Down syndrome is characterized by disproportionately severe impairments of speech and language, yet little is known about the neural underpinnings of these deficits. We compared fMRI activation patterns during passive story listening in 9 young adults with Down syndrome and 9 approximately age-matched, typically developing controls. The typically developing group exhibited greater activation th...

The cognitive use of the phonetic and acoustic features still needs to be specified for speech comprehension. Several studies have established that children with language impairments like dyslexia exhibit deficits in perceiving rapid speech sounds. Our study explored the temporal encoding of acoustic cues during natural speech perception. We focused on two short attributes of speech: Voice Onse...

Approximately 80% to 95% of patients with Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis (ALS) eventually develop speech impairments (Beukelman et al., 2011), such as defective articulation, slow laborious speech and hypernasality (Duffy, 2013). The relationship between impaired speech and asymptomatic speech may be seen as a divergence from a baseline. This relationship can be characterized in terms of measura...

Auditory experiences including musicianship and bilingualism have been shown to enhance subcortical speech encoding operating below conscious awareness. Yet, the behavioral consequence of such enhanced subcortical auditory processing remains undetermined. Exploiting their remarkable fidelity, we examined the intelligibility of auditory playbacks (i.e., "sonifications") of brainstem potentials r...

We report clinical, cytogenetic, and comparative genomic hybridization findings for three siblings with an unbalanced 4q;16q translocation, minor malformations, and cognitive abnormalities, including childhood apraxia of speech, a rare, severe motor speech disorder. Breakpoint findings indicate that in addition to possible contributions from duplicated genes on chromosome 16, haploinsufficiency...

PURPOSE The Early Childhood Longitudinal Study-Kindergarten Cohort (ECLS-K; U.S. Department of Education, 2000) includes comprehensive assessments of home, classroom, and school contexts and developmental outcomes for a nationally representative sample of more than 20,000 children who began kindergarten in 1998-1999. The purposes of this article are to describe the ECLS-K and provide an example...

Forkhead box protein P2 (FOXP2) is a well-studied gene known to play an essential role in normal speech development. Deletions in the gene have been shown to result in developmental speech disorders and regulatory disruption of downstream gene targets associated with common forms of language impairments. Despite similarities in motor planning and execution between speech development and oral fe...

PURPOSE Parents, professionals, and policy makers need information on the long-term prognosis for children with communication disorders. Our primary purpose in this report was to help fill this gap by profiling the family, educational, occupational, and quality of life outcomes of young adults at 25 years of age (N = 244) from the Ottawa Language Study, a 20-year, prospective, longitudinal stud...