Purpose: Up to 90% of people with Parkinson's disease (PD) develop communication difficulties over the course of the disease. While the negative effect of dysarthria on communicative participation has been well-documented, the impact of the occurrence of acquired stuttered disfluencies on communication in different speech situations is unknown. This study aimed to determine if the frequency of occurrence of stuttered disfluencies affects communicative participation in individuals with PD, and whether such a relationship is mediated by examiner- and self-rated measures of disease severity.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFIntroduction: To perceive speech, our brains process information from different sensory modalities. Previous electroencephalography (EEG) research has established that audio-visual information provides an advantage compared to auditory-only information during early auditory processing. In addition, behavioral research showed that auditory speech perception is not only enhanced by visual information but also by tactile information, transmitted by puffs of air arriving at the skin and aligned with speech.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFAlzheimer's disease (AD) is accompanied by language impairments and communicative breakdowns. Research into language processing by people with AD (pwAD) has focused largely on production of nouns in isolation. However, impairments are consistently found in verb production at word and sentence levels, and comparatively little is known about word use by pwAD in conversation.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBackground: Parkinson's disease frequently causes communication impairments, but knowledge about the occurrence of new-onset stuttering is limited.
Objectives: To determine the presence of acquired neurogenic stuttering and its relationship with cognitive and motor functioning in individuals with Parkinson's disease.
Method: Conversation, picture description, and reading samples were collected from 100 people with Parkinson's disease and 25 controls to identify the presence of stuttered disfluencies (SD) and their association with neuropsychological test performance and motor function.
Purpose: Augmentative and alternative communication (AAC) systems are important to support communication for individuals with complex communication needs. A recent addition to AAC system options is the brain-computer interface (BCI). This study aimed to compare the clinical application of the P300 speller BCI with two more common AAC systems, the EyeLink board, and an eye-tracking camera.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFAlzheimer's disease (AD) results in language impairments and higher-level communication problems. Research into the language of people with AD (pwAD) has mainly focused on nouns; however, improved understanding of verb processing by pwAD could improve diagnostic assessments and communicative interventions. This systematic review synthesizes findings of AD's effects on verbs from single-word, sentence, and discourse tasks.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFInt J Speech Lang Pathol
October 2020
This study aimed to identify the current practices of New Zealand speech-language pathologists (SLPs) working with multilingual children, to compare these with best practice guidelines and make recommendations for training and service development. An online survey was sent to SLPs working with children in New Zealand, asking questions about their training, languages spoken and management of multilingual children. Responses from 146 SLPs were analysed.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFOver the past decades, brain imaging studies in fluently speaking participants have greatly advanced our knowledge of the brain areas involved in speech production. In addition, complementary information has been provided by investigations of brain activation patterns associated with disordered speech. In the present study we specifically aimed to revisit and expand an earlier study by De Nil and colleagues, by investigating the effects of simulating disfluencies on the brain activation patterns of fluent speakers during overt and covert speech production.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFJ Acoust Soc Am
November 2019
Speech perception is a multi-sensory experience. Visual information enhances [Sumby and Pollack (1954). J.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFIntegration of auditory and aero-tactile information during speech perception has been documented during two-way closed-choice syllable classification tasks [Gick and Derrick (2009). Nature 462, 502-504], but not during an open-choice task using continuous speech perception [Derrick, O'Beirne, Gorden, De Rybel, Fiasson, and Hay (2016). J.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFIn adults and school-aged children, phonological aspects of reading seem to be sustained by left dorsal regions, while ventral regions seem to be involved in orthographic word recognition. Yet, given that the brain reorganises during reading acquisition, it is unknown when and how these reading routes emerge and whether neural deficits in dyslexia predate reading onset. Using diffusion MRI in 36 pre-readers with a family risk for dyslexia (FRD(+)) and 35 well matched pre-readers without a family risk (FRD(-)), our results show that phonological predictors of reading are sustained bilaterally by both ventral and dorsal tracts.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFAdvanced Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) techniques such as Diffusion Tensor Imaging (DTI) and resting-state functional MRI (rfMRI) are widely used to study structural and functional neural connectivity. However, as these techniques are highly sensitive to motion artifacts and require a considerable amount of time for image acquisition, successful acquisition of these images can be challenging to complete with certain populations. This is especially true for young children.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFNeurogenic stuttering is an acquired speech disorder characterized by the occurrence of stuttering-like dysfluencies following brain damage. Because the onset of stuttering in these patients is associated with brain lesions, this condition provides a unique opportunity to study the neural processes underlying speech dysfluencies. Lesion localizations of 20 stroke subjects with neurogenic stuttering and 17 control subjects were compared using voxel-based lesion symptom mapping.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFUnlabelled: This study presents survey data on 58 Dutch-speaking patients with neurogenic stuttering following various neurological injuries. Stroke was the most prevalent cause of stuttering in our patients, followed by traumatic brain injury, neurodegenerative diseases, and other causes. Speech and non-speech characteristics were analyzed separately for these four etiology groups.
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