Monthly Archives: July 2010
Influence of compact disk recording protocols on reliability and comparability of speech audiometry outcomes: acoustic analysis
Conclusion: To ensure the reliability and comparability of speech test outcomes obtained using different compact disks, it is recommended to check for possible differences in the recording gains used to prepare the compact disks, and then to compensate for any differences before testing.
from the Journal of Laryngology and Otology
Combined tympanic epithelial layer avulsion and overlay myringoplasty for diffuse granular myringitis
Conclusion: This new surgical procedure represents improved treatment for severe, chronic granular myringitis.
from the Journal of Laryngology and Otology
Diagnostic challenges in tuberculous otitis media
Conclusions: A high index of clinical suspicion of tuberculous otitis media is required in patients who do not respond to standard antibiotic therapy for (nontuberculous) chronic middle-ear infection. Early diagnosis and treatment of tuberculous otitis media is important to avoid irreversible complications, surgical intervention and propagation of the disease.
from the Journal of Laryngology and Otology
Enlarged internal auditory canal and sudden deafness
Conclusions: To the best of our knowledge, this is the first report of a patient with patulous internal auditory canals, with no other anomalies, who developed bilateral sudden hearing loss after weight-lifting exercise. Although no definitive conclusions can be drawn, close surveillance and lifestyle warnings should be considered in such patients, even if they are clinically asymptomatic.
from the Journal of Laryngology and Otology
Malignant otitis externa: case series
Conclusions: The incidence of cranial nerve palsy in our study was higher than in previous reports. The incidence of diabetes and Pseudomonas aeruginosa in our cohort was much lower than previously reported. The Pseudomonas aeruginosa strains isolated were all sensitive to ciprofloxacin, despite recent reports on emerging resistance.
from the Journal of Laryngology and Otology
Quality of life in patients with untreated age-related hearing loss
Conclusion: The Short Form 36 Health Survey, a generic measure, lacked specificity and sensitivity in detecting clinically significant hearing loss. However, significant hearing impairment was reflected in the Hearing Handicap Inventory for the Elderly Screening Version questionnaire scores, suggesting that this is a good, disease-specific screening tool. A combination of functional (i.e. the Hearing Handicap Inventory for the Elderly Screening Version questionnaire) and physiological (i.e. audiometric) assessment is recommended to investigate hearing loss in elderly individuals.
from the Journal of Laryngology and Otology
Selective lateral laser thyroarytenoid myotomy for adductor spasmodic dysphonia
Conclusion: Selective lateral laser thyroarytenoid myotomy seems to represent a curative procedure for adductor spasmodic dysphonia, a chronic, debilitating condition. This procedure is conceptually simple, minimally invasive and repeatable. It also seems to offer a safe and lasting alternative to botulinum toxin therapy.
from the Journal of Laryngology and Otology
Vestibular substitution: comparative study
Conclusion: These preliminary results indicate the efficacy of the electrotactile vestibular substitution system in improving patients’ symptoms of vestibulopathy, and constitute evidence of successful sensory substitution.
from the Journal of Laryngology and Otology
Development of metaphor and metonymy comprehension: Receptive vocabulary and conceptual knowledge
Figurative language, such as metaphor and metonymy are common in our daily communication. This is one of the first studies to investigate metaphor and metonymy comprehension using a developmental approach. Forty-five typically developing individuals participated in a metaphor-metonymy verbal comprehension task incorporating 20 short picture-stories. Cross-sectional trajectory analyses linking task performance to either chronological age or receptive vocabulary (mental age, MA) were used to compare the development of metaphor and metonymy. Results showed that development of metaphor and metonymy comprehension is strongly linked with chronological and MA, but metaphor comprehension develops at a slower rate compared to metonymy. It was also found that participants, across all ages, consistently showed around 21% better performance on metonymy. The relationship between metaphor and metonymy comprehension is discussed in terms of linguistic and cognitive models of figurative language comprehension arguing that metonymy is cognitively more basic than metaphor.
Is the visual analyzer orthographic-specific? Reading words and numbers in letter position dyslexia
Letter position dyslexia (LPD) is a deficit in the encoding of letter position within words. It is characterized by errors of letter migration within words, such as reading trail as trial and form as from. In order to examine whether LPD is domain-specific, and to assess the domain-specificity of the visual analysis system, this study explored whether LPD extends to number reading, by testing whether individuals who have letter migrations in word reading also show migrations while reading numbers. The reading of words and numbers of 12 Hebrew-speaking individuals with developmental LPD was assessed. Experiment 1 tested reading aloud of words and numbers, and Experiment 2 tested same–different decisions in words and numbers. The findings indicated that whereas the participants with developmental LPD showed a large number of migration errors in reading words, 10 of them read numbers well, without migration errors, and not differently from the control participants. A closer inspection of the pattern of errors in words and numbers of two individuals who had migrations in both numbers and words showed qualitative differences in the characteristics of migration errors in the two types of stimuli. In word reading, migration errors appeared predominantly in middle letters, whereas the errors in numbers occurred mainly in final (rightmost) digits. Migrations in numbers occurred almost exclusively in adjacent digits, but in words migrations occurred both in adjacent and in nonadjacent letters. The results thus indicate that words can be selectively impaired, without a parallel impairment in numbers, and that even when numbers are also impaired they show different error pattern. Thus, the visual analyzer is actually an orthographic visual analyzer, a module that is domain-specific for the analysis of words.
from Cortex
How do roots and suffixes influence reading of pseudowords: A study of young Italian readers with and without dyslexia
The study explored the different influences of roots and suffixes in reading aloud morphemic pseudowords (e.g., vetr-ezza, “glass-ness”). Previous work on adults showed a facilitating effect of both roots and suffixes on naming times. In the present study, pseudoword stimuli including roots and suffixes in different combinations were administered to sixth-grade children with dyslexia (N=22) and skilled readers (N=44), matched for chronological age. Indeed, the sequential reading strategy of less proficient readers (particularly for pseudowords) should favour the emergence of differences between left and right constituents (root and suffix, respectively) in reading performance. Results showed that for both children with dyslexia and skilled young readers the onset of pronunciation depended exclusively on roots, while there was no significant effect of suffixes. However, both roots and suffixes led to higher levels of accuracy than matched orthographic strings of letters. Posthoc regression analyses confirmed the morphological nature of the root and suffix effects, over and above the effects of the frequency of their orthographic patterns. Results indicate that the position of the reading units within the letter string, as well as their differential effects on latencies and accuracy, should be taken into account by models of morphological processing in word recognition and reading and by applied intervention research.
Representational complexity and memory retrieval in language comprehension
Mental representations formed from words or phrases may vary considerably in their feature-based complexity. Modern theories of retrieval in sentence comprehension do not indicate how this variation and the role of encoding processes should influence memory performance. Here, memory retrieval in language comprehension is shown to be influenced by a target’s representational complexity in terms of syntactic and semantic features. Three self-paced reading experiments provide evidence that reading times at retrieval sites (but not earlier) decrease when more complex phrases occur as filler phrases in filler-gap dependencies. The data also show that complexity-based effects are not dependent on string length, syntactic differences, or the amount of processing the stimuli elicit. Activation boosting and reduced similarity-based interference are implicated as likely sources of these complexity-based effects.
The role of speech-gesture congruency and delay in remembering action events
When watching others describe events, does information from their speech and gestures affect our memory representations for the gist and surface form of the described events? Does our reliance on these memory representations change over time? Forty participants watched videos of stories narrated by an actor. Each story included three target events that differed in their speech-gesture congruency for particular actions (congruent speech/gesture, incongruent speech/gesture, or speech with no gesture). Participants had to reproduce target event sentences, prompted after delays of 2, 6, or 18 minutes. Seeing gestures, either congruent or incongruent, led to better gist recall (more mentions of the target action, more gestures for the target action, and more complete target events) compared to not seeing gestures. However, seeing incongruent gestures sometimes led to reproductions of the incongruent gestures, particularly after short delays, as well as inaccuracies in speech. Our results suggest that over time people increasingly rely on multimodal gist-based representations and rely less on representations that include surface and source information about speech and gesture.
Functional and psychological evaluation after flap reconstruction plus radiotherapy in oral cancer
Conclusion
Dysphagia and taste impairment are associated with QOL and depression; our data suggest a different evaluation between self-reported and clinician-rating scales. DAP is a provocative tool that merits further research.
from Head and Neck
