Introduction: In early typical language development, children understand words before they are able to use them in speech. Children with autism spectrum disorders (ASD) generally show impairments in both the comprehension and the production of language. However, the relative degree of delay or impairment in each of these sub-domains may also be atypical and remains less well-understood. Materia...

We investigated whether and to what extent minority children attending elementary and middle schools in the U.S. are over- or under-identified as disabled and so disproportionately represented in special education. To address existing limitations in the field's knowledge base, we (a) analyzed multi-year longitudinal data, (b) used hazard modeling to estimate over-time dynamics of disability ide...

Children with autism often have language impairments and degraded cortical responses to speech. Extensive behavioral interventions can improve language outcomes and cortical responses. Prenatal exposure to the antiepileptic drug valproic acid (VPA) increases the risk for autism and language impairment. Prenatal exposure to VPA also causes weaker and delayed auditory cortex responses in rats. In...

Speech movement disorders, as a consequence of nervous system impairment, are relatively common, being associated with numerous nervous system diseases, stroke, brain trauma, and congenital abnormalities. Disorders of speech movements may manifest as the only problem in communication or they may co-occur with impairments in language function. For this reason, and mostly as a matter of scientifi...

Researchers and clinicians acknowledge today that the contribution of both cerebral hemispheres is necessary to a full and adequate verbal communication. Indeed, it is estimated that at least 50% of right brain damaged individuals display impairments of prosodic, discourse, pragmatics and/or lexical semantics dimensions of communication. Since the 1990's, researchers have focused on the descrip...

The assessment and treatment of pain in persons with cognitive impairments pose unique challenges. Disorders affecting cognition include neurodegenerative, vascular, toxic, anoxic, and infectious processes. Persons with memory, language, and speech deficits and consciousness alterations are often unable to communicate clearly about their pain and discomfort. Past research has documented that pe...

INTRODUCTION AND LITERATURE REVIEW The World Health Organization’s (WHO) International Classification of Functioning, Disability and Health (ICF) was used as the study framework1. According to the ICF, disability is the result of a complex nonlinear interaction between health conditions that can cause impairments (loss or change of physiological or anatomical body function or structure) which m...

Support Vector Machines (SVMs) have become a popular tool for discriminative classification. An exciting area of recent application of SVMs is in speech processing. In this paper discriminatively trained SVMs have been introduced as a novel approach for the automatic detection of voice impairments. SVMs have a distinctly different modelling strategy in the detection of voice impairments problem...

Speech is the primary means of human communication. Speech production starts in early ages and matures as children grow. People with intellectual or learning disabilities have deficit in speech production and faces difficulties in communication. These people need tailor-made therapies or trainings for rehabilitation to lead their lives independently. To provide these special trainings , it is i...