The impact of COVID-19 on communicative accessibility and well-being in adults with hearing impairment: a survey study.

Background: COVID-19 measures, such as face masks, have clear consequences for the communicative accessibility of people with hearing impairment because they reduce speech perception. As communication is essential to participate in society, this might have impact on their mental well-being. This study was set out to investigate the impact of the COVID-19 measures on the communicative accessibility and well-being of adults with hearing impairment.

Learning to express causal events in Mandarin Chinese: A multimodal perspective.

Previous research has shown language-specific features play a guiding role in how children develop expression of events with speech and gestures. This study adopts a multimodal approach and examines Mandarin Chinese, a language that features context use and verb serializations. Forty children (four-to-seven years old) and ten adults were asked to describe fourteen video stimuli depicting different types of causal events involving location/state changes.

Perspectives of D/HH-Students on Mainstream Higher Education: A Qualitative Study.

Social, contextual, and technological changes affected the educational context for students who are deaf or hard of hearing (D/HH) in higher education in many countries. Although, several barriers to academic success already have been identified, the perspectives of D/HH-students on inclusion, educational facilities, and support are important to overcome them. This interview-based qualitative study describes the perspectives of 32 D/HH-students in mainstream higher education in The Netherlands.

Listening Difficulties of Children With Cochlear Implants in Mainstream Secondary Education.

Objectives: Previous research has shown that children with cochlear implants (CIs) encounter more communication difficulties than their normal-hearing (NH) peers in kindergarten and elementary schools. Yet, little is known about the potential listening difficulties that children with CIs may experience during secondary education. The aim of this study was to investigate the listening difficulties of children with a CI in mainstream secondary education and to compare these results to the difficulties of their NH peers and the difficulties observed by their teachers.

LiCoS: A New Linguistically Controlled Sentences Test to Assess Functional Hearing Performance.

Purpose: To overcome the potential tension between clinical and ecological validity in speech audiometric assessment by creating a new set of sentence materials with high linguistic validity for the Dutch-speaking area.

Methods: A linguistic "fingerprint" of modern spoken Dutch and Flemish served to generate a set of sentences recorded from 1 male and 1 female talker. The sentences were presented to 30 normal-hearing listeners in stationary speech noise at a signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) of -5 dB sound pressure level (SPL).

Speech understanding in noise in elderly adults: the effect of inhibitory control and syntactic complexity.

Background: Previous research has suggested that speech perception in elderly adults is influenced not only by age-related hearing loss or presbycusis but also by declines in cognitive abilities, by background noise and by the syntactic complexity of the message.

Aims: To gain further insight into the influence of these cognitive as well as acoustic and linguistic factors on speech perception in elderly adults by investigating inhibitory control as a listener characteristic and background noise type and syntactic complexity as input characteristics.

Methods & Procedures: Phoneme identification was measured in different noise conditions and in different linguistic contexts (single words, sentences with varying syntactic complexity).

Foil Strain Gauges Using Piezoresistive Carbon Nanotube Yarn: Fabrication and Calibration.

Carbon nanotube yarns are micron-scale fibers comprised by tens of thousands of carbon nanotubes in their cross section and exhibiting piezoresistive characteristics that can be tapped to sense strain. This paper presents the details of novel foil strain gauge sensor configurations comprising carbon nanotube yarn as the piezoresistive sensing element. The foil strain gauge sensors are designed using the results of parametric studies that maximize the sensitivity of the sensors to mechanical loading.

Acoustic environments that support equally accessible oral higher education as a human right.

Purpose: People have the right to freedom of opinion and expression, as defined in Article 19 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Higher education plays a major role in helping students to develop and express their own opinions and, therefore, should be equally accessible to all. This article focuses on how students judge the accessibility to oral instruction in higher education listening contexts.

Morphosyntactic correctness of written language production in adults with moderate to severe congenital hearing loss.

Objective: To examine whether moderate to severe congenital hearing loss (MSCHL) leads to persistent morphosyntactic problems in the written language production of adults, as it does in their spoken language production.

Design: Samples of written language in Dutch were analysed for morphosyntactic correctness and syntactic complexity.

Study Sample: 20 adults with MSCHL and 10 adults with normal hearing (NH).

Linguistic Factors Influencing Speech Audiometric Assessment.

In speech audiometric testing, hearing performance is typically measured by calculating the number of correct repetitions of a speech stimulus. We investigate to what extent the repetition accuracy of Dutch speech stimuli presented against a background noise is influenced by nonauditory processes. We show that variation in verbal repetition accuracy is partially explained by morpholexical and syntactic features of the target language.

Spoken Word Recognition Errors in Speech Audiometry: A Measure of Hearing Performance?

This report provides a detailed analysis of incorrect responses from an open-set spoken word-repetition task which is part of a Dutch speech audiometric test battery. Single-consonant confusions were analyzed from 230 normal hearing participants in terms of the probability of choice of a particular response on the basis of acoustic-phonetic, lexical, and frequency variables. The results indicate that consonant confusions are better predicted by lexical knowledge than by acoustic properties of the stimulus word.

Data warehouse for detection of occupational diseases in OHS data.

Background: Occupational health and safety (OHS) services collect a wide range of data during health surveillance.

Aims: To build a 'data warehouse' to make OHS data available for research and to investigate sector-specific health problems.

Methods: Medical data were extracted, transformed and loaded into the data warehouse.

Finite Verb Morphology in the Spontaneous Speech of Dutch-Speaking Children With Hearing Loss.

Objective: In this study, the acquisition of Dutch finite verb morphology is investigated in children with cochlear implants (CIs) with profound hearing loss and in children with hearing aids (HAs) with moderate to severe hearing loss. Comparing these two groups of children increases our insight into how hearing experience and audibility affect the acquisition of morphosyntax.

Design: Spontaneous speech samples were analyzed of 48 children with CIs and 29 children with HAs, ages 4 to 7 years.

Development of the A§E test battery for assessment of pitch perception in speech.

Objectives: The auditory speech sounds evaluation 2009 test battery for assessment of speech pitch perception is presented. It was designed to (a) assess perception of pitch in linguistic contexts without the confounds of secondary acoustic cues, (b) be usable with listeners from different language backgrounds, and (c) be suitable for use in a clinical setting. The need for this test battery arises from increased awareness of the importance of prosody in clinical practice, and the development of methods for improving pitch perception in listeners with profound hearing losses.

Clinical assessment of pitch perception.

Objective: The perception of pitch has recently gained attention. At present, clinical audiologic tests to assess this are hardly available. This article reports on the development of a clinical test using harmonic intonation (HI) and disharmonic intonation (DI).

Assessing prosodic skills in five European languages: cross-linguistic differences in typical and atypical populations.

Following demand for a prosody assessment procedure, the test Profiling Elements of Prosody in Speech-Communication (PEPS-C), has been translated from English into Spanish, French, Flemish and Norwegian. This provides scope to examine receptive and expressive prosodic ability in Romance (Spanish and French) as well as Germanic (English and Flemish) languages, and includes the possibility of assessing these skills with regard to lexical tone (Norwegian). Cross-linguistic similarities and differences relevant to the translation are considered.

Are radiographs needed when MR imaging is performed for non-acute knee symptoms in patients younger than 45 years of age?

Objective: The objective was to determine the value of radiographs in young adults with non-acute knee symptoms who are scheduled for magnetic resonance imaging (MRI).

Materials And Methods: Nine hundred and sixty-one consecutive patients aged between 16 and 45 years with knee symptoms of at least 4 weeks' duration were prospectively included in three participating hospitals. After applying exclusion criteria, 798 patients remained.

Augmentation of near infrared diffuse reflectance and transmittance spectral data for the development of robust PLSBC models for classifying double blind clinical trial tablets.

The water content of clinical trial tablets can be different between and within different tablet batches, depending on the relative humidity conditions during their production, packaging, storage and analysis. These water variations lead to important spectral variations in the near infrared spectral region which can lead to a wrong identification if the classification model was based on unrepresentative data towards the water content. As model development for clinical trial studies needs to be extremely fast - within one working day - with generally only one batch available, the principle of data augmentation has to be applied to render more robust classification models.

Learning sequence movements in a homogenous sample of patients with Parkinson's disease.

We investigated the acquisition of sequence movements in Parkinson's disease (PD) by means of the serial reaction time (SRT) task. To this end, we used a sample of PD patients that fell within the same stage of the disease. Sixteen PD patients and 16 age-, sex- and education-matched control subjects performed the SRT task with a first-order conditional (FOC) sequence and with a second-order conditional (SOC) sequence.

The influence of cisapride and clarithromycin on QT intervals in healthy volunteers.

Objective: Recently a few cases of long QT syndrome were reported during treatment with cisapride. In most of these cases, risk factors for cardiac arrhythmias or pharmacologic interactions might have been involved, and the role of cisapride remained unclear. Macrolides such as clarithromycin potentially interact with the metabolic elimination of cisapride and have overlapping indication areas.

Induction of the oxidative catabolism of retinoid acid in MCF-7 cells.

Cytochrome P450-dependent oxidation is a pathway for all-trans-retinoic acid (all-trans-RA) catabolism. Induction of this catabolic pathway was studied in MCF-7 breast cancer cells. MCF-7 cells showed low constitutive all-trans-RA catabolism.

Analysis of the oxidative catabolism of retinoic acid in rat Dunning R3327G prostate tumors.

We studied the enzymatic characteristics of the oxidative catabolism of retinoic acid (RA) and its inhibition by liarozole-fumarate in homogenates of rat Dunning R3327G prostate tumors. Homogenates of rat liver were used as reference material. Both tumor and liver homogenates were able to catabolize retinoic acid.