Monthly Archives: October 2010
The King’s Speech – Inspiring story of overcoming stuttering coming to theatres in November.
A chronicle of King George VI’s effort to overcome his nervous stammer with the assistance of speech therapist Lionel Logue. (A link to the trailor is available on the link to CASLPA below.)
from CASLPA, The Canadian Association of Speech-Language Pathologists and Audiologists
Improved Understanding Of How The Brain’s ‘Hearing Center’ Spurs Responses To Sound
Just as we visually map a room by spatially identifying the objects in it, we map our aural world based on the frequencies of sounds.
Canadian Speech-Language Pathologists Help People With Autism Make Sense Of A Confusing World
People with autism can exhibit difficulties in three general areas: verbal and non-verbal communication, social interaction and repetitive or solitary behaviour. October is Autism Awareness Month in Canada and according to the Autism Society Canada, there are approximately 200,000 people in Canada living with an Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD).
Pre-Brain Balance Program for autistic children
With the autism epidemic on the rise, Brain Balance™ Centers of Peachtree City & Suwanee, GA have implemented the groundbreaking Pre-Brain Balance Program™ to help children diagnosed with mild, moderate and severe autism spectrum disorders and reactive detachment disorders. The program is designed to improve children’s listening comprehension, motor skills, core elements and verbal communication.
from News-Medical.net
PHSI Introduces the Clarujust Hearing System at the AAO Symposium in Chicago
Vision and Hearing Leader Reveals Revolutionary Hearing Technology at Renowned Event
from PRWeb.com
Mnemonic Strategies: Evidence-Based Practice and Practice-Based Evidence
This article presents information on using mnemonic strategies to enhance learning and memory of students with mild disabilities. Different types of mnemonic strategies are described, including the keyword method, the pegword method, and letter strategies. Following this, a number of teachers describe their own applications of mnemonic strategies with students with learning disabilities, mild mental retardation, and emotional/behavioral disabilities. Content areas include elementary life science, secondary social studies and anatomy, elementary social studies, elementary reading vocabulary, and secondary SAT vocabulary. Finally, a middle school social studies teacher describes lessons learned from her extended experience with mnemonic strategies. A discussion of the theoretical foundations and empirical research support of mnemonic strategies also is provided.
from the Intervention in School and Clinic
No bootstrapping without semantic inheritance
Anderson’s massive redeployment hypothesis (MRH) takes the grounding of meaning in sensorimotor behaviour to be a side effect of neural reuse. I suggest this grounding may play a much more fundamental role in accounting for the bootstrapping of higher-level cognition from sensorimotor behaviour. Thus, the question of when neural reuse delivers semantic inheritance is a pressing one for MRH.
Aspergilloma of the middle ear mimicking necrotising otitis externa: case report
Conclusion: To our knowledge, this is the first documented case of an aspergilloma of the middle ear with associated facial palsy. Readers are asked to consider this rare diagnosis in patients with suspected malignant otitis externa not responding to standard treatment.
from the Journal of Laryngology and Otology
Atypical presentations of malignant otitis externa
Discussion: The perception of malignant otitis externa as an infection caused by Pseudomonas aeruginosa in diabetic patients is not always correct. The adoption of diagnostic criteria could be helpful in identifying atypical cases.
from the Journal of Laryngology and Otology
Dysphonia secondary to traumatic avulsion of the vocal fold in infants
Conclusions: The mechanisms of injury, risk factors and management of the condition are discussed. Children suffering traumatic intubation require follow up throughout childhood and beyond puberty as their vocal needs and abilities change. At the time of writing, none of the reported patients had yet undergone reconstructive or medialisation surgery. However, regular specialist voice therapy evaluation is recommended for such patients, with consideration of phonosurgical techniques including injection laryngoplasty or thyroplasty.
from the Journal of Laryngology and Otology
Vocal quality of patients treated for laryngeal tuberculosis, before and after speech therapy
Conclusions: Following treatment of laryngeal tuberculosis, the incidence of dysphonia was very high. Speech therapy improved patients’ vocal quality.
from the Journal of Laryngology and Otology
A case for the involvement of phonological loop in sentence comprehension
We suggest that the neural correlates of the phonological loop, left BA40 and BA44, are both involved in the comprehension of syntactically complex sentences, while only left BA40, corresponding to the short-term store, is recruited for the comprehension of long but syntactically simple sentences. Therefore, in contrast with the dominant view, we showed that sentence comprehension is a function of the phonological loop.
from Neuropsychologia
Phonological Processing and Arithmetic Fact Retrieval: Evidence From Developmental Dyslexia
The triple-code model, cognitive neuroimaging and developmental behavioral data suggest a specific association between phonological processing and arithmetic fact retrieval. Accordingly, individuals with deficits in phonological processing, such as individuals with developmental dyslexia, are expected to show difficulties in arithmetic fact retrieval. The present study tested this proposal in 25 adults with developmental dyslexia and 25 matched controls by examining strategy use during single-digit multiplication and subtraction and its associations with phonological processing. Findings revealed that individuals with dyslexia retrieved fewer arithmetic facts from memory and were less efficient in doing so. At the same time, they showed deficits in phonological processing. Phonological processing, particularly phonological awareness, was related to arithmetic fact retrieval. This association was especially prominent in multiplication, indicating that fact retrieval in multiplication rather than subtraction is mediated by phonological processes. These data provide ground for future neuroimaging studies, who should examine the neural overlap between phonological processing and multiplication fact retrieval in the same sample of participants.
from Neuropsychologia
Cochlear active mechanisms in young normal-hearing subjects affected by willams syndrome: Time-frequencyanalysis of otoacoustic emissions
The aim of this study was to investigate the functionality of cochlear active mechanisms in normal hearing subjects affected by Williams syndrome (WS). Transient evoked otoacoustic emissions (TEOAE) were recorded in a group of young WS subjects and a group of typically developing control subjects, all having normal hearing thresholds and normal middle ear functionality. We also analysed the narrow-band frequency components of TEOAEs, extracted from the broad-band TEOAE recordingsby using a time-frequency analysis algorithm based on the Wavelet transform. We observed that TEOAEs and the frequency components extracted from TEOAEs measured in WS subjects had significantly lower energy compared to the controls. Also, the narrow-band frequency components of TEOAEs measured in WS subjects had slightly increased latency compared to the controls. Overall, results would suggest a subtle (i.e., sub‑clinical) dysfunction of the cochlear active mechanisms in WS subjects with otherwise normal hearing. Also, results point out the relevance of using otoacoustic emissions in the audiological evaluation and monitoring of WS subjects to early identify possible subtle auditory dysfunctions, before the onset of mild or moderate hearing loss that could exacerbate language or cognitive impairments associated with WS.
from Hearing Research
Responsiveness of the human auditory cortex to degraded speech sounds: Reduction of amplitude resolution vs. additive noise
The cortical mechanisms underlying human speech perception in acoustically adverse conditions remain largely unknown. Besides distortions from external sources, degradation of the acoustic structure of the sound itself poses further demands on perceptual mechanisms. We conducted a magnetoencephalography (MEG) study to reveal whether the perceptual differences between these distortions are reflected in cortically generated auditory evoked fields (AEFs). To mimic the degradation of the internal structure of sound and external distortion, we degraded speech sounds by reducing the amplitude resolution of the signal waveform and by using additive noise, respectively. Since both distortion types increase the relative strength of high frequencies in the signal spectrum, we also used versions of the stimuli which were low-pass filtered to match the tilted spectral envelope of the undistorted speech sound. This enabled us to examine whether the changes in the overall spectral shape of the stimuli affect the AEFs. We found that the auditory N1m response was substantially enhanced as the amplitude resolution was reduced. In contrast, the N1m was insensitive to distorted speech with additive noise. Changing the spectral envelope had no effect on the N1m. We propose that the observed amplitude enhancements are due to an increase in noisy spectral harmonics produced by the reduction of the amplitude resolution, which activates the periodicity-sensitive neuronal populations participating in pitch extraction processes. The current findings suggest that the auditory cortex processes speech sounds in a differential manner when the internal structure of sound is degraded compared with speech distorted by external noise.
from Brain Topography
