Use of the STAR PROCESS for Children with Sensory Processing Challenges

Background: This study examined the effectiveness of the STAR PROCESS, an intensive, short-term intervention that combines principles of sensory integration, relationship-based therapy, and parental-therapist collaboration for children with sensory processing challenges. Method: A nonconcurrent multiple baseline, repeated measures design was used. Four boys, aged 5 years 0 months to 7 years 9 months, participated in this study. The mean length of intervention was 22 sessions delivered 3 to 5 times per week. A behavioral coding system was used to measure change in four areas: play level, positive affect, joint attention, and novel use of equipment. The theory of change reflects the use of multisensory experiences in combination with parent participation to impact outcomes. Results: Improvement was noted in play level in all of the participants. Multisensory experiences and parent participation were associated with these changes in two participants. Discussion: The study results suggest a feasible methodology to study occupational therapy interventions. The behavioral coding system was sensitive to change. Play abilities changed in all four children. Preliminary support was provided for the theory of change combining multisensory experiences with parent participation. Conclusion: A targeted treatment approach that emphasizes parents as play partners in a multisensory environment shows promise in remediating these deficits

The Effects of Two Speech Interventions on Speech Function in Pediatric Dysarthria

Reduced speech function is a primary disability in children with cerebral palsy (CP) who have the motor speech disorder of dysarthria. Interventions for pediatric dysarthria with evidence of efficacy are greatly needed. The present exploratory study examined the effects of two intervention methods on three children with CP: (1) Lee Silverman Voice Treatment (LSVT LOUD), an intensive single-focus intervention protocol that increases sound pressure level (SPL), intelligibility, and vowel space in adults with dysarthria due to Parkinson Disease (PD) and has recent evidence suggesting effectiveness for children with CP, and (2) “Traditional” intervention, representing “treatment as usual,” consisting of instruction on breath control, positioning, articulation, and other behaviors. Examination of caregiver questionnaires, articulation assessment, and blinded listener ratings revealed greater speech function and articulatory precision, as well as utterances more often preferred and perceived as “easier to understand” after intervention. LSVT LOUD resulted in increases in speech function and SPL. Traditional resulted in increased speech function without increasing SPL. Thus, both interventions show promise for yielding increased speech function in children with dysarthria, although success may vary across linguistic levels and children

Conversational Discourse of Aphasic and Normal Adults: An Analysis of Communicative Functions

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Using Motor Tempi to Understand Rhythm and Grammatical Skills in Developmental Language Disorder and Typical Language Development

Children with developmental language disorder (DLD) show relative weaknesses on rhythm tasks beyond their characteristic linguistic impairments. The current study compares preferred tempo and the width of an entrainment region for 5- to 7-year-old typically developing (TD) children and children with DLD and considers the associations with rhythm aptitude and expressive grammar skills in the two populations. Preferred tempo was measured with a spontaneous motor tempo task (tapping tempo at a comfortable speed), and the width (range) of an entrainment region was measured by the difference between the upper (slow) and lower (fast) limits of tapping a rhythm normalized by an individual’s spontaneous motor tempo. Data from N = 16 children with DLD and N = 114 TD children showed that whereas entrainment-region width did not differ across the two groups, slowest motor tempo, the determinant of the upper (slow) limit of the entrainment region, was at a faster tempo in children with DLD vs. TD. In other words, the DLD group could not pace their slow tapping as slowly as the TD group. Entrainment-region width was positively associated with rhythm aptitude and receptive grammar even after taking into account potential confounding factors, whereas expressive grammar did not show an association with any of the tapping measures. Preferred tempo was not associated with any study variables after including covariates in the analyses. These results motivate future neuroscientific studies of low-frequency neural oscillatory mechanisms as the potential neural correlates of entrainment-region width and their associations with musical rhythm and spoken language processing in children with typical and atypical language development

Finishing the euchromatic sequence of the human genome

The sequence of the human genome encodes the genetic instructions for human physiology, as well as rich information about human evolution. In 2001, the International Human Genome Sequencing Consortium reported a draft sequence of the euchromatic portion of the human genome. Since then, the international collaboration has worked to convert this draft into a genome sequence with high accuracy and nearly complete coverage. Here, we report the result of this finishing process. The current genome sequence (Build 35) contains 2.85 billion nucleotides interrupted by only 341 gaps. It covers ∼99% of the euchromatic genome and is accurate to an error rate of ∼1 event per 100,000 bases. Many of the remaining euchromatic gaps are associated with segmental duplications and will require focused work with new methods. The near-complete sequence, the first for a vertebrate, greatly improves the precision of biological analyses of the human genome including studies of gene number, birth and death. Notably, the human enome seems to encode only 20,000-25,000 protein-coding genes. The genome sequence reported here should serve as a firm foundation for biomedical research in the decades ahead

A STUDY OF SEMANTIC COMPLEXITY INFLUENCES ON PHONOLOGY DURING CHILD LANGUAGE ACQUISITION

The purpose of the study was to examine the relationship between semantics and phonology in the speech of young children. This was accomplished by introducing experimental action words and experimental object words into the productive vocabularies of ten language-normal children. The phonetic structure, frequency of input, affixes, and presentation form of the experimental words were controlled, in order to eliminate the confounding effects these factors may have had on any semantic-phonological interrelationship. The hypothesis tested was whether the increased semantic complexity of action words would result in a decrease in production capability within the phonological domain. The results indicated that action words were spontaneously produced with a lower percentage of consonants correct than were the object words. Action words produced as unsolicited imitations were also produced with a lower percentage of consonants correct. Experimental words produced as elicited imitations did not reflect this production accuracy difference. However, differences were evident within the elicited imitations in terms of production variability: action words were produced with a higher degree of variability within multiple imitations than were object words. These findings were interpreted as being indicative of a semantic-phonological interaction within the speech of young children. Additionally, the results were discussed in terms of an information processing model of language acquisition and their relevance to current theories of phonological acquisition