In this paper, we present recent developments in the characterizat ion of healthy and pathologic cries of newborns. We have identified and quantified acoustic characteristics that appear the most relevant in differentiating between pathological and healthy cries; such as fundamental frequency (F0), irregularity of F0 and presence of hyper-phonic modes. The results obtained are very encouraging,...

Discussion: A large part of both clinical and subclinical lesions found in our daily work are benign and correspond with fibrocystic changes (FCC). This entity is complex and part exhibit traits that define characteristically in MRI and diagnose correctly, but there is another small group of changes that can take the image aspect of cancer. From a complex case, we review the main aspects of the...

BACKGROUND We evaluate the effectiveness of three theoretically motivated programmes for the teaching of reading to four-year-old children. METHOD Four hundred and ten children, of pre-kindergarten age, in 20 UK Reception-year classrooms were divided into four matched groups and randomly assigned to one of three experimental teaching conditions, Reading with Rhyme, Reading with Phoneme, Readi...

Tourette syndrome is a neuropsychiatric condition characterized by both motor and phonic tics over a period of at least 1 year with the onset in childhood or adolescence. Apart from the tics, most of the patients with Tourette syndrome have associated neuropsychiatric comorbidities consisting of attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, obsessive compulsive disorder, rage attacks, sleep issues,...

This study examines the changes in adult female voices due to the aging process. Acoustic cues in voices that enable listeners to recognize a speaker’s vocal age are specified as well as acoustic cues that straightly indicate the speaker’s chronological age. The analysed data are recordings of the voices of 56 female speakers differing in age. The recorded speech samples include sustained vowel...

A sperm whale (Physeter macrocephalus) was observed at the surface with above- and underwater video and synchronized underwater sound recordings. During seven instances the whale ventilated its lungs while clicking. From this observation it is inferred that click production is achieved by pressurizing air in the right nasal passage, pneumatically disconnected from the lungs and the left nasal p...

Cognitive abilities rise steeply from infancy to young adulthood and then are either maintained or decline to old age, depending on the specific ability. This pattern suggests corresponding continuities of mechanism and process, but it is striking that the fields of cognitive development and cognitive aging make little contact with each other's methods and theories. In this review we examine re...