Authors focus on swallowing problems in the elderly and ill.

If you’re dealing with Alzheimer’s, cancer, Parkinson’s disease, multiple sclerosis, head injury or stroke, the last thing you need is another problem.

But in making her rounds for the Natick (Mass.) Visiting Nurses Association, speech-language pathologist Roya Sayadi found patients with different diagnoses had something in common.

Echolalia? Apraxia? Morphology? These words are part of the lexicon of speech and language pathologists. And unfortunately, most parents with children on the autism spectrum are mystified by what these terms actually mean. To assist, here’s a review of common words and phrases used most often during speech and language screening.

People who interview young children for criminal investigations and other inquiries could elicit false information through their gestures, particularly if the child is inarticulate, new research shows. “Ours is the first study to show that misleading gesture can have long-term effects on the veracity of children’s reports,” said psychologist Susan Goldin-Meadow, PhD, a gesture expert at the University of Chicago.

A bill that would authorize funding for early hearing loss detection and intervention (EHDI) activities for fiscal years 2010 through 2015 was introduced into the U.S. Senate on April 14.

Smarty Ears released an innovative new app that focuses on therapy for one of the most common articulation difficulties among young children: the production of the /r/ phoneme. Smarty Ears’ new app, called “R intensive SLP”, is a fun, well structured, yet easy to administer way of practicing the most feared English sound.

The /r/ phoneme is one of the most complex phonemes in the English language and therefore one of the most frustrating sounds, for not only for speech therapists but also for children and parents. Often,  students are enrolled for many years to learn to produce this one sound in the English language.  Individuals who come from other countries often also have difficulties learning to pronounce this very “tricky” sound.

Israeli researchers were able to identify ASD with greater than 80% reliability by computing pitch across time and normalizing pitch histogram peaks as a measure of pitch variability.

Lead researcher Yoram Bonneh, PhD, senior research associate in the Department of Human Biology at the University of Haifa in Israel, said the original goal of the study was to quantify the abnormal voice quality and speech prosody (rhythm, stress, and intonation) often observed in autism “to get a quantitative measure that is not related to high-level things like social interactions and cognitive aspects.”