This study used the LENA Digital Language Processor to look at parental input as a possible factor affecting language performance variability in children with cochlear implants. Eight children between the ages of 2 and 6 with cochlear implants wore the LENA DLP for one full day while engaging in typical family activities. Adult word counts, child word counts, and number of conversational turns were compared to the child's Preschool Language Scales 3rd Edition scores and to LENA data from normal hearing children. It was found that parents of children with cochlear implants talk in a similar fashion to parents of normal hearing children in regards to amount of speech. The children, however, were significantly above agerage on word counts, while being significantly below average on PLS 3 scores. Possible reasons for this discrepancy are discussed.

Learning new object-name associations (i.e., word learning) is an ability crucial to normal development starting in early childhood and continuing through the lifespan. To learn a new word, an object must be associated with an arbitrary phonological (or orthographic) string representing a word. The declarative memory system formulates and encodes associations between two arbitrary stimuli and has been well established as playing a critical role for adult word learning. Research investigating the neural substrates of the declarative memory system and word learning has implicated the hippocampus and the surrounding medial temporal lobe (MTL) as crucial structures. A substantial literature on populations with damage to these particular structures (e.g., hippocampal amnesia, temporal lobectomy) has supports the view that without these structures, declarative learning, and word learning by extension, is grossly impaired. However, a recent study Sharon and colleagues (2011) suggested that non-MTL structures may be sufficient to support word learning under special study conditions ("fast mapping") (Sharon, Moscovitch, & Gilboa, 2011). Fast mapping is a word-learning phenomenon described as the ability to acquire the name for a new word in a single exposure to an unknown word and unfamiliar referent alongside a known word with its referent (e.g., Carey & Bartlett, 1978; Carey, 2010). This study evaluated the ability of patients with unilateral temporal lobectomy (TL) following early-onset temporal lobe epilepsy to learn new object-name associations in two different word learning conditions: fast mapping (FM) and explicit encoding (EE). The word learning performance was evaluated relative to a group of healthy normal comparison participants (NC). The goal of this study was to examine the role of the hippocampus in word learning to answer the question: does a FM condition promote word learning in participants with temporal lobe epilepsy who have had a left temporal lobectomy? NC participants were able to acquire a rich representation of novel items (as evidenced by improved familiarity ratings and generalization of items) while TL participants had severely impaired performance on free recall, recognition testing, and generalization tasks. TL participants did not learn novel object-name associations despite a FM paradigm while the NC group performed significantly above chance on recognition testing. These findings in conjunction with broadly similar results obtained from hippocampal amnesic patients tested using the same paradigm (Warren & Duff, 2012), support the necessity of the hippocampus for rapid and flexible associations to be obtained via the declarative memory system.

Contrary to the previous belief that any presence of supraglottic activity indicates presence of hyperfunctional vocal pathology, Stager et al. (2000, 2002) found out that supraglottic compressions do occur in normal subjects. In fact, dynamic false vocal fold compressions during production of phrases with a great number of glottal stops were noted. The present study hypothesized that a similar pattern s would be observed at sentence level, where at least 50% or higher incidence of dynamic FVF compressions would be observed at aurally perceived glottal stops and other linguistic markers, such as vowel-initial words, /t/ final words, punctuations and phrase boundaries, where glottal stops were likely to occur. Nasendoscopic recordings were obtained from 8 healthy subjects (2M; 6F) during production of selected sentence stimuli.. Their audio recordings were rated by two judges to detect the location of glottal stops. Then, the video images were analyzed to categorize the presence and absence of dynamic and static false vocal folds (FVF) or anterior posterior (AP) compressions. Results indicated that the incidence of dynamic FVF compressions was 30%. Nevertheless, the average incidence was elevated at aurally perceived glottal stops and at the linguistic contexts that are known to be associated with glottal stops compared to other contexts.

The speech signal carries two types of information: linguistic information (the message content) and indexical information (acoustic cues about the talker). In the traditional view of speech perception, the acoustic differences among talkers were considered "noise". In this view, the listeners' task was to strip away unwanted variability to uncover the idealized phonetic representation of the spoken message. A more recent view suggests that both talker information and linguistic information are stored in memory. Rather than being unwanted "noise", talker information aids in speech recognition especially under difficult listening conditions. For example, it has been shown that normal hearing listeners who completed voice recognition training were subsequently better at recognizing speech from familiar versus unfamiliar voices. For individuals with hearing loss, access to both types of information may be compromised. Some studies have shown that cochlear implant (CI) recipients are relatively poor at using indexical speech information because low-frequency speech cues are poorly conveyed in standard CIs. However, some CI users with preserved residual hearing can now combine acoustic amplification of low frequency information (via a hearing aid) with electrical stimulation in the high frequencies (via the CI). It is referred to as bimodal hearing when a listener uses a CI in one ear and a hearing aid in the opposite ear. A second way electrical and acoustic stimulation is achieved is through a new CI system, the hybrid CI. This device combines electrical stimulation with acoustic hearing in the same ear, via a shortened electrode array that is intended to preserve residual low frequency hearing in the apical portion of the cochlea. It may be that hybrid CI users can learn to use voice information to enhance speech understanding. This study will assess voice learning and its relationship to talker-discrimination, music perception, and spoken word recognition in simulations of Hybrid CI or bimodal hearing. Specifically, our research questions are as follows: (1) Does training increase talker identification? (2) Does familiarity with the talker or linguistic message enhance spoken word recognition? (3) Does enhanced spectral processing (as demonstrated by improved talker recognition) generalize to non-linguistic tasks such as talker discrimination and music perception tasks? To address our research questions, we will recruit normal hearing adults to participate in eight talker identification training sessions. Prior to training, subjects will be administered the forward and backward digit span task to assess short-term memory and working memory abilities. We hypothesize that there will be a correlation between the ability to learn voices and memory. Subjects will also complete a talker-discrimination test and a music perception test that require the use of spectral cues. We predict that training will generalize to performances on these tasks. Lastly, a spoken word recognition (SWR) test will be administered before and after talker identification training. The subjects will listen to sentences produced by eight talkers (four male, four female) and verbally repeat what they had heard. Half of the sentences will contain keywords repeated in training and half of the sentences will have keywords not repeated in training. Additionally, subjects will have only heard sentences from half of the talkers during training. We hypothesize that subjects will show an advantage for trained keywords rather than non-trained keywords and will perform better with familiar talkers than unfamiliar talkers.

Augmentative and Alternative Communication (AAC) devices have been created, and are currently used, in hospital settings to improve communication between those who require adaptive assistance for speaking and writing. AAC devices are typically used by non-oral patients. While interpreters are required to be available for non-English speaking patients within the hospital, they cannot be available at the bedside of the patient at all hours of the day for routine cares. One population in particular who has difficulty communicating without interpreters are those who are deaf and use American Sign Language (ASL) as a primary means of communication. How are these patients supposed to communicate with medical staff when interpreters are not available? This question was the basis for the current project. Previously developed AAC devices for non-oral patients were adapted to create a translation device to improve bedside communication between hospital staff and patients who are deaf. The limited ability to effectively communicate with patients who are deaf argues for the criticality of having a translation device for Deaf patients in the hospital setting.

No description available.

The purpose of this research was to analyze child and clinician factors affecting language therapy outcomes and to analyze the potential bi-directional relationship between child and clinician factors. Transcripts of intervention sessions with one child and one trained examiner were coded for factors relating to children's language ability, examiners' strategies for reaching session targets, and differences in examiners' interactional styles. It was found that differences in children's language ability and examiners' interactional styles did not have a strong relationship with therapy outcomes. Differences were observed in the overall frequency of examiners' strategy use across children; however, examiners were not sensitive to individual children's responsiveness to particular strategies. This is a secondary data analysis on an intervention study, which affects interpretation of the results: variability in examiner and child behaviors was decreased due to adherence to intervention protocol. However, the mismatch between examiner strategies and child responses is of interest. Making clinicians explicitly aware of the many types of elicitation and response strategies available may increase examiners' effectiveness, efficiency, or responsiveness.

The purpose of this study was to gather normative data regarding the phonological system of bilingual Creole-English children ages three and five and to compare performance to norms for English speaking children. The forty participants lived in Miami and represented low socio-economic groups. Participants were assessed using the Goldman-Fristoe Test of Articulation-2 and a Haitian Creole Picture Naming Assessment. The results indicated that the percentage of correct phonemes in Creole (M=91.6) were not significantly different when compared to the correct production of the same phonemes in English (M=92.8). Further analysis revealed that the accuracy of all phonemes was higher for the five-year (M= 90.8) as compared to the three-year-olds (M= 85) in Creole. In English, the five-year-olds performed better than the three-year-olds participants. These findings revealed patterns of phonological development in bilingual Creole/English Children similar to patterns reported in other bilingual children. This information is essential in the evaluation and treatment of this population.

Fourteen native Spanish-speaking adults participated in a study on tense and aspect in Spanish. Subjects viewed videos that depicted completed events or videos that ended with an ongoing event and chose a sentence in the past tense that best described the event. One condition included adverbial cues and the other condition did not. Subjects also read paragraphs describing bounded and unbounded events and chose a past tense verb that best fit the context. It was found that subjects consistently chose preterit responses for completed event videos in both the adverb and non-adverb condition, but responses varied more in the videos that ended with ongoing events. The majority of subjects selected preterit verbs for bounded events and imperfect verbs for unbounded events. Implications and further directions of research are discussed.

Traumatic brain injury (TBI) is a global health epidemic that has deleterious consequences for the individuals with the brain injury, their families, and society. The development and validation of effective treatments is imperative. The current study was inspired by Ylvisaker's collaborative intervention approach with individuals with TBI and draws on a line of work by Duff and colleagues (e.g., Duff et al., 2006; Gupta et al., 2011) documenting patterns of spared and impaired learning abilities in individuals with various types focal brain damage (e.g., hippocampus) and selective neuropsychological impairment (e.g., declarative memory) using a collaborative referencing paradigm. This study extends this line of work by examining the ability of individuals with mild to moderate traumatic brain injury to develop and use referential labels for novel picture cards across repeated interactions with a familiar partner as they complete a collaborative referencing task. Five TBI participant pairs (an individuals with TBI and their partner) and five healthy comparison pairs completed 24 trials (6 trials in each of 4 sessions) of the collaborative referencing task across two days. As a group, the performance of four of the five TBI pairs did not differ from healthy comparison pairs on the primary dependent variables of card placement accuracy, time to complete each trial, and reduction in communicative resources across trials. That is, despite having TBI, these individuals were able to develop and use unique and concise labels to reference the novel cards in collaboration with a familiar partner. The fifth TBI participant pair (3591) differed from the other TBI and healthy comparison pair on both quantitative and qualitative measures. Speculating that 3591's husband may have contributed to their poor performance, a follow-up study was conducted whereby 3591 was brought back to lab several months later and she complete one session of the collaborative referencing task with a new partner. The results of the follow-up study were striking. 3591 and her new partner were as successful as other pairs on all measures of learning in the study. Given the complex nature of cognitive, neurological, behavioral, personality, and communicative impairments associated with TBI, the findings here, that all participants with TBI were successful in the task, are surprising and provides further evidence that these interactive sessions are potent learning environments. The results of the study support the idea that use of a social and collaborative interaction paradigm facilitates learning in adults at least one year time post injury with mild to moderate brain injuries. Aspects of the collaborative referencing task that exemplify Ylvisaker's contextualized invention approach are completion of a goal-directed task, working with a partner who was relevant to the participant's everyday life, supports were provided by the partner as needed, the task was repeated many times in order to increase chances of the pair's success, and skills were taught through collaboration rather than explicit instruction. Although this was not an intervention study, these findings provide further evidence supporting the use of Ylvisaker's social, interactive, and collaborative approach for individuals with TBI. This study is the first to our knowledge to investigate learning during a collaborative referencing task with individuals with TBI and the positive results obtained here suggest that this may be a fruitful way to deploy Ylvisaker's contextualized intervention approach in more controlled research settings.