Speech Pathology

A review of ethnographic research investigated issues associated with regional or dialectal language use, particularly the use of African American Vernacular English (AAVE) in the special education classroom, and noted the implications for research and classroom practice. Research with speech/language pathologists is under way to develop a regionally normed profile of AAVE for more accurate assessment. Study of classroom interaction, which determined that students use standard and non-standard English alternates in patterned ways, suggests that a more important issue is the infrequent opportunities for extended academic talk, the linguistic register of success at school and beyond. Teachers are currently being trained in interactive instructional strategies to enhance academic talk, and curriculum materials designed to recontextualize language and dialect varieties as cultural resources rather than social problems are being developed. Because disproportionate numbers of AAVE speaker...

TemPO (TEMporalité, Pathologie orthophonique, Ontologie) is an attempt to transform a draft conceptual model created for the French orthophonie/speech and language therapy (SLT) community into an ontological resource focusing on language and communication pathology. It is interdisciplinary (SLT, linguistics, terminology and descriptive logic) and focuses on temporality as an entry point. It is part of a 3 step project aiming at harmonising European SLT terminology in order to facilitate communication about language pathology. The first step was to extract some characteristics using semantic and syntactic analyses, the second one is the creation and validation of the ontology (TemPO) and it will be followed by a larger multilingual terminological project at a European level.

RESUMO
Este artigo objetiva discutir criticamente a avaliação de linguagem na Demência de Alzheimer (DA). Instrumentos de avaliação neuropsicológica geralmente apresentam alguns testes como sendo “de linguagem” e seus resultados buscam confirmar o diagnóstico ou avaliar a progressão da doença. Buscamos apontar, por meio de análises qualitativas, à luz da Neurolingüística Discursiva, que os episódios dialógicos que ocorrem durante a anamnese ou ao longo das sessões de testes podem levar a uma melhor compreensão de como a linguagem encontra-se (ou não) alterada nos casos em que há uma provável DA.

ABSTRACT
This paper aims to discuss language evaluation in the Alzheimer disease (AD). Neuropsychological assessment tests usually present some of them as being “language evaluation” and the results aim to confirm the diagnosis or to evaluate the disease progression. We intend to show, by means of qualitative approach, oriented by the Discursive Neurolinguistics, that the dialogical episodes that take place during the interviews and tests sessions could lead to a better comprehension of how language is altered (or not) in probable cases of AD.

BACKGROUND:
In spite of its indusrial usefulness and varied daily uses, lead (Pb) pollution is a widespread ecological problem that faces the humans in the 21th century. Pb was found to produces a wide range of toxic effects including neurotoxicity especially to the developing and young offspring. Recently, the utilization of herbal plants has received a significant attention where there has been rising awareness in their therapeutic use; among these is the garlic.
AIM OF THE WORK:
In light of the above, the current study is designed experimentally in female pregnant rats in order to investigate the beneficial role of garlic extract in the protection from the maternal and fetal cerebellar damage that produced by administration of different doses of Pb during pregnancy.
MATERIALS AND METHODS:
Positively pregnant female rats were divided into five groups; one control group, two Pb-treated groups (exposed to 160 and 320 mg/kg b.wt. of Pb, respectively) and two groups treated with both Pb and garlic (exposed to Pb as previous groups together with 250 mg/ kg b.wt. /day of garlic extract). Treatments started from day 1 till day 20 of pregnancy, where the mother rats of different experimental groups were sacrified to obtain the fetuses. Pb level in the maternal nd fetal blood and cerebellum was estimated by spectrophotometry. Specimens of the cerebellum of different mother and fetal groups were processed to histological and immunohistochemical staining for microscopic examination.
RESULTS:
The results showed that administration of Pb to pregnant rats resulted in a dose-dependent toxicity for both mothers and fetuses in the form of decrease of maternal weight gain, placental and fetal weights, brain weight and diminished fetal growth parameters, which were prominent in rat's group treated with larger dose of Pb. In Pb-treated rats, Pb level in blood and cerebellum was high when compared to the control. The histopathological examination of the cerebellum of treated dams and fetuses showed marked alterations mainly in the form of Purkinje cell degeneration and lack of deveopmet of fetal cerebellum. Co-treatment of garlic extract along with Pb resulted in a significant decrease in Pb levels as compared with those treated with Pb alone with improvement of the histopathological changes.
CONCLUSIONS:
This study was useful in evaluating the hazardous effects of uncontrolled use of Pb in general and in assessing the developmental and neurotoxicity of fetuses due to exposure during pregnancy in particular. Co-administration of garlic has beneficial effects in amelioration of Pb-induced neurotoxicity and reversing the histopathological changes of the cerebellum of mother rats and fetuses.
KEYWORDS:
garlic; glial fibrillary acidic protein; lead; purkinje cells

RESUMEN
Objetivo: observar la capacidad de cinco individuos venezolanos que usan aparatos dentales ortodónticos para articular el habla y verificar la influencia de los aparatos en la percepción del habla por parte de
sus interlocutores. Métodos: se utilizó un corpus conformado por dos grabaciones de la lectura de un Test de Pares Mínimos realizadas por cinco hablantes antes y después de iniciar el tratamiento con los aparatos. Dichas grabaciones fueron luego expuestas a veinte oyentes adultos con la finalidad de que identificaran lo oído; sirviéndose de un test ad hoc, basado en el de los Pares Mínimos arriba indicado. Cada uno de los oyentes marcó la opción que creyó haber percibido. Resultados: el análisis de los datos arrojados por los dos conjuntos de tests permitió determinar los sonidos, los rasgos distintivos y los puntos articulatorios afectados por el uso de aparatos en los hablantes. Se demuestra que los sonidos mayormente afectados por los aparatos dentales son /t/, /m/, /p/, /f/, /b/, / /, /k/ y / /; los rasgos y oposiciones distintivas afectadas son [grave]: /b – d/, /f – s/, /m – /, /m – n/ y /p – t/; [sonoro]: /g – k/, /p – b/ y /t – d/ e [interrupto]: / - s/ ; por su parte, los lugares de articulación afectados son bilabial, alveolar, palatal, dental e interdental. Conclusiones: la presencia de los aparatos dentales ortodónticos en la cavidad bucal causa serios problemas en la articulación de los sonidos lingüísticos afectando de esa manera la percepción del habla por parte de los interlocutores. Los problemas de
articulación con el paso del tiempo van decreciendo.

This new essay of Alfonso Gianluca Gucciardo, MD is in Italian. It is intended for the voice lovers and, specifically, for clinicians/doctors interested to Performing Arts Medicine. The aim isn’t to go in the deepness of the ultra-specialistic remarks, but to stimulate new clinical thoughts and some ideas in order to prevent, to fast understand and to care & cure with pre­cision at least the most recurrent diseases of the voice artist. The preface is by a worldwide icon of the vocology, the Italian phoniatrician Andrea Ricci Maccarini, MD. The after­words are by Madame Yva Barthélémy, well known singer and voice pedagogue from Paris.
ISBN: 978-88-98245-83-3
edizioniqanat@gmail.com

Organic speech disorder or dysglossia is an articulation disorder which arise as a result of organic changes in peripheral speech organs or in peripheral nerves that supply them.
This presentation aims to classify dysglossias and provide information on how to document speech function.

The author of the article argues that, contrary to Charles Darwin’s assertion, sexual selection played only a marginal role in the early evolution of the Homo sapiens. Natural selection through the mechanisms of predator control is suggested to be the central reason behind the crucial evolutionary changes of human morphology (appearance of longer legs, head hair, eyebrows, low male voice, reduction of canines) and behavior (bipedalism, singing, dancing, painting).

The article is aimed at presenting the usability of some aspects of self-narrative analysis in clinical diagnosis. Clinical diagnosis concerns not only the identification of nosological categories, me­chanisms of psychopathology, or etiology, but also familiarity with patients' self-experience. It is assumed that the patient's narrative is a psychological phenomenon in itself; it is a way of con­struing and re-experiencing his or her disorder. Therefore, self-narrative analysis is expected to lead to an understanding of how psychopathology is construed in language. As the leading theoretical approach, the model of narrative development proposed by Salvatore, Dimaggio, & Semerari (2004) was chosen. In order to illustrate narrative analysis, examples of paranoid personality self-narrative accounts are presented. Keywords: paranoid personality disorder, clinical diagnosis, self-narrative, analysis of narratives, narrative psychology

The article is aimed at presenting the usability of some aspects of self-narrative analysis in clinical diagnosis. Clinical diagnosis concerns not only the identification of nosological categories, mechanisms of psychopathology, or etiology, but also familiarity with patients' self-experience. It is assumed that the patient's narrative is a psychological phenomenon in itself; it is a way of construing and re-experiencing his or her disorder. Therefore, self-narrative analysis is expected to lead to an understanding of how psychopathology is construed in language. As the leading theoretical approach, the model of narrative development proposed by

Links between verbs and gesture knowledge suggest that verb retrieval may be particularly amenable to gesture+verbal training (GVT) in aphasia compared to noun retrieval. This study examines effects of GVT for noun and verb retrieval in nine individuals with aphasia subsequent to left hemisphere stroke. Participants presented an array of noun and verb retrieval deficits, including impairments of semantic and/or phonologic processing. In a single-participant experimental design, we investigated effects of GVT for noun and verb retrieval in two counterbalanced treatment phases. Effects were evaluated in spoken naming and gesture production to pictured objects and actions. Spoken naming improvements associated with large effect sizes were noted for trained nouns (5/9) and verbs (5/9); no improvements were evident for untrained words. Gesture production improved for trained nouns (8/9) and verbs (6/9), and for untrained nouns (2/9) and verbs (2/9). No significant differences were eviden...

The article is aimed at presenting the usability of some aspects of self-narrative analysis in clinical diagnosis. Clinical diagnosis concerns not only the identification of nosological categories, me- chanisms of psychopathology, or etiology, but also familiarity with patients’ self-experience. It is assumed that the patient’s narrative is a psychological phenomenon in itself; it is a way of con- struing and re-experiencing his or her disorder. Therefore, self-narrative analysis is expected to lead to an understanding of how psychopathology is construed in language. As the leading theoretical approach, the model of narrative development proposed by Salvatore, Dimaggio, & Semerari (2004) was chosen. In order to illustrate narrative analysis, examples of paranoid personality self-narrative accounts are presented.

Aphasia is an acquired language disorder that can present a significant barrier to patient involvement in healthcare decisions. Speech-language pathologists (SLPs) are viewed as experts in the field of communication. However, many SLP students do not receive practical training in techniques to communicate with people with aphasia (PWA) until they encounter PWA during clinical education placements. This study investigated the confidence and knowledge of SLP students in communicating with PWA prior to clinical placements using a customised questionnaire. Confidence in communicating with people with aphasia was assessed using a 100-point visual analogue scale. Linear, and logistic, regressions were used to examine the association between confidence and age, as well as confidence and course type (graduate-entry masters or undergraduate), respectively. Knowledge of strategies to assist communication with PWA was examined by asking respondents to list specific strategies that could assist...

Existing literature on gauging intonational contours in Linguistics, mainly depends on the three parameters (High, Mid, Low) to be determined by the trained ears of the professional Phoneticians. However, there are software and machines for analyzing sound waves, that does not provide us with a generalized picture of intonational contours with varied and specific reference points with calculated intervals. Parameters like 'High, Mid, Low' as reference points for intonational contours do not tell us anything as none exactly knows the proportionate distances or intervals among such naïve parameters. This paper deals with the difference (a la Derrida) between so-called normal speech and music. The author, for the time being, is deferring the difference between speech and music. Though the melody of music is 'heavy' and the melody of speaking is 'light', still both of them follows the same algorithm - the algorithm of do, re, mi, fa, so, la, ti and do2, i.e., the ad hoc hypothesis is that, any normal speech falls within the octave that has a definite range. If the lower DO 1 is x, upper Sa DO 2 is 2x and this x to 2x octave range is considered as y, the intermediate noticeable frequency-points, as per Indian musical system, are 22. Therefore, our point of concentration is Y/22. In a scale y that has a range of x to 2x (i.e., any points on y, say yp, satisfies the relation x yp 2x). And the interval between two notes follows logarithmic pattern as the gap between two notes (say yp and yq ) is 2 multiplied by root 22 (please note the human love for binary-figure in the formulated representation). Thus, this hypothesis leads to an activity - i.e., making notation of 'normal' speech to understand the intonation pattern of speaking vis a vis musicking. However, it does not pay any heed to something called '(word-) stress'. In this work, the status of word in a sentence or discourse is contested. What is “word” really, especially in this type of pre-lexical studies? To the author, 'word' is a culture-specific concept or rather citation form, which has only visual representation - there is no such representation in the game of speaking, where domain is more important than written word-boudary. A literate speaking subject, in his/her printing culture, has only a visual sensation of word. If word is to be defined as a something (visual black or any other colored figure) in between two (white or any other colors) spaces (grounds), the boundaries of word depend on the particular literate community’s way of manipulating blank spaces in their printing/writing. The boundaries/spaces as defined by morphology do not exist when a speaking subject is engaged in a speaking. At that moment of speaking, from the subject’s position, it is not word-stress, but it is rather a harmony of a discourse, which s/he is expressing as a continuum without ontologically being conscious about the grammarians’ order of things (different levels of language, viz. phoneme, morpheme, word, phrase, sentence). As word does not exist, the word-stress is also an absentee at the moment of speaking. It is meaningless to account stress by isolating a ‘word’ from the speech continuum (the alternative is to concentrate on domains). When, in Linguistics, intonation pattern is attested by surveying a sample population, a crucial variable of that particular community is totally ignored. That is their cultural audio-exposure to the unintended sounds or non-discursive sonority (that is, the noises, music, and rhythm of the habitat or the non-discursive sounds in which the particular population inhabits). It is not possible to gauge the intonation pattern of particular speech community without noticing this context-specificity of non-discursive sonority. This work considers this non-discursive sonority as one of the variables (other variables are age and gender and speed of speech, speech Act) for attesting intonation.
Colophon: DePenning & DePenning

The present study aimed at investigating cognitive abilities of typical adults and older adults with normal hearing using P300 event related potential. The P300 measures (both latency and amplitude) did not differ significantly across gender. The P300 latency was found to increase with age, whereas the P300 amplitude reduced significantly with age except in the case of 60-70 years age group. Overall, the P300 measures reflected the ageing effect. Further, the choice of P300 which uses evoked potential (objectively extracted) and language insensitive stimuli can be made to evaluate cognitive linguistic functions in individuals with impaired communication abilities from different linguistic backgrounds.

The liver is almost unique in its capacity for regeneration after hepatectomy but the exact mechanisms are not yet fully clarified. Antioxidants have been shown to promote liver regeneration after major hepatectomy. The present study evaluated the ameliorative effect of vitamin E administration on the liver regeneration after different periods of partial hepatectomy (PH) in rats. Fifty-six adult male albino rats were divided into three groups: Control sham operated group; partially hepatectomized group which were divided into three subgroups sacrificed at 1day, 3 days and 7days after the operation respectively; Partially Hepatectomized group with vitamin E pretreatment before PH where the rats were given a daily oral dose of vitamin E until the time of sacrifice of the rats. Immunohistochemical detection of proliferating cell nuclear antigen (PCNA) and labeling index were demonstrated. After PH, the PCNA positive hepatocytes and the PCNA labeling indices were significantly high after the 1 st day and then much decreased after the 3 rd day, to be followed by a slight increase at the 7 th day. Vitamin E pretreatment in PH rats resulted in a decrease in PCNA positive cells and its labeling indices in the 1 st day with a gradual increase in the 3 rd and 7 th days. Vitamin E has an inhibitory effect in the first 24 hours on liver regeneration followed by stimulatory effect at the third and seventh days after PH. These data indicated that vitamin E pretreatment has an important role in regulation and enhancement of liver regeneration after PH.

Examining representations of speech disorders in works of literature, this first collection of its kind founds a new multidisciplinary subfield related but not limited to the emerging fields of disability studies and medical humanities. The scope is wide-ranging both in terms of national literatures and historical periods considered, engaging with theoretical discussions in poststructuralism, disability studies, cultural studies, new historicism, gender studies, sociolinguistics, trauma studies, and medical humanities. The book’s main focus is on the development of an awareness of speech pathology in the literary imaginary from the late-eighteenth century to the present, studying the novel, drama, epic poetry, lyric poetry, children’s literature, autobiography and autopathography, and clinical case studies and guidebooks on speech therapy. The volume addresses a growing interest, both in popular culture and the humanities, regarding the portrayal of conditions such as stuttering, aphasia and mutism, along with the status of the Self in relation to those conditions. Since speech pathologies are neither illnesses nor outwardly physical disabilities, critical studies of their representation have tended to occupy a liminal position in relation to other discourses such as literary and cultural theory, and even disability studies. One of the primary aims of this collection is to address this marginalization, and to position a cultural criticism of speech pathology within literary studies.