When a health professional, including speech and language therapists, treats a child, they will often ask the parent or relative of the child for information on the issue and its impact. Yet children will frequently have an opinion on their...
Motor Neurone Disease (MND) is a progressive neurological condition that affects motor neurons in the brain, brainstem and spinal cord, affecting the control of skeletal muscles for speech, chewing and swallowing. There are two variants of MND, with symptoms typically...
This study examined the interaction of hearing protection for noise reduction and hearing loss with speech recognition performance. Forty five subjects with four hearing loss profiles were fitted with two different level dependent hearing protectors (circumaural and inserts) in two...
While the cochlear implant (CI) has been a tremendous success in restoring hearing to deaf individuals, the implantation outcome still varies across CI users [1]. Some demographic factors, such as duration of deafness, and peripheral factors, such as electrode placement,...
Evidence-based practice is often described as the integration of three sources of information to inform clinical practice, namely: 1) research evidence/practice guidelines; 2) client preferences/needs, and: 3) clinical experience. Speech and language therapists have reported a lack of time and...
Hearing aid validation requires that speech discrimination be measured, yet there are no validated methods of measuring speech discrimination in infants and toddlers. Prof Uhler describes two related approaches that are showing promise. Speech discrimination is the gold standard for...
Approximately 40-80% of children with Down syndrome have hearing impairment in addition to speech and language impairment. The commonest cause of hearing impairment in young children is otitis media with effusion. This paper investigated the impact of early hearing loss...
Parkinson’s disease (PD) is the second most common neurological condition in Australia, and communication difficulties are reported by 90% of people with the condition. Unfortunately, not all people with PD have access to speech and language therapy services due to...
This soft cover book of 453 pages describes in detail the work undertaken at the Research Triangle Institute (RTI) in North Carolina which has led to many of the designs and theories of speech processing in cochlear implantation. It is...
Evidence based practice (EBP) is a three-pillared approach whereby information on the research evidence, factors relating to the patient and clinical experience are all considered to inform a care decision. Unfortunately, there is frequently very little research evidence to inform...
There are many myths around language development in bilingual children, and an increased risk of stuttering in bilingual children is one of these misperceptions. In research studies, speech and language therapists have identified higher numbers of dysfluencies in speech samples...
Communication training for medical students generally focuses on communicating with unimpaired individuals. This article describes how a speech and language therapy department at the University of Gothenburg in Sweden trialled a new approach to teaching medical students. Fifty-nine undergraduate medical...