Aspergers Syndrome is an autism spectrum disorder in which patients generally exhibit average or above-average intelligence and linguistic ability, but considerable difficulty building social relationships. Its incidence has increased greatly since the 1990s. Also since the 1990s, personal computers have come into wide use as tools not only for work, but also for social communication (Baron, 1998). Computer-mediated communication (CMC) technologies, such as instant messaging (IM), have become very popular with the general public in this time frame. In order to determine whether IM will be a useful social tool for people with Aspergers, in this study, a corpus of IM conversations from volunteers both with and without Aspergers, conversing with their peers was collected and analyzed to identify patterns of use of standard English lexemes and characteristic IM lexemes. A lexeme is a minimal unit of semantic meaning, which usually corresponds roughly to a word. Emoticons (such as the smiley :-)), acronyms (such as lol), characteristic abbreviations (like probly for probably), and typed representations of non-uttered events (like *hugs you* or I hug you) are examples of characteristic IM lexemes. It was hypothesized that people with Aspergers would use significantly more standard English lexemes, and fewer lexemes that are unique to IM, per sent message than would be used by their neurotypical peers. Additionally, it was hypothesized that people with Aspergers would use fewer sent messages to complete an apparent thought than their neurotypical peers. Participants were recruited in already-acquainted pairs through a peer mentoring program for college students with autism and developmental disabilities. Conversational partners were matched based on their acquaintance with each other. Each Aspergers and neurotypical participant held one or two fifteen- to twenty-minute conversations using AOL Instant Messenger®. The conversations were recorded, transcribed and analyzed to compare the use of characteristic IM lexemes and structural aspects of each conversation. The lexemes were counted to determine their frequency in each whole conversation. The number of sent messages in each conversation, the number of sent messages per conversational turn, and the number of lexemes (both IM and standard English) per sent message were counted and compared. Results showed no significant differences between groups on any of the variables, or for the behavior of the control group between conditions, suggesting that people with Aspergers are likely to communicate in this medium in ways that are very similar to their neurotypical peers. Implications of this pilot data and potential directions for future research are discussed.

In normal hearing adults, acoustic context influences perception of speech in a spectrally contrastive manner. The aim of this study is to investigate whether typically developing children, aged 5 through 6 and 7 through 9 years, demonstrate phonetic context effects in a manner and extent similar to adults. By comparing the childrens responses to those of adults aged 18 to 28 years, it will be determined if the childrens use of phonetic context is limited by maturity. A total of 61 individuals participated in this study: 45 adults and 16 children. The participants listened to isolated vowels along the /ʌ/ to /ɛ/ acoustic continuum and indicated if they heard /ʌ/ or /ɛ/. They then listened to the same vowel continuum within a /d/-Vowel-/d/ syllable context and in a /b/-Vowel-/b/ syllable context. With each syllable presentation the participants identified the vowel sound that they heard. The participants responses were assessed for shifts in the vowel perceptual boundaries relative to consonant context. The results indicated that the older children and the adults exhibited a context effect, but as a group, the younger children did not exhibit the effect. However, some of the younger children presented an effect that was consistent with the Older Children and Adults.

Background: Right hemisphere brain damage (RHD) manifests itself in many ways. The repercussions affecting language function are distinct; studies in discourse comprehension in RHD groups suggest that this population struggles with the mental structures necessary for processing, leading to difficulty when a task requires that participants modify their established mental models or alter first interpretations. The current investigation was based on an experiment in Rapp et al.s (2001) study that suggests that trait-based models of discourse processing affect online reading. Participants response times slowed when the final sentences of the story stimuli were inconsistent with character traits instantiated in the beginning of the stories. Aims: The current study examined the nature of discourse comprehension difficulties in adults with right hemisphere brain damage, specifically observing how participants with RHD performed in accuracy and response times when presented stories with inconsistencies in character trait portrayal. Methods and Procedures: Participants included eight adults with RHD and five with no brain damage (NBD). Participants listened to 20 stimuli featuring either a neutral or trait-instantiating first portion (describing a specific trait of a character), followed by a trait-consistent or trait-inconsistent final sentence. Asked to make a rapid judgment concerning whether the final sentence of each story fit with the personality of the character featured in that story, the subjects chose yes or no on a manual response box. Ancillary tasks were used to assist in classifying the clinical characteristics of participants and to provide potential alternative interpretations of participants performances. Outcomes and Results: The results of this study suggest that when character traits are strongly negative and/or strongly implied, adults with RHD appear to incorporate these character biases in their narrative processing, though these biases do not improve their judgments of trait-inconsistent information. As predicted, there were no group differences in trait-instantiating stories with the trait-consistent endings, but the participants with RHD were less accurate in the trait-inconsistent condition than the group with NBD. Supporting the studys main hypothesis, results indicate that adults with RHD are as able as control participants to accurately judge trait-consistent information, but are at a disadvantage when dealing with incongruity.

The current investigation sought to determine whether normal, non-impaired young and older adults performed differentially on the active and passive sentences of the Computerized Revised Token Test Active/Passive (CRTT-A/P). Twenty-five young adults (18 to 30 years old) and twenty-five older adults (50 to 80 years old) completed this study. The first purpose of this study was to determine if the two groups (i.e., young and older) differed significantly in their performance (as measured by overall mean scores) on the two sentence types (i.e., active and passive sentences) across each of the four subtests. Significant differences between subtests were found; participants obtained significantly higher scores on Subtest VIII than on Subtest V and Subtest VI. The second purpose of this study was to determine if the two groups differed significantly in their efficiency scores on the two sentence types across each of the four subtests. It was found that (1) participants obtained significantly higher efficiency scores on Subtest VII than on Subtests V and VI and that (2) participants obtained significantly higher efficiency scores on Subtest VIII than on Subtest VI. The final purpose of this study was to determine if the two groups differed significantly in their response times on the two sentence types across each of the four subtests. It was found that: (1) participants responded more quickly to the passive sentence type than to the active sentence type across all four subtests; (2) the older group responded more quickly on Subtest V than on Subtests VI and VIII; and (3) the older group responded more quickly on Subtest VII than on Subtests VI and VIII. When differences between the two groups were examined for all of the measures, only one significant difference was found (the older group performed significantly slower than the young group on Subtests VI and VIII). These findings demonstrate that language comprehension abilities remain relatively constant with age. While the CRTT-A/P did not detect any significant comprehension differences between active and passive sentences in young and older individuals, this test has yet to be administered to various pathological groups (e.g., persons with agrammatic comprehension). This study thus provides preliminary data for future comparisons with pathological populations. Such studies are equally important for advancing our understanding of the way we comprehend language and form grammatical meaning.

Personalized, pre-emptive and predictive medicine is the capstone of contemporary medical care. The central aim of this dissertation is to address clinical challenges in prescribing personalized therapy to patients with acute phonotrauma. Inflammation and healing, which are innate tissue responses to mechanical stress/ trauma, are regulated by a complex dynamic system. A systems biology approach, which combines empirical, mathematical and computational tools, was taken to study the biological complexity of this dynamic system in vocal fold injury. Computational agent-based models (ABMs) were developed to quantitatively characterize multiple cellular and molecular interactions around inflammation and healing. The models allowed for tests of various hypothetical effects of motion-based treatments in individuals with acute phonotrauma. A phonotrauma ABM was calibrated and verified with empirical data of a panel of inflammatory mediators, obtained from laryngeal secretions in individuals following experimentally induced phonotrauma and a randomly assigned motion-based treatment. A supplementary ABM of surgically induced vocal fold trauma was developed and subsequently calibrated and verified with empirical data of inflammatory mediators and extracellular matrix substances from rat studies, for the purpose of gaining insight into the &ldquo net effect &rdquo of cellular and molecular responses at the tissue level. ABM simulations reproduced and predicted trajectories of inflammatory mediators and extracellular matrix as seen in empirical data of phonotrauma and surgical vocal fold trauma. The simulation results illustrated a spectrum of inflammatory responses to phonotrauma, surgical trauma and motion-based treatments. The results suggested that resonant voice exercise may optimize the combination of para- and anti-inflammatory responses to accelerate healing. Moreover, the ABMs suggested that hyaluronan fragments might be an early molecular index of tissue damage that is sensitive to varying stress levels from relatively low phonatory stress to high surgical stress. We propose that this translational application of biosimulation can be used to quantitatively chart individual healing trajectories, test the effects of different treatment options and most importantly provide new understanding of laryngeal health and healing. By placing biology on a firm mathematical foundation, this line of research has potential to influence the contour of scientific thinking and clinical care of vocal fold injury.

The theory of the dispositional bases of vocal nodules and functional dysphonia (Roy & Bless, 2000) represents an important step toward the understanding of the relation between personality and voice disorders. However, experimental tests of this theory are widely lacking. In this study, female healthy and vocally normal adults between the ages of 18-35 years were divided into two groups, introversion (n = 27) and extraversion (n = 27), based on results on the Eysenck Personality Questionnaire- Revised (EPQ-R). Both groups underwent a stress reactivity protocol, which involved a simulated public speaking stressor in addition to baseline speech, rest, and recovery phases. Participants in the introversion group had significantly higher scores on voice handicap and depression than participants in the extraversion group. The introversion group exhibited significantly greater infrahyoid muscle activity (surface electromyography) and perceptions of vocal effort throughout the protocol. However, although greater stress reactivity was also descriptively observed for those measures in the introversion group, the phase by personality interaction was non-significant as were group differences for submental and anterior tibialis muscle activity. Voice fundamental frequency and intensity significantly decreased during stressor exposure for both groups. The stress induction was effective and significantly increased systolic blood pressure (SBP) and negative affect in everyone. The degree of rumination was not different between groups, but the participants with introversion experienced significantly more fear of public speaking. Neither SBP, negative affect, nor fear of public speaking were significantly correlated with SEMG activity in the participant pool. Instead the trait introversion was significantly and positively correlated with infrahyoid muscle activity in the total sample. This psychobiological study is first examination of the trait theory of voice disorders to focus on the role of stress reactivity. Results indicated that persons with introversion had a disposition towards increased infrahyoid extralaryngeal muscle activity combined with greater perceptions of vocal effort during speech, which were both magnified under conditions of psychological stress. Findings were tentatively interpreted to be consistent with behavioral inhibition in individuals high on introversion as predicted in the trait theory of voice disorders, which may constitute a risk factor for muscle tension dysphonia.

The first aim of the current study was to investigate the effects of the distance manipulation on sentence comprehension in normal individuals (NI) and persons with aphasia (PWA). Consistent with Gibson¡¯s (1998; 2000) locality theory, when distance was manipulated by varying the syntactic dependency (subject-verb: SV and filler-gap: FG) and type of modifier (No, prepositional-phrase: PP, and relative-clause: RC), NI demonstrated an increase in the number of errors and response times to the yes/no questions as the distance increases. NI also exhibited a relatively systematic increase of reading times on the verb (RT-V) and response times (RT) as a function of distance manipulation except for the most complex condition (FG-RC) in which 77% of NI performed at chance-level. More than 60% of normal individuals performed at chance-level in sentences with FG-dependency. Consistent with the previous literature on syntactic comprehension in aging, older adults showed decreased performance on the filler-gap computations. PWA generated more errors in the FG- than SV-dependency. However, their sentence comprehension was not affected by the manipulation of the modifiers. Their RT-V data were difficult to interpret due to the very limited observations for FG-dependency conditions after chance-level performers were excluded from the analyses. One can argue that the high rate of chance-level performance in PWA, especially in the FG conditions, is consistent with the specific impairments hypotheses. However, chance-level performance was observed in majority of individuals with aphasia and even in normal individuals, which was not predicted by those hypotheses. The current results were more consistent with resource-related hypotheses which suggested that sentence comprehension deficits will manifest themselves regardless of the type of aphasia when their capacity is taxed to be exceeded. When distance-based integration cost was held constant between the two dependencies, FG-dependency generated more errors across the groups. However, the RT-V was not significantly different between the two conditions in older adults. These results are consistent with the locality theory. Considering the longer RT-V differences between FG- and SV-dependency in older adults than younger adults, the non-significant group results might be due to the large variability of older adults¡¯ performance and the limited sample size.

Gestures and speech converge during spoken language production. Although the temporal relationship of gestures and speech is thought to depend upon factors such as prosodic stress and word onset, the effects of controlled alterations in the speech signal upon the degree of synchrony between manual gestures and speech is uncertain. Thus, the precise nature of the interactive mechanism of speech-gesture production, or lack thereof, is not agreed upon or even frequently postulated. In Experiment 1, syllable position and contrastive stress were manipulated during sentence production to investigate the synchronization of speech and pointing gestures. An additional aim of Experiment 2 was to investigate the temporal relationship of speech and pointing gestures when speech is perturbed with delayed auditory feedback (DAF). Comparisons between the time of gesture apex and vowel midpoint (GA-VM) for each of the conditions were made for both Experiment 1 and Experiment 2. Additional comparisons of the interval between gesture launch midpoint to vowel midpoint (GLM-VM), total gesture time, gesture launch time, and gesture return time were made for Experiment 2. The results for the first experiment indicated that gestures were more synchronized with first position syllables and neutral syllables as measured GA-VM intervals. The first position syllable effect was also found in the second experiment. However, the results from Experiment 2 supported an effect of contrastive pitch effect. GLM-VM was shorter for first position targets and accented syllables. In addition, gesture launch times and total gesture times were longer for contrastive pitch accented syllables, especially when in the second position of words. Contrary to the predictions, significantly longer GA-VM and GLM-VM intervals were observed when individuals responded under provided delayed auditory feedback (DAF). Vowel and sentence durations increased both with (DAF) and when a contrastive accented syllable was produced. Vowels were longest for accented, second position syllables. These findings provide evidence that the timing of gesture is adjusted based upon manipulations of the speech stream. A potential mechanism of entrainment of the speech and gesture system is offered as an explanation for the observed effects.

This investigation examined the comprehension of complex language in Operation Iraqi Freedom (OIF) and Operation Enduring Freedom (OEF) soldiers, who have been diagnosed with a mild traumatic brain injury upon return from deployment. This experiment used the sentence structure known as a garden path sentence, where the ambiguity of the sentence leads the mind down the path to the wrong interpretation, to test the language comprehension skills of veterans diagnosed with mTBI and controls. Accuracy and reaction time were measured by answering comprehension questions about both garden path sentences and non-garden path sentences. Results demonstrated that the subjects with mTBI had difficulty with complex language which did not contain strong pragmatic cues, but that reaction times were not significantly different compared to the control subjects.

The current study investigated the effect of interferon-á (IFN-á) on the cochlear cell line to shed light on the mechanisms by which interferon alpha may affect hearing. HEI-OC1 cell line and real time-PCR were used to determine the expression of those genes that might be involved in these mechanisms. Dose- (20, 40, & 80 U/ml) and time-dependent experiment-1 did not show significant alteration in gene expression associated with the stimulations of the IFN-á receptors. Therefore, a second experiment was planned. A 3 X 4 factorial design, consisting of three treatment conditions (0, 200 & 2000U/ml) and four time-points (6, 12, 24 & 48 Hrs), was employed. The results of experiment-2 revealed that significant differential expression of inflammatory genes, immune response genes and apoptotic genes is found in a dose- and time-dependent manner. This outcome indicates that IFN-á treatment led to initiation of an inflammatory response, an immune response and apoptosis of the cochlear cells, which was confirmed by a reduction in cell viability. The immune response was the most pronounced response; whereas inflammatory the apoptotic responses were transient. Therefore, the current in-vitro study indicates that the inflammatory response, the immune response and apoptosis might be the underlying mechanisms involved in the hearing impairment previously reported in patients under IFN-á therapy. These results imply that pre-treatment hearing evaluation as well as close monitoring of hearing function in patients undergoing long-term high-dose of IFN-á therapy are necessary to avoid or to minimize its adverse effect on hearing. The results also indicate that there is a need for further investigation of other markers that might be involved in signaling pathways of IFN-á, including markers for intrinsic pathway of apoptosis and antiapoptotic markers as well as markers for necrosis. This information might open an avenue for therapeutic intervention that can protect the inner ear from the ototoxic effect of some medications in general and IFN-á in particular and treat some immune-mediated inner ear disorders. In addition, this information might help in identifying novel diagnostic markers for vulnerability, severity, and outcomes of any cochlear pathology.