PURPOSE Speech and other oral functions such as swallowing have been compared and contrasted with oral behaviors variously labeled quasispeech, paraspeech, speechlike, and nonspeech, all of which overlap to some degree in neural control, muscles deployed, and movements performed. Efforts to understand the relationships among these behaviors are hindered by the lack of explicit and widely accept...

PURPOSE To verify the corrected gestational age when oral feeding (breast half full) and exclusive breastfeeding were initiated in preterm newborns submitted to the transition technique from enteral feeding directly to breastfeeding, and time spent (in days) under speech-language pathology intervention until discharge. METHODS Study participants were 35 preterm infants (PTI) divided into two ...

C-ORAL-BRASIL I is a Brazilian Portuguese spontaneous speech corpus compiled following the same architecture adopted by the C-ORAL-ROM resource. The main goal is the documentation of the diaphasic and diastratic variations in Brazilian Portuguese. The diatopic variety represented is that of the metropolitan area of Belo Horizonte, capital city of Minas Gerais. Even though it was not a primary g...

Genes code for the expression of phenotypic traits, such as behavioral (e.g., aggressiveness) and morphological (e.g., opposing thumbs) traits. Costly traits are phenotypic traits that evolved in spite of imposing a fitness cost, often in the form of a survival handicap. In non-human animals, the classic example of costly trait is the peacock’s train, used by males to signal good health to fema...

BACKGROUND Spoken and gestural communication proficiency varies greatly among autistic individuals. Three studies examined the role of oral- and manual-motor skill in predicting autistic children's speech development. METHODS Study 1 investigated whether infant and toddler oral- and manual-motor skills predict middle childhood and teenage speech fluency; Study 2 verified those early infant an...

BACKGROUND The soft palate functions as a valve and helps generate the oral pressure required for normal speech resonance. Speech problems and nasal regurgitation can result from a soft palatal defect. Reduction of the size of the velopharyngeal orifice is required to compensate for the lack of mobility in a reconstructed soft palate. We suggest a large volume folded free flap for reduction of ...

Speech analysis techniques open new perspectives in the processing of dialectal oral data. Speech synthesis can be useful to create or recreate voices of speakers for extinct languages, to re-edit dialectal material using new technologies or to reconstruct utterances of informants that only were registered in notebooks. Speech recognition, applied to sound dialectal sequences, can make easier a...

OBJECTIVES In this study, we compared the performance of both fluent speakers and people who stutter in three different speaking situations: monologue speech, oral reading and choral reading. This study follows the assumption that the neuromotor control of speech can be influenced by external auditory stimuli in both speakers who stutter and speakers who do not stutter. METHOD Seventeen adult...

Absence of communicative speech in autism has been presumed to reflect a fundamental deficit in the use of language, but at least in a subpopulation may instead stem from motor and oral motor issues. Clinical reports of disparity between receptive vs. expressive speech/language abilities reinforce this hypothesis. Our early-intervention clinic develops skills prerequisite to learning and commun...

This project assesses the resources necessary to make oral history searchable by means of automatic speech recognition (ASR). There are many inherent challenges in applying ASR to conversational speech: smaller training set sizes and varying demographics, among others. We assess the impact of dataset size, word error rate and term-weighted value on human search capability through an information...