The aim of this paper was to develop and test two equivalent forms of the Assessment Battery for Communication (ABaCo), a tool for evaluating pragmatic abilities in patients with neuropsychological and psychiatric disorders. The equivalent forms were created using the data from a sample of 390 children, then tested in a sample of 30 patients with…

Purpose: Many adults with aphasia demonstrate concomitant deficits in working memory (WM), but such deficits are difficult to quantify because of a lack of validated measures as well as the complex interdependence between language and WM. We examined the feasibility, reliability, and internal consistency of an "n"-back task for evaluating WM in…

Purpose: Adequate velopharyngeal control is essential for speech, but may be impaired in Parkinson's disease (PD). Bilateral subthalamic nucleus deep brain stimulation (STN DBS) improves limb function in PD, but the effects on velopharyngeal control remain unknown. We tested whether STN DBS would change aerodynamic measures of velopharyngeal…

Purpose: To compare articulation and speech rates of school-aged children who do and do not stutter across sentence priming, structured conversation, and narration tasks and to determine factors that predict children's speech and articulation rates. Method: 34 children who stutter (CWS) and 34 age- and gender-matched children who do not stutter…

Phonotactic frequency effects on word production are thought to reflect accumulated experience with a language. Here we demonstrate that frequency effects can also be obtained through short-term manipulations of the input to children. We presented children with nonwords in an experiment that systematically manipulated English phonotactic frequency…

Parkinson disease is characterized by a complex neuropathological profile that primarily affects dopaminergic neural pathways in the basal ganglia, including pathways that modulate cranial sensorimotor functions such as swallowing, voice and speech. Prior work from our lab has shown that the rat model of unilateral 6-hydroxydopamine infusion to…

This study examined the ability of 20 preschool children with functional phonological delays and 34 age- and vocabulary-matched typical children to learn words differing in phonotactic probability (i.e., the likelihood of occurrence of a sound sequence) and neighborhood density (i.e., the number of words that differ from a target by one phoneme).…

Parents of 210 preschool children (age 2-5.7) and their clinicians were asked to describe their expectations for therapy and the changes they observed following treatment. Based on content analysis of the parents' and clinicians' responses, it was apparent that the comments aligned with the World Health Organization's (WHO) International…

The purpose of this study was to investigate whether variations in disfluencies of young children who do (CWS) and do not stutter (CWNS) significantly change their talker group classification or diagnosis from stutterer to nonstutterer, and vice versa. Participants consisted of seventeen 3- to 5-year-old CWS and nine 3- to 5-year-old CWNS, with no…

We identified individuals with deficits in musical pitch recognition by screening a large random population using the Distorted Tunes Test (DTT), and enrolled individuals who had DTT scores in the lowest 10th percentile, classified as tune deaf. We examined phonological processing abilities in 35 tune deaf and 34 normal control individuals. Eight…

Data on disfluencies in the speech of non-stuttering adults are relevant to several aspects of the assessment and treatment of adults who stutter. Currently, very few sources provide relevant data. In the existing literature on normally fluent speakers, there is no consistency in sample length or topic or in which types of disfluency are counted.…

Electropalatometry is a useful clinical and research tool for measuring linguapalatal contact. The goal of this study was to examine intra-speaker variability in performance. Twenty individuals spoke VCV nonsense words using a schwa in the initial position, the 15 palatal consonants, and three corner vowels, /alpha/, /i/, /u/. A variability index…

Language plays a critical role in the development of theory of mind (ToM). There is limited research, however, examining the role of specific components of language in ToM development for typical and clinical populations. The purpose of the current study is to examine the relative contributions of general grammar, grammatical tense markers,…

The purpose of this study was to examine possible differences in laryngeal aerodynamic measures during connected speech associated with oral contraceptive (OC) use. Eight women taking an OC, and eight others not taking an OC, participated in the study. Three trials of syllable /p[subscript alpha] /repetitions were obtained using a…

Background: A most important index of functional impairment in dysarthria is "intelligibility". The "Munich Intelligibility Profile" (MVP) is a computer-based method for the assessment of the intelligibility of dysarthric patients. A multi-user online version of MVP is now available. Aims: To describe the structure of MVP-online and to evaluate…