An investigation into the personal financial costs associated with stuttering

Stuttering has been found to deteriorate quality of life in psychological, emotional and social functioning domains. It is reasonable to assume then that stuttering would also be associated with economic consequences that may also challenge quality of life. Remarkably, the personal financial costs associated with stuttering in adults has rarely if ever been explored or investigated in the fluency disorders field. This study involved an assessment of the personal costs of stuttering and an investigation into determinants that may influence spending. Two hundred adults who stutter participated in this study. Findings indicated that the average total cost was around $5,500 (median cost $4,165) in 2007/08 Australian dollars over a five year period. Major financial items included costs of direct and indirect treatments for stuttering, self-help, stuttering related conferences, and technology. Financial costs were not significantly influenced by the sex of the person, annual income, or by how severe the person stuttered. However, those individuals younger than 60 years old spent significantly more on treatment related costs, while those with elevated levels of social anxiety spent significantly less than those with lower levels of social anxiety. Quality of life implications associated with stuttering are discussed.

from Journal of Fluency Disorders

Stuttering after right cerebellar infarction: A case study

We report a male patient with neurogenic stuttering after cerebellar infarction. He had suffered from frontal and thalamus damage and he had exhibited aphasia, but his speech had been fluent until onset of the cerebellar infarction. Results of analysis of speech samples included the following: (1) The patient showed very frequent syllable repetition and part-word repetition. (2) The stuttering occurrence rate at the second test was much higher than at the first test. (3) Almost all stuttering occurred on initial word sounds; stuttering on the medial and final word was less frequent. (4) Adaptation effect was absent. (5) Secondary behaviors such as closing of the eyes and grimacing were observed. The internal model related to cerebellar functions can be modified using feedback error information. Results suggest that internal model dysfunction caused this patient’s stuttering.

from Journal of Fluency Disorders

Figurative language processing after traumatic brain injury in adults: A preliminary study

Figurative speech (e.g., proverb, irony, metaphor, and idiom) has been reported to be particularly sensitive to measurement of abstract thinking in patients who suffer from impaired abstraction and language abilities. Metaphor processing was investigated with fMRI in adults with moderate to severe post-acute traumatic brain injury (TBI) and healthy age-matched controls using a valence-judgment task. We hypothesized that TBI patients would display decreased activation of the left inferior frontal gyrus (LIFG), which is considered central to semantic memory retrieval and abstract thought, in comparison with healthy controls. We also predicted that decreased activation in TBI individuals would correlate with their behavioral response times. A whole-brain analysis across the two participant groups revealed that patients did not strongly engage frontal and temporal regions related to semantic processing for novel metaphor comprehension, whereas control participants exhibited more intensive and concentrated activation within frontal and temporal areas. A region of interest (ROI) analysis verified that the LIFG was underactivated in TBI patients compared to controls across all conditions. TBI patients’ impaired abstraction of novel stimuli may stem from reduced prefrontal control of semantic memory as well as disrupted interconnectivity of prefrontal cortex with other regions.

from Neuropsychologia

Visual naming performance after ATL resection: Impact of atypical language dominance

Atypical language dominance is a predictor of change in visual naming performance after left ATL and may also impact postsurgical seizure control. This should be considered when counseling surgical candidates.

from Neuropsychologia

Spared syntax and impaired spell-out: The case of prepositions

The objective of the study was to identify the factors that determine the preservation/impairment of prepositions in aphasia. Five parameters derived from previous research ([Bennis et al., 1983], [Friederici, 1982], [Grodzinsky, 1988], [Kean, 1977], [Kean, 1979] and [Kreindler and Mihãilescu, 1970]) were examined in a sentence completion task and three types of grammaticality judgement tasks using four subcategories of prepositions with 18 preposition tokens in a large number of test sentences. Prepositions were found impaired in both Broca’s and anomic aphasia. Most of the parameters could not account for the data, and some data were in the opposite direction to the predicted. No disproportionate impairments of meaningless prepositions were found and prepositions with syntactic function were best preserved in the majority of patients. Patients made predominately within-category substitution errors. The results are interpreted as evidence for preserved syntactic knowledge about prepositions. It is suggested that a deficit at the post syntactic level of (late) spell-out is the underlying reason for the preposition deficit.

from the Journal of Neurolinguistics

Suppressing irrelevant information from working memory: Evidence for domain-specific deficits in poor comprehenders

Previous research has suggested that children with specific reading comprehension deficits (poor comprehenders) show an impaired ability to suppress irrelevant information from working memory, with this deficit detrimentally impacting on their working memory ability, and consequently limiting their reading comprehension performance. However, the extent to which these suppression deficits are specific to the verbal domain has not yet been explored. Experiment 1 examined the memory profiles of poor comprehenders and demonstrated a memory deficit specific to working memory, and the verbal domain within working memory. Experiment 2 compared the same poor comprehenders and controls on both verbal and non-verbal versions of a proactive interference task designed to assess their ability to suppress no-longer-relevant information from working memory. The poor comprehenders showed domain-specific suppression deficits, demonstrating impairments relative to the controls only in the verbal version of the task. Experiment 3 replicated these findings after the response modes of the verbal and non-verbal tasks were equated, confirming the domain specificity of our sample of poor comprehenders’ suppression deficits.

from the Journal of Memory and Language

Temporal Coding by Populations of Auditory Receptor Neurons

Auditory receptor neurons of crickets are most sensitive to either low or high sound frequencies. Earlier work showed that the temporal coding properties of first-order auditory interneurons are matched to the temporal characteristics of natural low- and high-frequency stimuli (cricket songs and bat echolocation calls, respectively). We studied the temporal coding properties of receptor neurons and used modeling to investigate how activity within populations of low- and high-frequency receptors might contribute to the coding properties of interneurons. We confirm earlier findings that individual low-frequency-tuned receptors code stimulus temporal pattern poorly, but show that coding performance of a receptor population increases markedly with population size, due in part to low redundancy among the spike trains of different receptors. By contrast, individual high-frequency-tuned receptors code a stimulus temporal pattern fairly well and, because their spike trains are redundant, there is only a slight increase in coding performance with population size. The coding properties of low- and high-frequency receptor populations resemble those of interneurons in response to low- and high-frequency stimuli, suggesting that coding at the interneuron level is partly determined by the nature and organization of afferent input. Consistent with this, the sound-frequency-specific coding properties of an interneuron, previously demonstrated by analyzing its spike train, are also apparent in the subthreshold fluctuations in membrane potential that are generated by synaptic input from receptor neurons.

from the Journal of Neurosphysiology

Mode-Locked Spike Trains in Responses of Ventral Cochlear Nucleus Chopper and Onset Neurons to Periodic Stimuli

We report evidence of mode-locking to the envelope of a periodic stimulus in chopper units of the ventral cochlear nucleus (VCN). Mode-locking is a generalized description of how responses in periodically forced nonlinear systems can be closely linked to the input envelope, while showing temporal patterns of higher order than seen during pure phase-locking. Re-analyzing a previously unpublished dataset in response to amplitude modulated tones, we find that of 55% of cells (6/11) demonstrated stochastic mode-locking in response to sinusoidally amplitude modulated (SAM) pure tones at 50% modulation depth. At 100% modulation depth SAM, most units (3/4) showed mode-locking. We use interspike interval (ISI) scattergrams to unravel the temporal structure present in chopper mode-locked responses. These responses compared well to a leaky integrate-and-fire model (LIF) model of chopper units. Thus the timing of spikes in chopper unit responses to periodic stimuli can be understood in terms of the complex dynamics of periodically forced nonlinear systems. A larger set of onset (33) and chopper units (24) of the VCN also shows mode-locked responses to steady-state vowels and cosine-phase harmonic complexes. However, while 80% of chopper responses to complex stimuli meet our criterion for the presence of mode-locking, only 40% of onset cells show similar complex-modes of spike patterns. We found a correlation between a unit’s regularity and its tendency to display mode-locked spike trains as well as a correlation in the number of spikes per cycle and the presence of complex-modes of spike patterns. These spiking patterns are sensitive to the envelope as well as the fundamental frequency of complex sounds, suggesting that complex cell dynamics may play a role in encoding periodic stimuli and envelopes in the VCN.

from the Journal of Neurosphysiology

Systematic review of voice therapy for functional voice disorders: Positive results from a conservative review

No abstract available.

from Evidence-Based Communication Assessment and Intervention

Reconstruction of the Mandible and the Maxilla

The upper and lower jaws play an essential role in mastication, articulation, and cosmetic form. The mandible provides support for tongue position and elevation of the larynx during swallowing, while the maxilla provides support for the nasal structures as well as an opposing structure to the mandible during mastication. The evolution of mandibular and maxillary reconstruction dates back to the early 19th century. Before the introduction of free tissue transfer, a variety of local flaps, regional flaps, and prosthetics were introduced, yet each was met with eventual failure. Since the introduction of free tissue transfer, mandibular and maxillary reconstruction has become as much of an art as it has a science. Whether the mandibular or the palatomaxillary defects are a result of trauma, congenital deformity, or tumor extirpation, the resultant effect often disrupts both form and function. With these considerations taken together, jaw reconstruction is a unique undertaking in which the artistic reconstruction of the facial skeleton is met with the science of reestablishing the mechanics of mastication. The site, size, and associated soft-tissue defects represent the 3 most important factors in determining the impact of a given defect on function and aesthetics. There is also an inherent difference between defects that are sustained in a controlled fashion, such as during cancer ablation, and those that result from trauma. The consideration of these complexities in jaw reconstruction is reflected in the wide variety of approaches and techniques that have evolved over the past century.

from the Archives of Facial Plastic Surgery

Ophthalmologic Disorders in Children With Syndromic and Nonsyndromic Hearing Loss

Conclusions Comprehensive ophthalmologic examination revealed a rate of ophthalmologic disorders in children with SNHL in the lower end of the previously reported rates of 31% to 61%. Children with nonsyndromic SNHL have an approximately 2- to 3-fold increase in ocular abnormalities compared with the general pediatric population. Ophthalmologic and genetic consultations are warranted in patients with congenital SNHL.

from the Archives of Otolaryngology–Head and Neck Surgery

The Nation’s Report Card: Reading 2009

Nationally representative samples of more than 178,000 fourth-graders and 160,000 eighth-graders participated in the 2009 National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) in reading. At each grade, students responded to questions designed to measure their knowledge of reading comprehension across two types of texts: literary and informational.

from Docuticker

Johns Hopkins doctor says sports events and cell phones can harm voice

From the first tip-off during March Madness to the championship’s final buzzer, and with start of the 2010 Major League Baseball season, on Sunday, April 4, thousands of people will relentlessly scream and shout, placing tremendous strain on their voices. While no one is recommending complete silence, the constant pressure on the vocal cords can cause great damage.

from News-Medical.net

Spectacular Speech Pathology Professional Speaks The Language Of Stanford Who’s Who

Stanford Who’s Who welcomes Michelle Dahlberg to the ranks of premier professionals as a result of her spectacular work in the field of Speech Pathology.

from Topix.net

During Infancy The Human Brain Becomes Tuned To Voices And Emotional Tone Of Voice

New research finds that the brains of infants as young as 7 months old demonstrate a sensitivity to the human voice and to emotions communicated through the voice that is remarkably similar to what is observed in the brains of adults. The study, published by Cell Press in the March 25 issue of the journal Neuron, probes the origins of voice processing in the human brain and may provide important insight into neurodevelopmental disorders such as autism.

from Medical News Today.com