Cochlear implant in the carotid canal. Case report and literature review

Post-operative CT-scan allowed the diagnosis. The misplaced cochlear implant in the carotid canal was successfully removed and a successful re-implantation followed immediately. Anatomy of the interval between the cochlea and the carotid canal is reviewed, together with information regarding the neural telemetry response.

In each case, specific anatomical landmarks must be identified to perform the cochleostomy in the right position. If not, or if surgery proves itself difficult, the surgeon should intra-operatively control the position of the electrode.

from the International Journal of Pediatric Otorhinolaryngology

Glottic Closure Patterns: Type I Thyroplasty Versus Type I Thyroplasty With Arytenoid Adduction

Although larger glottic gaps and vertical height discrepancies may lead some surgeons to predict that an AA is warranted, the usefulness of AA may not always be related to these parameters. Ultimately, voice improvement and not geometry should guide the surgeon’s decision making.

from the Journal of Voice

Cochlear implant in the carotid canal. Case report and literature review

Post-operative CT-scan allowed the diagnosis. The misplaced cochlear implant in the carotid canal was successfully removed and a successful re-implantation followed immediately. Anatomy of the interval between the cochlea and the carotid canal is reviewed, together with information regarding the neural telemetry response.

In each case, specific anatomical landmarks must be identified to perform the cochleostomy in the right position. If not, or if surgery proves itself difficult, the surgeon should intra-operatively control the position of the electrode.

from the International Journal of Pediatric Otorhinolaryngology

From mathematics to language: A novel intervention for sentence comprehension difficulties in aphasia

We report an intervention for severe and chronic sentence comprehension difficulties that used the intact resources of one symbolic system (mathematics) to scaffold impaired capacity in a second symbolic system (language). The study evaluated the outcome of therapy for participant SO. SO retained the ability to understand structural principles such as reversibility in mathematics. The therapy attempted to link this awareness to language expressions in order to enhance his understanding of canonical active sentences. The investigation employed a single case study design, with multiple-baselines. Behaviour was measured prior to intervention, immediately post-intervention, and following an eight week no-therapy maintenance period. A four component therapy programme lasting five weeks was implemented. Untreated control behaviours displayed only minor change following intervention. The intervention resulted in significant and stable improvement in treated behaviours with increased scores for sentence comprehension, including the comprehension of spoken and written reversible sentences. There was generalisation of gains to untreated sentences, and also to sentences which shared the verb, but not the noun phrases of the treated sentences.

from the Journal of Neurolinguistics

“My Way or Mom’s Way?” The Bilingual and Bicultural Self in Hong Kong Chinese Children and Adolescents

This study examined the relation of language to the development of a cultural self. Bilingual children ages 8–14 from Hong Kong (N = 125) were interviewed in either English or Chinese. They recalled autobiographical events and described themselves, and indicated their agreement with Chinese interdependent versus Western independent values. Children interviewed in English provided more elaborate and self-focused self-descriptions and memory accounts and endorsed more strongly Western values, compared with children interviewed in Chinese. Furthermore, the endorsement of a cultural belief system mediated the effect of language on self-concept, which, in turn, mediated the effect of language on autobiographical memory. These findings offer new insight into the dynamic relations between language, culture, and the self.

from Child Development

Categorization in 3- and 4-Month-Old Infants: An Advantage of Words Over Tones

Neonates prefer human speech to other nonlinguistic auditory stimuli. However, it remains an open question whether there are any conceptual consequences of words on object categorization in infants younger than 6 months. The current study examined the influence of words and tones on object categorization in forty-six 3- to 4-month-old infants. Infants were familiarized to different exemplars of a category accompanied by either a labeling phrase or a tone sequence. In test, infants viewed novel category and new within-category exemplars. Infants who heard labeling phrases provided evidence of categorization at test while infants who heard tone sequences did not, suggesting that infants as young as 3 months of age treat words and tones differently vis-à-vis object categorization.

from Child Development

Children Monitor Individuals’ Expertise for Word Learning

Two experiments examined preschoolers’ ability to learn novel words using others’ expertise about objects’ nonobvious properties. In Experiment 1, 4-year-olds (n = 24) endorsed individuals’ labels for objects based on their differing causal knowledge about those objects. Experiment 2 examined the robustness of this inference and its development. Four-year-olds (n = 40) endorsed labels from confederates who accurately predicted objects’ nonobvious internal properties but not nonobvious external properties. Three-year-olds (n = 40) performed at chance levels in both cases and were less likely to recognize the informants’ expertise, suggesting that they might be unable to monitor individuals’ expertise. These data suggest that children’s ability to learn from testimony is necessary for their understanding of the relevance of an individual’s expertise.

from Child Development

Preschoolers’ Implicit and Explicit False-Belief Understanding: Relations With Complex Syntactical Mastery

Three studies were carried out to investigate sentential complements being the critical device that allows for false-belief understanding in 3- and 4-year-olds (N = 102). Participants across studies accurately gazed in anticipation of a character’s mistaken belief in a predictive looking task despite erring on verbal responses for direct false-belief questions. Gaze was independent of complement mastery. These patterns held when other low-verbal false-belief tasks were considered and the predictive looking task was presented as a time-controlled film. While implicit (gaze) knowledge predicted explicit (verbal) false-belief understanding, complement mastery and cognitive flexibility also supported explicit reasoning. Overall, explicit false-belief understanding is complexly underpinned by implicit knowledge and input from higher-order systems of language and executive control.

from Child Development

The Tuning of Human Neonates’ Preference for Speech

Human neonates prefer listening to speech compared to many nonspeech sounds, suggesting that humans are born with a bias for speech. However, neonates’ preference may derive from properties of speech that are not unique but instead are shared with the vocalizations of other species. To test this, thirty neonates and sixteen 3-month-olds were presented with nonsense speech and rhesus monkey vocalizations. Neonates showed no preference for speech over rhesus vocalizations but showed a preference for both these sounds over synthetic sounds. In contrast, 3-month-olds preferred speech to rhesus vocalizations. Neonates’ initial biases minimally include speech and monkey vocalizations. These listening preferences are sharpened over 3 months, yielding a species-specific preference for speech, paralleling findings on infant face perception.

from Child Development

Early Gesture Predicts Language Delay in Children With Pre- or Perinatal Brain Lesions

Does early gesture use predict later productive and receptive vocabulary in children with pre- or perinatal unilateral brain lesions (PL)? Eleven Children with PL were categorized into 2 groups based on whether their gesture at 18 months was within or below the range of typically developing (TD) children. Children with PL whose gesture was within the TD range developed a productive vocabulary at 22 and 26 months and a receptive vocabulary at 30 months that were all within the TD range. In contrast, children with PL below the TD range did not. Gesture was thus an early marker of which children with early unilateral lesions would eventually experience language delay, suggesting that gesture is a promising diagnostic tool for persistent delay.

from Child Development

Not Doing What You Are Told: Early Perseverative Errors in Updating Mental Representations via Language

This research examined the ability of young (N = 96) children to learn about a change in the location of a hidden object, either via an adult’s verbal testimony or from direct observation. Thirty-month-olds searched with equal accuracy whether they were told about the change or directly observed it. By contrast, when 23-month-olds were told about the change of location, they often returned to the container where they had last observed the object—even when that container was visibly empty. When interference from prior observational encoding was minimized, 23-month-olds, and even 19-month-olds, successfully updated their knowledge of the object’s location on the basis of language. The processing demands of updating experience-based representations from new verbal information are discussed.

from Child Development

Genetic variation in G72 correlates with brain activation in the right middle temporal gyrus in a verbal fluency task in healthy individuals

The D-amino acid oxidase activator gene (G72) has been found associated with several psychiatric disorders such as schizophrenia, major depression, and bipolar disorder. Impaired performance in verbal fluency tasks is an often replicated finding in the mentioned disorders. In functional neuroimaging studies, this dysfunction has been linked to signal changes in prefrontal and lateral temporal areas and could possibly constitute an endophenotype. Therefore, it is of interest whether genes associated with the disorders, such as G72, modulate verbal fluency performance and its neural correlates. Ninety-six healthy individuals performed a semantic verbal fluency task while brain activation was measured with functional MRI. All subjects were genotyped for two single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNP) in the G72 gene, M23 (rs3918342) and M24 (rs1421292), that have previously shown association with the above-mentioned disorders. The effect of genotype on brain activation was assessed with fMRI during a semantic verbal fluency task. Although there were no differences in performance, brain activation in the right middle temporal gyrus (BA 39) and the right precuneus (BA 7) was positively correlated with the number of M24 risk alleles in the G72 gene. G72 genotype does modulate brain activation during language production on a semantic level in key language areas. These findings are in line with structural and functional imaging studies in schizophrenia, which showed alterations in the right middle temporal gyrus. Hum Brain Mapp, 2010. © 2010 Wiley-Liss, Inc.

from Human Brain Mapping

Item response theory analysis of the Western Aphasia Battery

Conclusions: These results suggest that the WAB may be productively fit to an IRT-based measurement model, and that such models may be used to improve the psychometric properties of aphasia tests. Benefits include indices of severity and score reliability that are more valid than those currently in use, and the potential for improved efficiency of testing through adaptive administration.

from Aphasiology

Morphological-syntactic deficits in the production of Slovak-speaking aphasic patients

Conclusions: This analysis revealed morphological-syntactic deficits in Slovak-speaking aphasic patients. The results indicate that the symptoms depend not only on the type of aphasia but also on the degree of Broca’s aphasia. We compared these results with studies carried out in other languages (for example, Czech, Polish, Serbo-Croatian, Hungarian, Turkish).

from Aphasiology

Sound Production Treatment: Application with severe apraxia of speech

Conclusions: Results for this speaker with severe AOS and verbal perseverations were similar to those previously reported for SPT. The decrease in performance from 10 weeks to 15 weeks indicated that changes in behaviour had not been sufficiently instantiated. Furthermore, these findings suggested that maintenance probing may need to be conducted over a considerably longer period of time than has previously been reported in the literature.

from Aphasiology