Speech Characteristics and Intelligibility in Adults with Mild and Moderate Intellectual Disabilities

PURPOSE: Adults with intellectual disabilities (ID) often show reduced speech intelligibility, which affects their social interaction skills. This study aims to establish the main predictors of this reduced intelligibility in order to ultimately optimise management. METHOD: Spontaneous speech and picture naming tasks were recorded in 36 adults with mild or moderate ID. Twenty-five naïve listeners rated the intelligibility of the spontaneous speech samples. Performance on the picture-naming task was analysed by means of a phonological error analysis based on expert transcriptions. RESULTS: The transcription analyses showed that the phonemic and syllabic inventories of the speakers were complete. However, multiple errors at the phonemic and syllabic level were found. The frequencies of specific types of errors were related to intelligibility and quality ratings. CONCLUSIONS: The development of the phonemic and syllabic repertoire appears to be completed in adults with mild-to-moderate ID. The charted speech difficulties can be interpreted to indicate speech motor control and planning difficulties. These findings may aid the development of diagnostic tests and speech therapies aimed at improving speech intelligibility in this specific group

Regular Expression Matching and Operational Semantics

Many programming languages and tools, ranging from grep to the Java String library, contain regular expression matchers. Rather than first translating a regular expression into a deterministic finite automaton, such implementations typically match the regular expression on the fly. Thus they can be seen as virtual machines interpreting the regular expression much as if it were a program with some non-deterministic constructs such as the Kleene star. We formalize this implementation technique for regular expression matching using operational semantics. Specifically, we derive a series of abstract machines, moving from the abstract definition of matching to increasingly realistic machines. First a continuation is added to the operational semantics to describe what remains to be matched after the current expression. Next, we represent the expression as a data structure using pointers, which enables redundant searches to be eliminated via testing for pointer equality. From there, we arrive both at Thompson's lockstep construction and a machine that performs some operations in parallel, suitable for implementation on a large number of cores, such as a GPU. We formalize the parallel machine using process algebra and report some preliminary experiments with an implementation on a graphics processor using CUDA.Comment: In Proceedings SOS 2011, arXiv:1108.279

Radio Frequency Interference Observations at IAR La Plata

The Wettzell RFI-Monitoring system was developed to monitor radio frequency interference at existing and potential VLBI sites. It is a transportable system which can be operated in a semiautomated manner. It was used at the Instituto Argentino de Radioastronomía in La Plata to investigate a future site for the Transportable Integrated Geodetic Observatory (TIGO). With the help of an automated pedestal for the RFI-monitoring antenna a 24h/7d survey was conducted during September and October 2012. This data set is one of the most dense RFI-monitoring samples known within the IVS. The results of this survey showed, that most of the present RFI signals occure sporadically and take away less than 5% of the observation time. Hence IAR is a suitable site for TIGO.Fil: Haze, Hayo. Bundesamt Für Kartographie Und Geodäsie-bkg; AlemaniaFil: Gancio Gonzalez, Guillermo Matias. Provincia de Buenos Aires. Gobernación. Comisión de Investigaciones Científicas. Instituto Argentino de Radioastronomía. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas. Centro Científico Tecnológico Conicet - La Plata. Instituto Argentino de Radioastronomía; ArgentinaFil: Perilli, Daniel Oscar. Provincia de Buenos Aires. Gobernación. Comisión de Investigaciones Científicas. Instituto Argentino de Radioastronomía. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas. Centro Científico Tecnológico Conicet - La Plata. Instituto Argentino de Radioastronomía; ArgentinaFil: Larrarte, Juan Jose. Provincia de Buenos Aires. Gobernación. Comisión de Investigaciones Científicas. Instituto Argentino de Radioastronomía. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas. Centro Científico Tecnológico Conicet - La Plata. Instituto Argentino de Radioastronomía; ArgentinaFil: Garcia, Leandro Manuel. Provincia de Buenos Aires. Gobernación. Comisión de Investigaciones Científicas. Instituto Argentino de Radioastronomía. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas. Centro Científico Tecnológico Conicet - La Plata. Instituto Argentino de Radioastronomía; ArgentinaFil: Kronschnabl, G.. Bundesamt Für Kartographie Und Geodäsie-bkg; AlemaniaFil: Plötz, C.. Bundesamt Für Kartographie Und Geodäsie-bkg; AlemaniaFil: Guarrera, Leonardo. Provincia de Buenos Aires. Gobernación. Comisión de Investigaciones Científicas. Instituto Argentino de Radioastronomía. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas. Centro Científico Tecnológico Conicet - La Plata. Instituto Argentino de Radioastronomía; Argentina21st Meeting of the European VLBI Group for Geodesy and AstrometryKirkkonummiFinlandiaFinnish Geodetic Institut

Effectiveness of speech therapy in adults with intellectual disabilities

BackgroundThis study investigated the effect of speech therapy in a heterogeneous group of adults with intellectual disability. MethodThirty-six adults with mild and moderate intellectual disabilities (IQs 40-70; age 18-40years) with reported poor speech intelligibility received tailored training in articulation and listening skills delivered in two 3-month periods. Pre- to post-changes in speech intelligibility and receptive vocabulary were assessed using standardized tasks. ResultsThe results showed a positive effect of treatment on speech intelligibility and receptive vocabulary, irrespective of severity of intellectual disability, hearing loss and intellectual disability aetiology. ConclusionsSpeech therapy for people with intellectual disability can be effective at adult age and hearing loss should not prevent treatment. Continued attention to speech can help augment verbal communication skills in this population

German macro: how it's different and why that matters. EPC Discussion Paper, May 2016

Do the macroeconomics of the German political establishment really differ from standard western macroeconomics? That question was the starting point for the seminar on ‘German macro: How it’s Different and Why that Matters’, which was held at Heriot-Watt University in December 2015, with financial support from the Scottish Institute for Research in Economics (SIRE) and the Money, Macro & Finance Research Group (MMF). This ebook, edited by George Bratsiotis and David Cobham, is the result of that exercise; six of the papers were presented at the seminar in earlier versions, and the editors sought some additional papers to complete the range of perspectives offered. The authors all sought out to discover whether or not there is something unique about German macroeconomics, and in what ways it differs from standard western macroeconomics; is it true that the former neglects demand management (although it may be quite interventionist in other ways), rejects debt relief and emphasises structural reform designed to improve competitiveness as the (only) key to economic growth? How much of whatever difference exists is due to a well worked out set of ideas in the form of Ordoliberalism? In what way does it relate to Germany’s own experiences in different periods? And how far is this the result of political preferences and how much do the idiosyncrasies of these German views matter, for the development of the Eurozone and indeed the health of the German economy