Reading Disabilities in Adolescents and Adults.

Purpose: Reading skills continue to develop into adolescence and adulthood. Difficulties in reading have lifelong repercussions. Many speech-language pathologists who work with older individuals in the school setting face significant issues, including those mandated by recent changes in legislation.

Influence of Language Load on Speech Motor Skill in Children With Specific Language Impairment.

Purpose: Children with specific language impairment (SLI) show particular deficits in the generation of sequenced action: the quintessential procedural task. Practiced imitation of a sequence may become rote and require reduced procedural memory. This study explored whether speech motor deficits in children with SLI occur generally or only in conditions of high linguistic load, whether speech motor deficits diminish with practice, and whether it is beneficial to incorporate conditions of high load to understand speech production.

Orthography and Modality Influence Speech Production in Adults and Children.

Purpose: The acquisition of literacy skills influences the perception and production of spoken language. We examined if orthography influences implicit processing in speech production in child readers and in adult readers with low and high reading proficiency.

Method: Children (n = 17), adults with typical reading skills (n = 17), and adults demonstrating low reading proficiency (n = 18) repeated or read aloud nonwords varying in orthographic transparency.

Reading Skill and Exposure to Orthography Influence Speech Production.

Orthographic experience during the acquisition of novel words may influence production processing in proficient readers. Previous work indicates interactivity among lexical, phonological, and articulatory processing; we hypothesized that experience with orthography can also influence phonological processing. Phonetic accuracy and articulatory stability were measured as adult, proficient readers repeated and read aloud nonwords, presented in auditory or written modalities and with variations in orthographic neighborhood density.

The relationship between intermittent limit cycles and postural instability associated with Parkinson's disease.

Background: Many disease-specific factors such as muscular weakness, increased muscle stiffness, varying postural strategies, and changes in postural reflexes have been shown to lead to postural instability and fall risk in people with Parkinson's disease (PD). Recently, analytical techniques, inspired by the dynamical systems perspective on movement control and coordination, have been used to examine the mechanisms underlying the dynamics of postural declines and the emergence of postural instabilities in people with PD.

Methods: A wavelet-based technique was used to identify limit cycle oscillations (LCOs) in the anterior-posterior (AP) postural sway of people with mild PD ( = 10) compared to age-matched controls ( = 10).