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EHDI Legislation Introduced in Senate

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.

May 27, 2010 (Philadelphia, Pennsylvania) — Contrary to a common impression of monotonic speech in autism, children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) were found to have a significantly greater variability in pitch compared with controls, according to a study presented here at the 9th Annual International Meeting for Autism Research. Thus, increased pitch variability may be a marker for ASD among children who can speak.

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.”