Background: Falls are a common safety incident in people with stroke. Studies report that between 14% and 65% of people with stroke fall at least once during their hospital admission. Risk factors for falls in people with stroke have been reported to include neglect, balance and dependence for activities of daily living. Communication disability…

Background: Persons with Parkinson's disease (PD) frequently report word-finding difficulties. Many of the established tests are, however, insufficient in detecting mild cases of such symptoms. Results from earlier research have suggested that controlled oral word association tests (COWATs) with high demands on cognitive processing resources could…

Purpose: The purposes of this study are to develop a novel multimodal framework for measuring variability at the muscular, kinematic, and acoustic levels of the motor speech hierarchy and evaluate the utility of this framework in detecting speech impairment in amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS). Method: The myoelectric activities of three…

Previous studies measuring praxis abilities in young autistic children have only used praxis measures that were not optimised for autistic individuals. Hence, we used the FAB-R to measure praxis skills in autistic (n = 38) and typically developing (TD) children (n = 38) aged between four and 10 years. Praxis abilities were generally not different…

Purpose: Prior investigations suggest that simultaneous performance of more than 1 motor-oriented task may exacerbate speech motor deficits in individuals with Parkinson disease (PD). The purpose of the current investigation was to examine the extent to which performing a low-demand manual task affected the connected speech in individuals with and…

Purpose: This preliminary study on lingual-alveolar contact pressures (LACP) in people with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) had several aims: (a) to evaluate whether the protocol induced fatigue, (b) to compare LACP during speech (LACP-Sp) and during maximum isometric pressing (LACP-Max) in people with ALS (PALS) versus healthy controls, (c)…

Purpose: The aim of this longitudinal study was to describe developmental courses of childhood dysarthria against the background of typical speech motor development by collecting auditory-perceptual data. Method: Fourteen children (four girls, 10 boys; 5;1-8;4 [years;months] at Time 1) with neurological conditions (CNC) and 14 typically developing…

Impairment of motor learning skills in developmental coordination disorder (DCD) has been reported in several studies. Some hypotheses on neural mechanisms of motor learning deficits in DCD have emerged but, to date, brain-imaging investigations are scarce. The aim of the present study is to assess possible changes in communication between brain…

Purpose: The aim of the current investigation was to examine speech motor sequence learning in neurologically healthy younger adults, neurologically healthy older adults, and individuals with Parkinson disease (PD) over a 2-day period. Method: A sequential nonword repetition task was used to examine learning over 2 days. Participants practiced a…

The present pilot study aimed to determine motor control alterations in children with ADHD belonging to public schools, using Da Fonseca's Psychomotor Battery (BPM). This was a descriptive cross-sectional comparative study. The sample consisted of two groups, each group composed of 15 children between 7 and 9 years old belonging to public…

Background: Myotonic dystrophy type 1 (DM1) is a slowly progressive multi-systemic disease with an autosomal-dominant inheritance caused by a mutation on chromosome 19 (19q13.3). Aims: To explore speech characteristics in a group of individuals with the congenital and childhood-onset forms of DM1 in terms of intelligibility, speech-sound…

Hereditary spastic paraplegia (HSP) and spastic diplegia (SD) patients share a strong clinical resemblance. Thus, HSP patients are frequently misdiagnosed with a mild form of SD. Clinical gait analysis (CGA) has been highlighted as a possible tool to support the differential diagnosis of HSP and SD. Previous analysis has focused on the lower-body…

The aim of the present study was to investigate temporal abilities in children treated by surgery for a malignant tumor in the cerebellum. Children with a diagnosed medulloblastoma and age-paired control children were given a temporal discrimination task (bisection task) and a temporal reproduction task with two duration ranges, one shorter than 1…

Impaired tool related action in ideomotor apraxia is normally ascribed to loss of sensorimotor memories for habitual actions (engrams), but this account has not been tested against a hypothesis of a general deficit in representation of hand-object spatial relationships. Rapid reaching for familiar tools was compared with reaching for abstract…

There is now a growing body of research examining movement difficulties in children diagnosed with high functioning autism (HFA) and Asperger's disorder (AD). Despite this, few studies have investigated the kinematic components of movement that may be disrupted in children diagnosed with these disorders. The current study investigated rapid aiming…