multisensory Research Forum view poster session in the Lincoln Corridor of Shepard Hall.
“These results are the first of their kind to verify that children with autism have substantial difficulties in these situations, and this has major implications for how we go about teaching these children in the classroom,” he continued. “Children with autism may become distressed in large classroom settings simply because they are unable to understand basic speech if the environment is sufficiently noisy.
“We should start to pay attention to the need for smaller numbers in the classroom and we need to carefully control the levels of background noise that these kids are exposed to. Imagine how frustrating it must be to sit in a classroom without being able to properly understand what the teacher or your classmates are saying to you.
“Being able to detect speech in noise plays a vital role in how we communicate with each other because our listening environments are almost never quiet. Even the hum of air conditioners or fans that we can easily ignore may adversely impact these children’s ability to understand speech in the classroom.
“Our data show that the multisensory speech system develops relatively slowly across the childhood years and that considerable tuning of this system continues to occur even into early adolescence. Our data suggest that children with Autism lag almost 5 years behind typically developing children in this crucial multisensory ability.”
Professor Foxe concluded that further studies may result in advances in the understanding of ASD and the communication abilities of individuals with autism by identifying the neural mechanisms that are at the root of these multisensory deficits. This will be an important step if viable intervention and training strategies are to be developed.
###
The 10th International Multisensory Research Forum (IMRF) began Monday, June 29, and continues until Thursday, July 2. This four-day meeting has brought together more than 400 scientists from around the world.
IMRF provides an invaluable platform for neuroscientists to stay abreast of the latest advances in multisensory research. The conference features presentations and talks by prominent researchers in the field of multisensory research, from a host of different backgrounds – neurophysiology, anatomy, psychophysics, development and modeling – all interested in how the senses combine and interact to drive perception and behavior.
“This is one of the largest forums in the world whereby neuroscientists have the opportunity to offer insights, exchange, debate and collaborate on current research into multisensory integration, most of which have numerous practical everyday applications, for example, the clinical profession working in the area of autism,” said Dr. Sophie Molholm, Associate Professor of Psychology and Cognitive Neuroscience at CCNY and local organizer for the conference.
Cystic Fibrosis Treatment May Cause Hearing Loss
Patients who underwent more than five treatments with nasal irrigation of aminoglycosides were also at risk for sensorineural hearing loss, the study found.
Pulmonary and sinonasal infections are common in cystic fibrosis patients. Because of their potency against bacteria, aminoglycosides are often given to cystic fibrosis patients, even though the treatments are known to cause side effects such as hair cell loss, which leads to hearing loss, according to information in a news release from the American Academy of Otolaryngology — Head and Neck Surgery.
Cystic fibrosis patients should have regular hearing tests that specifically assess sensorineural hearing loss, especially when patients have undergone repeated courses of systemic or intranasal aminoglycoside treatments, the researchers concluded.
The study appears in the July issue of the journal Otolaryngology–Head and Neck Surgery.
from the International Journal of Language and Communication Disorders
