Electroglottogram approximate entropy: a novel single parameter for objective voice assessment

Conclusion: Electroglottogram approximate entropy can be used to assess change in voice quality resulting from glottic morphological abnormality. Electroglottogram approximate entropy values improve as voice quality improves after treatment. Electroglottogram approximate entropy values correlate significantly with grade–roughness–breathiness–asthenia–strain scale results.

from the Journal of Laryngology and Otology

Hearing outcomes of vestibular schwannoma patients managed with ‘wait and scan’: predictive value of hearing level at diagnosis

Conclusion: In vestibular schwannoma patients, good high frequency hearing and good speech discrimination at diagnosis are useful tools in predicting good hearing after observation.

from the Journal of Laryngology and Otology

Neuro-otological findings in tinnitus patients with normal hearing

Conclusion: We may infer from these results that tinnitus could be the only clinical manifestation of a cochlear – and presumably cochleo-vestibular – lesion, and that unilateral canal paresis may be the only abnormal finding on neuro-otological examination.

from the Journal of Laryngology and Otology

Vocal function following discharge from intensive care

Conclusion: Up to one-third of patients who survived admission to an intensive care unit reported suffering significant vocal morbidity. The Voice Symptom Scale could be used in an intensive care follow-up setting to identify and ensure the referral of such patients.

from the Journal of Laryngology and Otology

Critical Tensions in Talk About Brain Injury

This article presents an introduction to some potential applications of a critical discourse perspective to the field of traumatic brain injury. Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) examines spoken and written texts as a means to understand the two-way relationship between discourse and cultural context. CDA is particularly interested in how language use reflects and creates power relationships between those involved in the communication. In order to illustrate this perspective, this paper discusses a purposively selected set of written texts about brain injury from a range of institutional contexts: a scholarly journal article, a submission to government from an advocacy group, the home web page of a support group, a newspaper article from the general media, and personal letters written by people with traumatic brain injury. The analysis involved investigation of key linguistic features reflecting the experiential, interpersonal and textual aspects of these texts. Three main lines of tension between competing discourses emerged from an examination. Tension emerged within each text between medical vs. lay terminology, and this was seen as reflecting the widespread power of the scientific paradigm. Tension was apparent between problem talk vs. positive talk. Talk about the problems associated with brain injury forms an essential component when seeking support, and yet talk about positive outcomes forms an essential component when describing the rehabilitation journey. There were also competing discourses in terms of the focus of the talk, between person centredness vs. other centredness. The methodology of CDA is proposed as a tool for reflective clinical practice at both an individual and professional level, as it provides a systematic means to examine health professionals’ interactions and promotes the development of a critical understanding of the cultural ideologies and institutions in which practice is located.

from the Australian Academic Press

“Let me tell you the point”: How speakers with aphasia assign prominence to information in narratives

The relatively intact ability of individuals with aphasia to assign prominence to information in narratives once again raises questions on the neurological underpinnings of modalising language. The clinical potential for assessment and treatment that incorporates narrative evaluative devices needs to be further explored.

from Aphasiology

Ageing, auditory distraction, and grammaticality judgement

Older adults responded differently from younger adults in the GJ task in distraction, consistent with the inhibitory deficit theory. Their response pattern was also affected by reversibility and memory variables, apart from distraction, suggesting that multiple cognitive and linguistic components contribute to the decline in processing speed with normal ageing.

from Aphasiology

Test for Swallowing Disorder Treatments Being Developed

ScienceDaily (Apr. 28, 2010) — Muscle degeneration and confinement to a wheelchair are the hallmarks of Lou Gehrig’s disease, Parkinson’s, muscular dystrophy and other neurodegenerative diseases. One of the silent, and most serious, symptoms of these diseases is losing the ability to swallow. Swallowing impairment, or dysphagia, affects about 500,000 people annually in the U.S., but little is known about the disorder and only a few temporary, behavioral treatments are available.

from ScienceDaily.com

Brain sensitivity to print emerges when children learn letter–speech sound correspondences

The acquisition of reading skills is a major landmark process in a human’s cognitive development. On the neural level, a new functional network develops during this time, as children typically learn to associate the well-known sounds of their spoken language with unfamiliar characters in alphabetic languages and finally access the meaning of written words, allowing for later reading. A critical component of the mature reading network located in the left occipito-temporal cortex, termed the “visual word-form system” (VWFS), exhibits print-sensitive activation in readers. When and how the sensitivity of the VWFS to print comes about remains an open question. In this study, we demonstrate the initiation of occipito-temporal cortex sensitivity to print using functional MRI (fMRI) (n = 16) and event-related potentials (ERP) (n = 32) in a controlled, longitudinal training study. Print sensitivity of fast (<250 ms) processes in posterior occipito-temporal brain regions accompanied basic associative learning of letter–speech sound correspondences in young (mean age 6.4 ± 0.08 y) nonreading kindergarten children, as shown by concordant ERP and fMRI results. The occipito-temporal print sensitivity thus is established during the earliest phase of reading acquisition in childhood, suggesting that a crucial part of the later reading network first adopts a role in mapping print and sound.

from the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America

Can You Say It Another Way? Cognitive Factors in Bilingual Children’s Pragmatic Language Skills

Pragmatic differentiation in bilinguals is the ability to use two languages appropriately with different speakers. Although some sensitivity emerges by 2 years, the effects of context on these skills and their relation to other developing metacognitive capacities have not been examined. The current study compared the language use of 28 bilingual children (aged 2;7 to 3;10 and 4;1 to 4;11) across two tasks. All children were bilingual in English and Marathi, an Indian language. Theory of mind measures were included to assess whether developing cognitive capacities relate to pragmatic language ability. Results indicated that pragmatic differentiation is not an all-or-none ability but one which develops during the preschool years and varies based on the conversational context. This development is also related to metacognitive abilities which emerge during this time.

from the Journal of Cognitive and Development

What Is Dyslexia? What Causes Dyslexia?

Dyslexia, also called specific reading disability, is a common type of learning difficulty that primarily affects the skills involved in the reading and spelling of words. It is a disorder in the brain’s ability to translate written images received from the eyes into meaningful language. It manifests itself as a difficulty with reading decoding, reading comprehension and/or reading fluency. Dyslexia is the most common learning disability in children. It is estimated that it affects between 5 to 17 percent of the population.

from Medical News Today.com

Left temporal alpha band activity increases during working memory retention of pitches

The functional role and regional specificity of ∼10 Hz alpha band activity remains of debate. Alpha band activity is strongly modulated in visual working memory tasks and it has been proposed to subserve resource allocation by disengaging task-irrelevant regions. It remains unknown if alpha band activity plays a similar role during auditory working memory processing. In this study we applied whole-head magnetoencephalography to investigate brain activity in a delayed-match-to-sample task including pure tones, non-harmonic complex tones and harmonic tones. The paradigm included a control condition in which no active auditory maintenance was required. We observed a bilateral increase in 5–12 Hz power during the perception of harmonic and non-harmonic complex tones compared with the control tone. During the maintenance period a left-lateralized increase in 5–12 Hz was found for all stimuli compared with the control condition. Using a beam-forming approach we identified the sources in left temporal regions. Given that functional magnetic resonance imaging, positron emission tomography and lesion studies have identified right hemisphere regions to be engaged in memory of pitch, we propose that the 5–12 Hz activity serves to functionally disengage left temporal regions. Our findings support the notion that alpha activity is a general mechanism for disengaging task-irrelevant regions.

from the European Journal of Neuroscience

An empirical generative framework for computational modeling of language acquisition*

This paper reports progress in developing a computer model of language acquisition in the form of (1) a generative grammar that is (2) algorithmically learnable from realistic corpus data, (3) viable in its large-scale quantitative performance and (4) psychologically real. First, we describe new algorithmic methods for unsupervised learning of generative grammars from raw CHILDES data and give an account of the generative performance of the acquired grammars. Next, we summarize findings from recent longitudinal and experimental work that suggests how certain statistically prominent structural properties of child-directed speech may facilitate language acquisition. We then present a series of new analyses of CHILDES data indicating that the desired properties are indeed present in realistic child-directed speech corpora. Finally, we suggest how our computational results, behavioral findings, and corpus-based insights can be integrated into a next-generation model aimed at meeting the four requirements of our modeling framework.

from the Journal of Child Language

Cognitive architectures and language acquisition: A case study in pronoun comprehension*

In this paper we discuss a computational cognitive model of children’s poor performance on pronoun interpretation (the so-called Delay of Principle B Effect, or DPBE). This cognitive model is based on a theoretical account that attributes the DPBE to children’s inability as hearers to also take into account the speaker’s perspective. The cognitive model predicts that child hearers are unable to do so because their speed of linguistic processing is too limited to perform this second step in interpretation. We tested this hypothesis empirically in a psycholinguistic study, in which we slowed down the speech rate to give children more time for interpretation, and in a computational simulation study. The results of the two studies confirm the predictions of our model. Moreover, these studies show that embedding a theory of linguistic competence in a cognitive architecture allows for the generation of detailed and testable predictions with respect to linguistic performance.

from the Journal of Child Language

Implicational markedness and frequency in constraint-based computational models of phonological learning*

This study examines the interacting roles of implicational markedness and frequency from the joint perspectives of formal linguistic theory, phonological acquisition and computational modeling. The hypothesis that child grammars are rankings of universal constraints, as in Optimality Theory (Prince & Smolensky, 1993/2004), that learning involves a gradual transition from an unmarked initial state to the target grammar, and that order of acquisition is guided by frequency, along the lines of Levelt, Schiller & Levelt (2000), is investigated. The study reviews empirical findings on syllable structure acquisition in Dutch, German, French and English, and presents novel findings on Polish. These comparisons reveal that, to the extent allowed by implicational markedness universals, frequency covaries with acquisition order across languages. From the computational perspective, the paper shows that interacting roles of markedness and frequency in a class of constraint-based phonological learning models embody this hypothesis, and their predictions are illustrated via computational simulation.

from the Journal of Child Language