OBJECTIVE Treatment for oral tongue cancer poses unique challenges to restoring and maintaining personally acceptable, intelligible speech. METHODS We report how oral tongue cancer survivors describe their speech after treatment in a qualitative descriptive approach using constant comparative technique to complete a focal analysis of interview data from a larger grounded theory study of oral ...

Speech impairments are one of the earliest manifestations in patients with Parkinson’s disease. Particularly, articulation deficits related to the capability of the speaker to start/stop the vibration of the vocal folds have been observed in the patients. Those difficulties can be assessed by modeling the transitions between voiced and unvoiced segments from speech. A robust strategy to model t...

Speech is a complex behavior that is coordinated by an integrated network of sensory, muscular, respiratory, and cognitive systems. As a result of the complex nature of speech, symptoms of speech impairment can be quite diverse, reflecting dysfunction in one or more of these systems. Research has found that speech problems are common in Parkinson’s disease (PD), and it has been found that 70% o...

abstract autism is a developmental disability with age of onset in childhood (under 3 years old), which is characterized by definite impairments in social interactions, abnormalities in speech and stereotyped pattern of behaviors. due to the progress of autism in recent decades, a wide range of studies have been done to identify the etiological factors of autism. it has been found that genetic ...

Speech recognition technology holds great potential for such users with motor impairments due to the hands-free interaction it affords without significant investment in specialized hardware. Its accuracy and performance have been steadily improving, leading to accurate recognition engines such as Dragon Naturally Speaking from Nuance as well as the Windows Speech Recognizer in the Vista operati...

Children with specific language impairments (SLIs) show impaired perception and production of language, and also show impairments in perceiving auditory cues to rhythm [amplitude rise time (ART) and sound duration] and in tapping to a rhythmic beat. Here we explore potential links between language development and rhythm perception in 45 children with SLI and 50 age-matched controls. We administ...

Patients with classic galactosemia, an inborn error of metabolism, have speech and language production impairments. Past research primarily focused on speech (motor) problems, but these cannot solely explain the language impairments. Which specific deficits contribute to the impairments in language production is not yet known. Deficits in semantic and syntactic planning are plausible and requir...

Cerebral malaria results in short- to long-term cognitive impairments in many of its child survivors. Although some of the risk factors for impairments have been identified, no attempts have been made to address the plight of those who develop cognitive impairments. This paper discusses the burden of cognitive impairment caused by cerebral malaria and suggests some rehabilitation strategies bas...

User Centred Design is accepted as being essential to good software design, only by involving the users throughout the development process can the developers understand what the end users really want (Sharp et al., 2007). One area which has in the past had little experience of User Centred Design is Assistive Technology, and in particular Augmentative and Alternative Communication software (Wal...

Impairments in language and communication are core features of Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD), and a substantial percentage of children with ASD do not develop speech. ASD is often characterized as a disorder of brain connectivity, and a number of studies have identified white matter impairments in affected individuals. The current study investigated white matter integrity in the speech network...