Speech treatment in nemaline myopathy: A single-subject experimental study.

Purpose: The objective of this work was to verify the efficacy of a treatment based on myofunctional therapy techniques which aimed to improve the tongue strength, precision, and speed of a ten-year-old girl with nemaline myopathy (NM) and the repercussions of this therapy on her speech intelligibility. NM is a rare congenital muscle disorder that causes extreme muscle weakness, especially in the face and neck, as well as severe dysarthria and dysphagia, although this does not affect the nervous system or cognitive development.

Method: This was a single-subject experimental study which used an interrupted pre- and post-treatment time-series design, and which applied autoregressive integrated moving-average predictive models and Holt exponential smoothing.

[Perception-production relations in substitution phonological processes in children with language disorders].

It is generally agreed that the auditory perception skills of children with developmental language disorders are more limited than those of typically developing children. It is not easy to determine exactly how the capacity to discriminate and the capacity to pronounce phonemes influence each other in children with language disorders. For most authors, the inability to discriminate certain phonemes accurately causes a developmental delay in pronunciation, whereas others claim the influence is mutual.

Spelling performance of 2nd to 5th grade students from public school.

Purpose: To characterize, compare and classify the performance of 2nd to 5th grade students from public schools according to the semiology of spelling errors.

Methods: Participants were 120 students from 2nd to 5th grades of a public school in Marília (SP), Brazil, 30 students from each grade, who were divided into four groups: GI (2nd grade), GII (3rd grade), GIII (4th grade), and GIV (5th grade). The tasks of the Pro-Ortografia test were applied: collective version (writing of alphabet letters, randomized dictation of letters, words dictation, nonwords dictation, dictation with pictures, thematic writing induced by picture) and individual version (dictation of sentences, purposeful error, spelled dictation, orthographic lexical memory).

[Language observation protocol for teachers in pre-school education. Effectiveness in the detection of semantic and morphosyntactic difficulties].

Introduction: A number of studies have shown that teachers are capable of recognising pupils with language difficulties if they have suitable guidelines or guidance.

Aims: To determine the effectiveness of an observation-based protocol for pre-school education teachers in the detection of phonetic-phonological, semantic and morphosyntactic difficulties.

Subjects And Methods: The sample consisted of 175 children from public and state-subsidised schools in Valencia and its surrounding province, together with their teachers.