Conversation is a highly interactive and coordinated effort between interactants. For example, interactants often mimic the behaviors and speech of one another and coordinate the timing of behaviors, or interactional synchrony. Despite being affected in certain neurological and psychiatric disorders, the neural mechanisms underlying these processes are not understood. The goal of this study is to understand the role of the ventromedial prefrontal cortex (vmPFC), an area of the brain involved in social and emotional behavior, for interpersonal coordination, including mimicry and interactional synchrony. To test the role of the vmPFC for mimicry, normal comparison (NC), brain damaged comparison (BDC), and participants with vmPFC damage interacted in two sessions with a research assistant (RA) who was performing a target behavior (1st session: nodding, 2nd session: face touching). The amount of time the participants spent nodding or touching their face in each session was recorded. NC and BDC participants tended to mimic the partner and nodded slightly more in the session in which the RA was nodding, and touched their face slightly more in the session in which the RA was touching their face. In contrast, vmPFC patients showed no difference in their behaviors in either session, suggesting that they were not influenced by the partner's behaviors and did not mimic them. In a second experiment, all of the above participant groups had a naturalistic conversation with an unfamiliar interactional partner. The conversational data were analyzed for numerous aspects of interpersonal coordination, including convergence of number of words, words per turn and backchannels, reciprocity of self-disclosures, the use of questions, interactional synchrony, and a time series analysis of response latency and speech rate. The vmPFC participants performed consistently worse than NC participants on convergence of words and words per turn, self-disclosures and asking questions. All brain-damaged participants were impaired on aspects of interactional synchrony, and no conclusive results were found for the time series analysis of response latency and speech rate. This study provides support for the hypothesis that the vmPFC is important for interpersonal coordination as the vmPFC group differed significantly from the NC group on the majority of the analyses. The final goal of this study was to understand the effects of traumatic brain injury (TBI) on interpersonal coordination. TBI patients participated in all of the experiments described above and preliminary results showed that they also seemed to be impaired on the mimicry task, and they performed slightly worse than NC participants on many of the interpersonal coordination analyses of the conversational data. This suggests that TBI also does seem to affect certain aspects of interpersonal coordination.

abstract: Speech sound disorders (SSDs) are the most prevalent type of communication disorder in children. Clinically, speech-language pathologists (SLPs) rely on behavioral methods for assessing and treating SSDs. Though clients typically experience improved speech outcomes as a result of therapy, there is evidence that underlying deficits may persist even in individuals who have completed treatment for surface-level speech behaviors. Advances in the field of genetics have created the opportunity to investigate the contribution of genes to human communication. Due to the heterogeneity of many communication disorders, the manner in which specific genetic changes influence neural mechanisms, and thereby behavioral phenotypes, remains largely unknown. The purpose of this study was to identify genotype-phenotype associations, along with perceptual, and motor-related biomarkers within families displaying SSDs. Five parent-child trios participated in genetic testing, and five families participated in a combination of genetic and behavioral testing to help elucidate biomarkers related to SSDs. All of the affected individuals had a history of childhood apraxia of speech (CAS) except for one family that displayed a phonological disorder. Genetic investigation yielded several genes of interest relevant for an SSD phenotype: CNTNAP2, CYFIP1, GPR56, HERC1, KIAA0556, LAMA5, LAMB1, MDGA2, MECP2, NBEA, SHANK3, TENM3, and ZNF142. All of these genes showed at least some expression in the developing brain. Gene ontology analysis yielded terms supporting a genetic influence on central nervous system development. Behavioral testing revealed evidence of a sequential processing biomarker for all individuals with CAS, with many showing deficits in sequential motor skills in addition to speech deficits. In some families, participants also showed evidence of a co-occurring perceptual processing biomarker. The family displaying a phonological phenotype showed milder sequential processing deficits compared to CAS families. Overall, this study supports the presence of a sequential processing biomarker for CAS and shows that relevant genes of interest may be influencing a CAS phenotype via sequential processing. Knowledge of these biomarkers can help strengthen precision of clinical assessment and motivate development of novel interventions for individuals with SSDs. / Dissertation/Thesis / Doctoral Dissertation Communication Disorders 2020

Background: Word retrieval deficits are a common, pervasive feature of aphasia. Semantic feature analysis (SFA) is a popular treatment technique for word retrieval impairment. Preliminary evidence of its use in small aphasia-group settings suggests improved word retrieval in discourse-based tasks with improvements in communicative informativeness (Antonucci, 2009; Falconer & Antonucci, 2012). Objective: The aim of this study was to investigate the training of SFA within discourse during a small (two-member) aphasia group treatment to ascertain if gains would be made in word retrieval abilities and communicative informativeness. Method: Two female participants with chronic aphasia, aged seventy seven and sixty eight, participated weekly in group treatment for five consecutive weeks where stimuli were used to elicit increasingly naturalistic discourse. A multiple-baseline design was used and a case series analysis conducted. Baseline measures, treatment data and data from the six week follow-up (SWFU) session were analysed using the protocols developed by Nicholas and Brookshire (1993) and Mayer and Murray (2003). Results: Both participants demonstrated certain modest gains in overall communicative informativeness but these were not maintained at the SWFU session. Gains in informativeness ranged from 12% to 13.4% for participants, which agree with improvements in other studies (Antonucci, 2009; Boyle & Coelho, 1995; Falconer & Antonucci, 2012). P2 (presented with anomic aphasia) performed better than P1 (presented with Broca’s aphasia and a component of apraxia of speech [AOS]) with regards to communicative informativeness (%CIUs) and had greater access to semantic knowledge (i.e. could access lexical forms at an improved rate). Conclusion: The small group setting may offer advantages to facilitate communication skills and increase participation in everyday conversation. Further research is needed to identify benefits for individuals with differing aphasia types and severity, optimal intensity and frequency of group treatment and the role of peer support during group interaction. Key Words Aphasia, stroke rehabilitation, word retrieval, semantic feature analysis, connected speech, discourse, group therapy, communicative informativeness, functional communication. / Dissertation (MA)--University of Pretoria, 2016. / Speech-Language Pathology and Audiology / MA / Unrestricted

In the absence of a gold standard, this study illustrates the process involved in the cross-cultural translation and adaptation of the FOCUS© and its shortened version, FOCUS-34© (the Parent Form and Instruction Sheet, as well as the Clinician Form and Instruction Sheet), while also determining the social validity and clinical applicability of the translated measure. The target language used as example was Afrikaans, one of the 11 official languages of South Africa.

Children with disabilities are at high risk for several forms of maltreatment, including abuse and neglect (Ammerman, Hersen, Van Hasselt, Lubetsky, & Sieck, 1994; Sullivan & Knutson, 1998b), and children with hearing and communication disorders comprise a substantial portion of children at risk (e.g., Sullivan & Knutson, 2000). For example, some literature investigating the parenting practices of parents raising children and adolescents with hearing and communication disorders suggests that these parents have a tendency to use physically harsh discipline practices (Knutson, Johnson, & Sullivan, 2004; Sullivan & Knutson, 1998b). Further, high prevalence rates of emotional and behavioral problems are documented in these youth (e.g., Greenberg & Kusche, 1989; Hindley, 1997; Prizant, Audet, Burke, & Hummel, 1990). Despite these findings, a limited amount of research focuses on understanding factors related to these undesired outcomes. Therefore, this study investigates the relationships among dimensions of parents' psychological functioning and parent-child interactive processes in a culturally diverse, national sample of families raising children and adolescents with hearing and communication disorders. Results suggest that parents' stress, depression, and anxiety as well as parent-child communication and involvement are important correlates of discipline practices and subsequent child behavior in families raising children and adolescents with hearing and communication disorders. Additionally, psychological aggression and parents' depression are highly predictive factors in the use of corporal punishment. Also, psychological aggression and parenting stress are highly predictive of reported youth behavior problems. The information gained from this investigation may provide direction for assessment and therapeutic intervention with parents of children and adolescents who have hearing and communication disorders.

No description available.

No description available.

Developmental language impairments are neurodevelopmental disorders in which the acquisition of language, a task which children typically perform with ease, is hindered or fraught with difficulty. This work focuses on specific language impairment (SLI), a common and highly heritable language impairment in which language development is abnormal while other developmental domains are normal. Additionally, a case-study of a child with a broader linguistic and behavioural phenotype is also presented. The work described in this thesis includes both genetic and functional investigations which were aimed at identifying candidate genes for language impairment and provide insight into the genetic mechanisms that underlie language development. I performed a genome-wide association study of SLI which included child genotype effects, maternal genotype effects, parent-of-origin effects, and maternal-foetal interaction effects. This study found significant paternal parent-of-origin effects with the gene NOP9 on chromosome 14, and suggestive maternal parent-of-origin effects with a region on chromosome 5 which had previously been implicated in autism and ADHD. Case-control and quantitative association analyses of HLA genes and SLI identified several risk alleles and protective alleles. A case-control association analysis for related individuals which used an isolated population affected by SLI identified a non-synonymous coding variant in the gene NFXL1 which was significantly more frequent in affected individuals than in unaffected individuals. High-throughput sequencing of the coding regions of NFXL1 and LD blocks surrounding associated variants in ATP2C2, CMIP and CNTNAP2 (as reported in previous studies) identified novel or rare non-synonymous coding variants in NFXL1 and ATP2C2 in SLI families as well as intronic variants in all four genes that were significantly more frequent in SLI probands than in population controls. I describe a functional study of NFXL1 examining its expression in various brain regions, the presence of different splice variants across several tissues, its effect on genes it potentially interacts with, and the subcellular localisation of the protein. Finally, I present the case-study of a child with language impairment who had chromosomal rearrangements which spanned the location of FOXP2. I examine the potential influence the chromosomal rearrangements had on FOXP2 expression and describe a lincRNA gene which was disrupted by the chromosomal inversion. In conclusion, this work identified new candidate genes for language impairment, provided further support for the involvement of previously-identified candidate genes in SLI and contributed to the understanding of the molecular function of a newly-identified candidate gene for SLI.

This study examines the relationship between types of gestures and instances of self-initiated self-repair (SISR) used by persons with non-fluent aphasia (NFA), which is a type of aphasia characterized by stilted speech or signing (Papathanasiou et al., 2013), in interactions with clinicians. Conversation repairs in this study are assessed using the framework of Conversation Analysis (CA), which is an approach for describing, analyzing, and understanding social interaction (Sidnell, 2010). Previous linguistic studies have demonstrated a distinct preference for the use of gesture during a repair by persons with aphasia (Goodwin, 1995; Klippi, 2015; Wilkinson, 2013). This study draws more conclusive generalizations than previous studies about the types of gesture used in successful and unsuccessful SISR by persons with NFA through the use of the AphasiaBank corpus. Results show that there does not appear to be a connection between the overall frequencies of gesture used by persons with NFA during a phase of the repair mechanism as compared to other phases in the repair mechanism. Additionally, there is a slight tendency in this dataset for persons with NFA to have more successful repairs when they use gesture during the initiation and reparable portions of the repair mechanism.

Students on two continents are participating in a new, innovative program designed to promote research into communication disorders across languages and cultures. The three-year project, jointly funded by the U.S. Department of Education and the Brazilian Ministry of Education (Fundacao Coordenacao de Aperfeicoamento de Pessoal de Nivel Superior; CAPES), supports student exchange as well as cross-cultural and cross-linguistic curriculum development for students of speech-language pathology and audiology at four universities in the United States and Brazil. The universities include East Tennessee State University (lead U.S. university, Dr. Brenda Louw, Project Director), the University of Northern Iowa (Dr. Ken Bleile, Project Director), Universidade Federal de Santa Maria (lead Brazil university, Dr. Marcia Keske-Soares, Project Director,), and Universidade de São Paulo-Baurú (Dr. Inge Trindade, Project Director).