Monthly Archives: October 2010
Cochlear Implants in Forty-Eight Children with Cochlear and/or Vestibular Abnormality
CT and MRI scans for 48 children with cochlear and/or vestibular abnormality were classified in decreasing severity; common cavity, Mondini plus enlarged vestibular aqueduct, Mondini dysplasia alone and enlarged vestibular aqueduct alone. No significant relationship between degree of cochlea abnormality and surgical issues (cerebrospinal fluid gusher, depth of insertion, number of electrodes) or speech perception/language outcomes was found. A significant relationship was observed between cerebrospinal fluid gusher and partial electrode insertion, fewer active electrodes and poorer sentence understanding. Optimum language outcomes were associated with younger age at implant.
An investigation of two interventions for micrographia in individuals with Parkinson’s disease
Conclusion: Improvements in letter size after practising with horizontal parallel lines and grid lines were not different. The addition of vertical lines to form a grid did not appear to improve the writing more than horizontal lines alone in persons with Parkinson’s disease who experienced micrographia.
‘Getting back to real living’: a qualitative study of the process of community reintegration after stroke
Conclusions: Over the first year after stroke, participants reported that the process of community reintegration was marked by ongoing changes in their goals. Formal and informal caregivers need to work with stroke survivors living in the community to facilitate realistic and achievable goal setting. Tools which identify meaningful activities should also be incorporated to provide stroke survivors with the opportunity to contribute and engage with others in the community.
Preliminary analysis indicates Speech Generating Devices appear to be useful for developing communication in children with Autism Spectrum Disorders
No abstract available.
from Evidence-Based Communication Assessment and Intervention
No Childhood Advantage in the Acquisition of Skill in Using an Artificial Language Rule
A leading notion is that language skill acquisition declines between childhood and adulthood. While several lines of evidence indicate that declarative (“what”, explicit) memory undergoes maturation, it is commonly assumed that procedural (“how-to”, implicit) memory, in children, is well established. The language superiority of children has been ascribed to the childhood reliance on implicit learning. Here we show that when 8-year-olds, 12-year-olds and young adults were provided with an equivalent multi-session training experience in producing and judging an artificial morphological rule (AMR), adults were superior to children of both age groups and the 8-year-olds were the poorest learners in all task parameters including in those that were clearly implicit. The AMR consisted of phonological transformations of verbs expressing a semantic distinction: whether the preceding noun was animate or inanimate. No explicit instruction of the AMR was provided. The 8-year-olds, unlike most adults and 12-year-olds, failed to explicitly uncover the semantic aspect of the AMR and subsequently to generalize it accurately to novel items. However, all participants learned to apply the AMR to repeated items and to generalize its phonological patterns to novel items, attaining accurate and fluent production, and exhibiting key characteristics of procedural memory. Nevertheless, adults showed a clear advantage in learning implicit task aspects, and in their long-term retention. Thus, our findings support the notion of age-dependent maturation in the establishment of declarative but also of procedural memory in a complex language task. In line with recent reports of no childhood advantage in non-linguistic skill learning, we propose that under some learning conditions adults can effectively express their language skill acquisition potential. Altogether, the maturational effects in the acquisition of an implicit AMR do not support a simple notion of a language skill learning advantage in children.
from PLoS ONE
The Differences in Brain Activity between Narrow Band Noise and Pure Tone Tinnitus
Results demonstrated that narrow band noise tinnitus patients differ from pure tone tinnitus patients in the lateral frontopolar (BA 10), PCC and the parahippocampal area for delta, beta and gamma frequency bands, respectively. The parahippocampal-PCC current density differences might be load dependent, as noise-like tinnitus constitutes multiple frequencies in contrast to pure tone tinnitus. The lateral frontopolar differences might be related to pitch specific memory retrieval.
from PLoS ONE
Sequential Bilateral Cochlear Implantation in Children: Development of the Primary Auditory Abilities of Bilateral Stimulation
The advantages of sequential bilateral cochlear implantation were assessed in 29 children with a severe to profound hearing loss. The effect of age at second implantation and the effect of duration of bilateral implant use on the outcomes in speech perception and directional hearing were investigated. The children received their second cochlear implant at an age ranging from 2.8 to 8.5 years. Measurements were carried out preoperatively and postoperatively after 6, 12 and 24 months of bilateral implant use. A matched control group of 9 children with a unilateral implant were also measured over time and were compared with the study group after 12 and 24 months. Speech reception in both quiet and in noise and lateralization were measured. After 24 months, a minimum audible angle task was carried out. Bilateral advantages with regard to speech reception in quiet and in noise were already present after 6 months of bilateral implant use and improved thereafter. After 24 months, speech reception in noise had significantly improved with bilateral implants compared to that of children with a unilateral implant. The percentage of children that could accurately lateralize increased from 57% after 6 months to 83% after 24 months. With regard to the minimum audible angle task, loudspeakers were placed on average at ±42°. Age at second implantation did not have an influence on all outcomes. From the results it can be concluded that the advantages of bilateral hearing occur after sequential bilateral implantation and that age at second implantation does not influence the amount of bilateral advantage. Furthermore, it can be concluded that longer periods of bilateral implant use lead to greater bilateral advantages.
Neurophysiological origin of human brain asymmetry for speech and language
The physiological basis of human cerebral asymmetry for language remains mysterious. We have used simultaneous physiological and anatomical measurements to investigate the issue. Concentrating on neural oscillatory activity in speech-specific frequency bands and exploring interactions between gestural (motor) and auditory-evoked activity, we find, in the absence of language-related processing, that left auditory, somatosensory, articulatory motor, and inferior parietal cortices show specific, lateralized, speech-related physiological properties. With the addition of ecologically valid audiovisual stimulation, activity in auditory cortex synchronizes with left-dominant input from the motor cortex at frequencies corresponding to syllabic, but not phonemic, speech rhythms. Our results support theories of language lateralization that posit a major role for intrinsic, hardwired perceptuomotor processing in syllabic parsing and are compatible both with the evolutionary view that speech arose from a combination of syllable-sized vocalizations and meaningful hand gestures and with developmental observations suggesting phonemic analysis is a developmentally acquired process.
from the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America
Categorizing speech
Using direct electrode recordings in patients undergoing preoperative surgery, a new study demonstrates that neural responses in the secondary auditory cortex mirror perception, showing categorical responses to continuous stimuli.
from Nature Neuroscience
Hearing It Again and Again: On-Line Subcortical Plasticity in Humans
We provide the first demonstration of on-line subcortical plasticity in humans. This complements previous findings that experience-dependent subcortical plasticity can occur on a number of time scales, including life-long experiences with music and language, and short-term auditory training. Our results suggest that the incoming stimulus stream is constantly being monitored, even when the stimulus is physically invariant and attention is directed elsewhere, to augment the neural response to the most statistically salient features of the ongoing stimulus stream. These real-time transformations, which may subserve humans’ strong disposition for grouping auditory objects, likely reflect a mix of local processes and corticofugal modulation arising from statistical regularities and the influences of expectation. Our results contribute to our understanding of the biological basis of statistical learning and initiate a new investigational approach relating to the time-course of subcortical plasticity. Although the reported time-dependent enhancements are believed to reflect universal neurophysiological processes, future experiments utilizing a larger array of stimuli are needed to establish the generalizability of our findings.
from PLoS ONE
I see where you’re hearing: how cross-modal plasticity may exploit homologous brain structures
Sensory deprivation such as deafness or blindness leads to specific functional and neural reorganization. A new study gives insight into why and how certain abilities change, while others remain unaltered after the loss of a sense.
from Nature Neuroscience
Spectral- and Cepstral-Based Measures During Continuous Speech: Capacity to Distinguish Dysphonia and Consistency Within a Speaker
Spectral- and cepstral-based acoustic measures are preferable to time-based measures for accurately representing dysphonic voices during continuous speech. Although these measures show promising relationships to perceptual voice quality ratings, less is known regarding their ability to differentiate normal from dysphonic voice during continuous speech and the consistency of these measures across multiple utterances by the same speaker. The purpose of this study was to determine whether spectral moments of the long-term average spectrum (LTAS) (spectral mean, standard deviation, skewness, and kurtosis) and cepstral peak prominence measures were significantly different for speakers with and without voice disorders when assessed during continuous speech. The consistency of these measures within a speaker across utterances was also addressed. Continuous speech samples from 27 subjects without voice disorders and 27 subjects with mixed voice disorders were acoustically analyzed. In addition, voice samples were perceptually rated for overall severity. Acoustic analyses were performed on three continuous speech stimuli from a reading passage: two full sentences and one constituent phrase. Significant between-group differences were found for both cepstral measures and three LTAS measures (P < 0.001): spectral mean, skewness, and kurtosis. These five measures also showed moderate to strong correlations to overall voice severity. Furthermore, high degrees of within-speaker consistency (correlation coefficients ≥0.89) across utterances with varying length and phonemic content were evidenced for both subject groups.
from the Journal of Voice
The Effect of Oxandrolone on Voice Frequency in Growth Hormone-Treated Girls With Turner Syndrome
Conclusions
Untreated girls with TS have relatively high-pitched voices. The addition of Ox to GH decreases voice frequency in a dose-dependent way. Although most voice frequencies remain within the normal range, they may occasionally become lower than −2 SDS, especially on GH + Ox 0.06 mg/kg/d.
from the Journal of Voice
The Role of the Cricothyroid Joint Anatomy in Cricothyroid Approximation Surgery
Conclusions
The anatomical structure of the CTJ influences directly (1) the position of the effective rotation axis and (2) the elongation of the vocal folds.
from the Journal of Voice
