The purpose of the this study was to examine the perception of both generic and disease-specific quality of life (QoL) in adults with hearing impairment who are members of the lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) community. Eighty-three adults who self-identified as having hearing impairment and as being members of the LGBT community and…

Purpose: Many adults with aphasia demonstrate concomitant deficits in working memory (WM), but such deficits are difficult to quantify because of a lack of validated measures as well as the complex interdependence between language and WM. We examined the feasibility, reliability, and internal consistency of an "n"-back task for…

This longitudinal investigation on Dutch children with Specific Language Impairment (SLI) aimed at determining the predictive value of statistically uncorrelated language proficiencies on later reading and spelling skills in Dutch. Language abilities, tested with an extensive test battery at the onset of formal reading instruction, were…

We report two sets of experiments showing that the large individual variability in language learning success in adults can be attributed to neurophysiological, neuroanatomical, cognitive, and perceptual factors. In the first set of experiments, native English-speaking adults learned to incorporate lexically meaningfully pitch patterns in words. We…

Awareness has been an important factor in theories of onset and development of stuttering. So far it has been suggested that even young children might be aware of their speech difficulty. The purpose of the present study was to investigate (a) the number of stuttering children aware of their speech difficulty, (b) the description of reported…

Purpose: The intent of this study was to examine the longitudinal morpho-syntactic progression of children with Speech Sound Disorders (SSD) grouped according to Mean Length of Utterance (MLU) scores. Methods: Thirty-seven children separated into four clusters were assessed in their pre-kindergarten and Grade 1 years. Cluster 1 were children with…

This study examines the ability of preschool speech-language measures and parent report in predicting later academic performance. Preschool measures of speech, language and communication for 35 children with language impairment were analyzed for their ability to predict reading, writing, spelling, and mathematics in these same children at age…

In the present study, the relations of various aspects of working memory to various aspects of language problems in a clinical sample of 97 Dutch speaking 5-year-old children with severe language problems were studied. The working memory and language abilities of the children were examined using an extensive battery of tests. Working memory was…

Preliminary findings from a longitudinal study of 32 preschool children who stutter and 32 nonstuttering controls reveal 4 subgroups: (1) persistent stuttering; (2) late recovery; (3) early recovery; and (4) control. Comparative data for the groups regarding frequency of disfluency, acoustic features, phonologic skills, language development,…

The purpose of this study was to investigate the relation between stuttering and a range of variables of possible relevance, with the main focus on neuromuscular reactivity, and anxiety. The explorative analysis also included temperament, biochemical variables, heredity, preonset lesions, and altered auditory feedback (AAF). An increased level of…

Knowledge of variables that predict treatment time is of benefit in deciding when to start treatment for early stuttering. To date, the only variable clearly related to treatment time with the Lidcombe Program is pre-treatment stuttering frequency. Previous studies have shown that children whose stuttering is more severe take longer to complete…

This study investigated the relationship between the temporal-acoustic parameters of the speech of 15 adults with motor neuron disease. Differences in predictions of the progression of the disease and clinician judgments of dysarthria severity were found to relate to the linguistic systems of both speaker and judge. (Author/JDD)

The phonological patterns of 22 children with Down's Syndrome, aged 6-12, were tested to assess the relationships among cluster reduction, liquid simplification and sentence length, age, and intelligence quotient. Sentence length was found to be the primary predictor of cluster reduction and liquid simplification in the children's articulatory…

A study investigated frequency change and duration of the second formant (F2) transition in speech samples recorded close to stuttering onset in 10 preschoolers who stutter, 10 who recovered from stuttering, and 10 controls. Near stuttering onset, children whose stuttering persisted demonstrated significantly smaller frequency change than the…

The relationships between speech parameters and speech intelligibility of 40 severely to profoundly hearing-impaired adults were studied. Regression analysis revealed that speech intelligibility was predicted by a cognate-pair voice-onset-time difference measure and a measure of the stability of the volume-velocity rise time. (Author/JDD)