Speech, language, and reading in 10-year-olds with cleft: Associations with teasing, satisfaction with speech, and psychological adjustment

© 2017 American Cleft Palate-Craniofacial Association. Background: Despite the use of multidisciplinary services, little research has addressed issues involved in the care of those with cleft lip and/or palate across disciplines. The aim was to investigate associations between speech, language, reading, and reports of teasing, subjective satisfaction with speech, and psychological adjustment. Design: Cross-sectional data collected during routine, multidisciplinary assessments in a centralized treatment setting, including speech and language therapists and clinical psychologists. Participants: Children with cleft with palatal involvement aged 10 years from three birth cohorts (N = 170) and their parents. Outcome Measures: Speech: SVANTE-N. Language: Language 6-16 (sentence recall, serial recall, vocabulary, and phonological awareness). Reading: Word Chain Test and Reading Comprehension Test. Psychological measures: Strengths and Difficulties Questionnaire and extracts from the Satisfaction With Appearance Scale and Child Experience Questionnaire. Results: Reading skills were associated with self- and parent-reported psychological adjustment in the child. Subjective satisfaction with speech was associated with psychological adjustment, while not being consistently associated with speech therapists' assessments. Parent-reported teasing was found to be associated with lower levels of reading skills. Having a medical and/or psychological condition in addition to the cleft was found to affect speech, language, and reading significantly. Conclusions: Cleft teams need to be aware of speech, language, and/or reading problems as potential indicators of psychological risk in children with cleft. This study highlights the importance of multiple reports (self, parent, and specialist) and a multidisciplinary approach to cleft care and research

The Effect of Dyslexia on Searching Visual and Textual Content: Are Icons Really Useful?

Little is known about how dyslexia affects online information seeking. This study addresses the search performance of 21 users with dyslexia and 21 controls in textual versus visual displays. The aim was to investigate whether visual content enhance search performance. Participants were presented with 24 icons and 24 words and asked to locate a target item. Eye-tracking data revealed no differences in performance in visual or textual content in the dyslexia group. There were no significant differences between the user groups on visual tasks. However, users with dyslexia performed significantly slower on textual tasks than controls, mainly due to longer fixation durations. Users in the control group took much less time solving textual tasks than visual tasks. The results indicate that there may be no advantages in replacing textual content with icons for users with dyslexia. However, replacing text with icons may be counterproductive for users without dyslexia

“I’m not Stupid”: Attitudes towards adaptation among people with dyslexia

A significant portion of the population have dyslexia, which is commonly associated with reading and writing difficulties. In the context of developing materials well-suited for user s with reading disorders, one solution has been to develop materials especially targeted at dyslexic users. However, how are the attitudes among users with dyslexia towards adaptation? In this paper, we report the findings from qualitative interviews with 20 adults with dyslexia. The main finding was that they were sceptical towards adapted products, among others because it made them “feel stupid” and because the adapted format affected the reading experience negatively. In this paper we argue to instead work within the universal design paradigm, trying to develop products and services usable by all people, thus reducing the need for particular user groups to utilise “special solutions”