Revista de Logopedia, Foniatria y Audiologia最新文献

Objective

The present study aimed to establish and compare nasalance scores in Spanish-speaking adults of both genders from Chile during the production of sustained vowels, an automatic speech sample and the reading of sentences.

Methods

46 adults participated, 25 women and 21 men, aged between 18 and 29 years. All without a history of speech therapy, neurological pathologies, intellectual deficit, hearing loss, syndromes or other pathologies that affect speech production. Adequate velopharyngeal function was determined in vivo through a perceptual evaluation of resonance. Nasalance was determined with the Nasometer, model 6450, during the sustained production of the vowels /a/, /i/ and /u/, an automatic repetition of the number series 1-10 and the reading of six sentences, five with consonants high pressure orals and one with nasal consonants. The comparison between both genders was made with the Mann-Whitney U test.

Results

The sentence with nasal sounds («Mi mamá me mima») presented the highest percentage of nasalance with 66.36%, followed by the numerical series with 24.61% and the vowel /i/ with 23.57%. Meanwhile, sentences with oral sounds and sustained vowels /a/ and /u/ presented an average nasalance that fluctuated between 10.5% (vowel /u/) and 16.52% (sentence: «Fifi fue feliz»). Finally, a significantly higher average was observed in women for three oral sentences: «Pipo patea la pelota» (P = .044), «Tito tapa tarros» (P = .041), and «Fifi fue feliz» (P = .027).

Conclusion

The nasalance values obtained in Chilean adults showed variations according to the speech stimulus and the gender of the speakers.

Purpose

To generate a cross-cultural adaptation of the Voice Handicap Index-10 (VHI-10) in the Latin-American Spanish language and to assess its psychometric properties.

Methods

This is a descriptive and prospective cross-sectional study. The Voice Handicap Index-10 (VHI-10) was translated and back-translated and then adapted to the Latin-American Spanish language (LASVHI-10). It was then applied to adult patients with clinical findings of dysphonia made by a physician. A psychometric validation consisting of a principal components exploratory factor analysis with varimax rotation, concurrent validation comparing the visual analog scale performed by the patient and two relevant questions of the Spanish version of the University of Washington Quality of Life (UWQOL) scale, known group validity assessment and test–retest reliability assessment was performed.

Results

A total of 119 patients were included. The mean score for the LASVHI-10 scale was 18.4 ± 10.7 (median 18, range 0–40). A principal component factor analysis showed a two-factor solution with good diagnostic test results. The Cronbach's alpha value for the global scale was .92. The comparison between the LASVHI-10 and the visual analog scale demonstrated a high correlation (rho = .82), and the coefficient for test–retest was .80.

Conclusion

The results of this study provide evidence of a reliable and objective instrument to be used in clinical practice and for research objectives in Spanish-speaking patients.

Introduction

Specific Language Impairment (SLI) is a significant impairment in language acquisition (−1.25 SD), resistant to intervention and not justified by physical, neurological, intellectual, sensory or social causes, requiring specialized intervention. There is little information on the prevalence of this group in Spain.

Objectives

Three objectives, to calculate the prevalence of SLI in general and subtypes globally and according to gender, to determine the ages of diagnosis of SLI and to know its distribution by provinces in Andalusia.

Materials and methods

Prevalence: Reference population: 537,879 Primary School students. The prevalence is calculated by types, provinces and sex and homogeneity with hierarchical cluster is analyzed. Detection ages and SLI allocation in Andalusia: Reference population: 1,185,061 students. Frequencies and percentages of SLI are calculated by typology, province, age group and sex. Classification tree technique (CHAID method) is used.

Results

Prevalence: 8.27 per thousand (‰) in Andalusia (Spain). Screening ages. At age 8, 86.9%, mainly expressive SLI (E-SLI). Semantic-pragmatic disorder (SPD) is detected mainly from the age of 8 years.

Distribution

Sex: 74% are boys. Age groups: 2.9% are between 3-6 years old, 32% between 6 and 8, 42% between 8 and 12 and 23% over 12. Typologies: expressive SLI (E-SLI): 56%, expressive-receptive SLI (ER-SLI): 33% and semantic-pragmatic disorder (SPD): 11%.

Conclusions

SLI students, due to their specific characteristics and dimensions, should be considered in educational policies.

Background and objectives

The skills involved in narrative production are a good indicator of children's current language competence and predict future linguistic performance. It is important in speech and language therapy and education research to have specific assessments of developing narrative abilities. To date, however, there are few tests that assess the development of narratives in Spanish. This research has a double objective: first, to adapt the Test of Narrative Production to Spanish; and second, to describe the development of narrative skills using the adapted test.

Method

A total of 146 children aged 4-11 years with Spanish as their mother tongue were evaluated by the Test of Narrative Production adapted to Spanish, and were assessed for their narrative skills at the level of both macrostructure and microstructure.

Results

A strong significant correlation between age and narrative performance was observed at the macrostructural and microstructural levels. However, although both levels showed a stabilization at age 9 years, at the microstructural level cohesive devices continued developing until age 11 years.

Conclusions

The test can be considered a valid evaluation of narrative development in Spanish. The results are consistent with research in English-speaking children, where it has been shown that they acquire a similar level of narrative performance to that of adults at 9 years of age at the macrostructural level, but they continue to develop and refine the microstructural level until adolescence.

Smith–Magenis syndrome (SMS) is a rare neurodevelopmental disorder with mild-to-moderate intellectual disability. Speech and language impairments have not been well described as part of the SMS phenotype. This study reports the speech and language characteristics presented by a classical SMS case, a 20-year-old woman with positive deletion in the region 17p11.2. The case presented a borderline IQ on verbal and performance Wechsler scales. Language standardized tests (i.e., Peabody, Token test, CEG test and Boehm test) and naturalistic language sample (i.e. conversation and story generation) were used to assess speech and language performance. Speech characteristics included imprecise speech, with a high speech rate, hoarse voice, hypernasality and intelligibility deficits. The performance in all standardized tests was poor. Socio-communicative deficits included repetitive and persistent verbal behavior, difficulties in the use of linguistic strategies to repair communication breakdowns, limited vocabulary production and short overall length utterances with reduced grammatical components. The results contribute to expanding knowledge about the SMS phenotype, also to highlight the need to include speech and language evaluation as part of the clinical assessment of SMS and, at the same time, to draw attention to the need to include early communications skills in language intervention programs.

Background and objective

Prosodic stress awareness is a metalinguistic ability that develops in parallel to other abilities such as phonological awareness (PhA). The objectives of this article are: to determine prosodic stress awareness the of children with Developmental Language Disorder (DLD) in second and fourth grade elementary school children, Prosodic stress awareness and PhA are related to each other and, to determine if those eventual relations are presented equally in individuals of second and fourth grade of primary education.

Materials and method

131 children participated in the study, 76 in the 2nd grade of primary school (PS) (26 DLD and 50 without DLD) and 55 children in the 4th grade of PS (22 DLD and 33 without DLD). Two prosodic stress awareness tests were used: lexical accent test and metric accent test, and 2 tests of PhA.

Results and conclusions

The results show that children with DLD present difficulties in prosodic stress awareness regardless of grade. In addition, the relationship between prosodic stress awareness and CF is corroborated.

Young children consulting due to an absence of language usually show deficits in the construction of preverbal communicative mechanisms, not necessarily a sign of broader developmental disorders.

Aim

To analyse the presence/absence of preverbal abilities in non-autistic children with language absence.

Population

A subset of 77 2-3.5 year-old children was analysed. These children attended consultation at the Speech-Language Pathology Service of the Hospital Universitario Austral and private consultation due to an absence of language.

Materials and methodology

The population of children under study went through an audiological evaluation to rule out hearing loss. Their parents were asked to answer the M-CHAT Questionnaire to rule out children with high and medium risk of autism; and an assessment of the general development parameters was made with the Vineland, VABS scale, seeking to identify the presence of specific delays in language acquisition and global developmental disorders. The preverbal abilities studied were: visual contact, joint attention, the ability to interact, simple imitation, and the use of protoimperative gestures.

Results

Children with global developmental delays showed more issues in the above mechanisms than the patients with specific language delays. The items that showed a higher level of impairment were the development of imitation and the use of protoimperative gestures related to development during the last quarter of the first year of life.

The present case study presents the speech therapy evaluation of a 17-year-old adolescent patient, adopted in an Eastern country, with borderline intellectual disability and sensory problems. After the initial evaluation, a specific lexical-syntactic language disorder was diagnosed, with comorbidity with evolutionary dyslexia and severe sensorial problems. Parallel to the diagnosis, it was postulated that the adolescent had foetal alcohol syndrome associated with prenatal alcohol exposure, both due to her clinical condition and suspicion from her adoption history. After a year of speech therapy intervention, the girl showed no improvement.