The Norwegian Hearing in Noise Test for Children.

Objectives: The aims of this study were to create 12 ten-sentence lists for the Norwegian Hearing in Noise Test for children, and to use these lists to collect speech reception thresholds (SRTs) in quiet and in noise to assess speech perception in normal hearing children 5 to 13 years of age, to establish developmental trends, and to compare the results with those of adults. Data were collected in an anechoic chamber and in an audiometric test room, and the effect of slight room reverberation was estimated.

Design: The Norwegian Hearing in Noise Test for children was formed from a subset of the adult sentences.

Dietary intake and nutritional status in a Scandinavian adult cystic fibrosis-population compared with recommendations.

Background: Malnutrition is a well-known complication in cystic fibrosis (CF). There is good evidence that maintaining a normal body-weight correlates well with improved survival in CF. Energy intake in excess of 120% of the estimated average requirement (EAR) has been advised since 1980s.

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.

Semi-spontaneous oral text production: measurements in clinical practice.

Functionally relevant assessment of the language production of speakers with aphasia should include assessment of connected speech production. Despite the ecological validity of everyday conversations, more controlled and monological types of texts may be easier to obtain and analyse in clinical practice. This article discusses some simple measurements for the analysis of semi-spontaneous oral text production by speakers with aphasia.

Brain dynamics of word familiarization in 20-month-olds: effects of productive vocabulary size.

The present study investigated the brain mechanisms involved during young children's receptive familiarization with new words, and whether the dynamics of these mechanisms are related to the child's productive vocabulary size. To this end, we recorded event-related potentials (ERPs) from 20-month-old children in a pseudoword repetition task. Results revealed distinct patterns of repetition effects for children with large and small productive vocabularies.

Productive vocabulary size predicts event-related potential correlates of fast mapping in 20-month-olds.

Although it is well documented that children undergo a productive vocabulary spurt late in the second year, it is unclear whether this development is accompanied by equally significant advances in receptive word processing. In the present study, we tested an electrophysiological procedure for assessing receptive word learning in young children, and the impact of productive vocabulary size for performance in this task. We found that 20-month-olds with high productive vocabularies displayed an N400 incongruity effect to violations of trained associations between novel words and pictures, whereas 20-month-olds with low productive vocabularies did not.

Verb and sentence processing in Norwegian aphasic speakers compared to Dutch and English aphasic speakers: experimental evidence.

The article reports on a comparative study of the abilities of aphasic speakers and normal control subjects to comprehend and produce verbs and sentences. The analysis is based on test results obtained as part of the standardization procedure for a test battery originally developed for Dutch and since translated and adapted for English and Norwegian. With a few exceptions, there is extensive similarity in the test results between the different languages.

Brain responses to lexical-semantic priming in children at-risk for dyslexia.

Deviances in early event-related potential (ERP) components reflecting auditory and phonological processing are well-documented in children at familial risk for dyslexia. However, little is known about brain responses which index processing in other linguistic domains such as lexicon, semantics and syntax in this group. The present study investigated effects of lexical-semantic priming in 20- and 24-month-olds at-risk for dyslexia and typically developing controls in two ERP experiments.

On the distinction between Norwegian [symbols: see text] from a phonetic perspective.

The present study uses electropalatography (EPG) and electromagnetic articulography (EMA) in the description of the articulation of the two East Norwegian fricatives [symbols: see text] in the speech of seven normal adult speakers. The motivation for studying these two phonemes is twofold: there is a merger between the places of articulation of these two fricatives in the speech of the young. A description of the articulation in the speech of mature speakers who have the distinction, may throw light on the mechanisms behind the merger.