Agreed definitions and a shared vision for new standards in stroke recovery research: The Stroke Recovery and Rehabilitation Roundtable taskforce.

The first Stroke Recovery and Rehabilitation Roundtable established a game changing set of new standards for stroke recovery research. Common language and definitions were required to develop an agreed framework spanning the four working groups: translation of basic science, biomarkers of stroke recovery, measurement in clinical trials and intervention development and reporting. This paper outlines the working definitions established by our group and an agreed vision for accelerating progress in stroke recovery research

The acquisition of Sign Language: The impact of phonetic complexity on phonology

Research into the effect of phonetic complexity on phonological acquisition has a long history in spoken languages. This paper considers the effect of phonetics on phonological development in a signed language. We report on an experiment in which nonword-repetition methodology was adapted so as to examine in a systematic way how phonetic complexity in two phonological parameters of signed languages — handshape and movement — affects the perception and articulation of signs. Ninety-one Deaf children aged 3–11 acquiring British Sign Language (BSL) and 46 hearing nonsigners aged 6–11 repeated a set of 40 nonsense signs. For Deaf children, repetition accuracy improved with age, correlated with wider BSL abilities, and was lowest for signs that were phonetically complex. Repetition accuracy was correlated with fine motor skills for the youngest children. Despite their lower repetition accuracy, the hearing group were similarly affected by phonetic complexity, suggesting that common visual and motoric factors are at play when processing linguistic information in the visuo-gestural modality

Girls and Boys Born before 28 Weeks Gestation: Risks of Cognitive, Behavioral, and Neurologic Outcomes at Age 10 Years

To compare the prevalence of cognitive, neurological, and behavioral outcomes at 10 years of age in 428 girls and 446 boys who were born extremely preterm (EP)

The Relationship of Maternal Prepregnancy Body Mass Index and Pregnancy Weight Gain to Neurocognitive Function at Age 10 Years among Children Born Extremely Preterm

OBJECTIVE: To assess the association between maternal prepregnancy body mass index and adequacy of pregnancy weight gain in relation to neurocognitive function in school-aged children born extremely preterm. STUDY DESIGN: Study participants were 535 ten-year-old children enrolled previously in the prospective multicenter Extremely Low Gestational Age Newborns cohort study who were products of singleton pregnancies. Soon after delivery, mothers provided information about prepregnancy weight. Prepregnancy body mass index and adequacy of weight gain were characterized based on this information. Children underwent a neurocognitive evaluation at 10 years of age. RESULTS: Maternal prepregnancy obesity was associated with increased odds of a lower score for Differential Ability Scales-II Verbal IQ, for Developmental Neuropsychological Assessment-II measures of processing speed and visual fine motor control, and for Wechsler Individual Achievement Test-III Spelling. Children born to mothers who gained an excessive amount of weight were at increased odds of a low score on the Oral and Written Language Scales Oral Expression assessment. Conversely, children whose mother did not gain an adequate amount of weight were at increased odds of a lower score on the Oral and Written Language Scales Oral Expression and Wechsler Individual Achievement Test-III Word Reading assessments. CONCLUSION: In this cohort of infants born extremely preterm, maternal obesity was associated with poorer performance on some assessments of neurocognitive function. Our findings are consistent with the observational and experimental literature and suggest that opportunities may exist to mitigate risk through education and behavioral intervention before pregnancy

Large expert-curated database for benchmarking document similarity detection in biomedical literature search

Document recommendation systems for locating relevant literature have mostly relied on methods developed a decade ago. This is largely due to the lack of a large offline gold-standard benchmark of relevant documents that cover a variety of research fields such that newly developed literature search techniques can be compared, improved and translated into practice. To overcome this bottleneck, we have established the RElevant LIterature SearcH consortium consisting of more than 1500 scientists from 84 countries, who have collectively annotated the relevance of over 180 000 PubMed-listed articles with regard to their respective seed (input) article/s. The majority of annotations were contributed by highly experienced, original authors of the seed articles. The collected data cover 76% of all unique PubMed Medical Subject Headings descriptors. No systematic biases were observed across different experience levels, research fields or time spent on annotations. More importantly, annotations of the same document pairs contributed by different scientists were highly concordant. We further show that the three representative baseline methods used to generate recommended articles for evaluation (Okapi Best Matching 25, Term Frequency-Inverse Document Frequency and PubMed Related Articles) had similar overall performances. Additionally, we found that these methods each tend to produce distinct collections of recommended articles, suggesting that a hybrid method may be required to completely capture all relevant articles. The established database server located at https://relishdb.ict.griffith.edu.au is freely available for the downloading of annotation data and the blind testing of new methods. We expect that this benchmark will be useful for stimulating the development of new powerful techniques for title and title/abstract-based search engines for relevant articles in biomedical research.Peer reviewe

Tutorial:Speech assessment for multilingual children who do not speak the same language(s) as the speech-language pathologist

Purpose: The aim of this tutorial is to support speech language pathologists (SLPs) undertaking assessments of multilingual children with suspected speech sound disorders, particularly children who speak languages that are not shared with their SLP. Method: The tutorial was written by the International Expert Panel on Multilingual Children’s Speech, which comprises 46 researchers (SLPs, linguists, phoneticians, and speech scientists) who have worked in 43 countries and used 27 languages in professional practice. Seventeen panel members met for a 1-day workshop to identify key points for inclusion in the tutorial, 26 panel members contributed to writing this tutorial, and 34 members contributed to revising this tutorial online (some members contributed tomore than 1 task). Results: This tutorial draws on international research evidence and professional expertise to provide a comprehensive overview of working with multilingual children with suspected speech sound disorders. This overview addresses referral, case history, assessment, analysis, diagnosis, and goal setting and the SLP’s cultural competence and preparation for working with interpreters and multicultural support workers and dealing with organizational and government barriers to and facilitators of culturally competent practice. Conclusion: The issues raised in this tutorial are applied in a hypothetical case study of an English-speaking SLP’s assessment of a multilingual Cantonese-and English-speaking 4-year-old boy. Resources are listed throughout the tutorial.Australian Research Council: FT0990588United States Department of Health & Human Services National Institutes of Health (NIH) - USA NIH National Institute on Deafness & Other Communication Disorders (NIDCD

Extremely low gestational age and very low birthweight for gestational age are risk factors for autism spectrum disorder in a large cohort study of 10-year-old children born at 23-27 weeks’ gestation

No prospective cohort study of high-risk children has used rigorous exposure assessment and optimal diagnostic procedures to examine the perinatal antecedents of autism spectrum disorder (ASD), separately among those with and without cognitive impairment