Charles West: a 19th century perspective on acquired childhood aphasia

Dr Charles West was the founder (1852) of the first paediatric hospital in the English-speaking world. In a career spanning four decades, he devoted a great part of his energies to describing the nervous diseases of infants and children. In 1871, West published a series of lectures which focused uniquely on the developmental and acquired language and mental disorders of children. West's clinical experience indicated that acquired aphasia was almost always a transitory condition in children. However, there was one exceptional case which West followed for over 3 years. It represents the youngest case of persistent aphasia described in the modern English medical literature. West's writings reflect a significant early attempt to document and categorise language loss and disturbance in children. In this paper, we detail West's innovations in the description, assessment and treatment of child language disorders

Spartan Daily, November 7, 1961

Volume 49, Issue 30https://scholarworks.sjsu.edu/spartandaily/4217/thumbnail.jp

The Intensive Cognitive-Communication Rehabilitation Program for young adults with acquired brain injury

PURPOSE: This study investigated the effects of an intensive cognitive-communication rehabilitation (ICCR) program for young individuals with chronic acquired brain injury. METHOD: ICCR included classroom lectures; metacognitive instruction, modeling, and application; technology skills training; and individual cognitive-linguistic therapy. Four individuals participated in the intensive program (6 hr with 1-hr lunch break × 4 days × 12 weeks of treatment): 3 participants completed 3 consecutive semesters, and 1 participant completed 1 semester. Two controls did not receive treatment and completed assessments before and after the 12-week treatment interval only. RESULTS: All 4 experimental participants demonstrated significant improvements on at least 1 standardized cognitive-linguistic measure, whereas controls did not. Furthermore, time point significantly predicted participants' scores on 2 of the 4 standardized outcome measures, indicating that as duration in ICCR increased, scores also increased. Participants who completed multiple semesters of ICCR also improved in their therapy and personal goals, classroom behavior, life participation, and quality of life. CONCLUSION: After ICCR, participants showed gains in their cognitive-linguistic functioning, classroom participation, and individual therapy. They also demonstrated improvements outside the classroom and in their overall well-being. There is a gap between the large population of young adults with acquired brain injury who wish to return to higher education and a lack of rehabilitation programs supporting reentry into academic environments; ICCR is a first step in reducing that gap.T32 DC013017 - NIDCD NIH HHSAccepted manuscrip

Domain-independent Punctuation and Segmentation Insertion

Punctuation and segmentation is crucial in spoken language translation, as it has a strong impact to translation performance. However, the impact of rare or unknown words in the performance of punctuation and segmentation insertion has not been thoroughly studied. In this work, we simulate various degrees of domain-match in testing scenario and investigate their impact to the punctuation insertion task. We explore three rare word generalizing schemes using part-of-speech (POS) tokens. Experiments show that generalizing rare and unknown words greatly improves the punctuation insertion performance, reaching up to 8.8 points of improvement in F-score when applied to the out-of-domain test scenario. We show that this improvement in punctuation quality has a positive impact on a following machine translation (MT) performance, improving it by 2 BLEU points

Holy Things: Foundations for Liturgical Theology

(Excerpt) Christian corporate worship has biblical foundations. This is so, of course, in the most obvious ways: at the heart of the meeting the book called the Bible is read and then interpreted as having to do with us. Sometimes, as ceremonial preface to that reading, the book is carried about, even enthroned. Furthermore, the text of the Bible provides the source of the imagery and, often, the very form and quality of the language in prayers, chants, hymn texts, and sermons. Psalms are sung as if that ancient collection were for our singing. Snatches of old biblical letters are scattered throughout the service, as if we were addressed. Frequently images and texts drawn from the Bible adorn the room which provides a place for the meeting. The very actions of the gathering may seem like the Bible alive: an assembly gathers, as the people gathered at the foot of Mt. Sinai; arms are upraised in prayer or blessing, as Moses raised his arms; the holy books are read, as Ezra read to the listening people; the people hold a meal, as the disciples did gathered together after the death of Jesus. To come into the meeting seems like coming into a world determined by the language of the Bible