Latest Speech Stories
MEMPHIS, Tenn., Feb. 10 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- The mystery behind a complex disorder called stuttering became a little clearer today with the announcement of the discovery of three genes for stuttering by Dennis Drayna, Ph.D., a director of the Stuttering Foundation and researcher for the National Institute on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders. (Photo: http://www.newscom.com/cgi-bin/prnh/20100210/DC53167) "This research is important because it's another indication that...
Music serves as a natural and non-invasive intervention for patients with severe neurological disorders to promote long-term memory, social interaction and communication. However, there is currently no plausible explanation of its neural basis for why and how music affects physical and psychosocial responses.Origins of music perception in humans may have their foundation in animal communication calls, as evidenced here in non-human primates. Many speech sounds and animal vocalizations, for...
U.S. researchers say trained musicians are better able to discern speech in noisy environments. The study, published in Ear and Hearing, supports the potential therapeutic and rehabilitation uses of musical training for those with hearing and communication disorders. The study points to a highly pragmatic side of music's magic, Nina Kraus, director of the lab at Northwestern University, Evanston, Ill., says in a statement. The researchers asked 31 study participants with normal hearing and a...
Researchers from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem have succeeded for the first time in devising a model that describes and identifies a basic cellular mechanism that enables networks of neurons to efficiently decode speech in changing conditions.The research may lead to the upgrading of computer algorithms for faster and more precise speech recognition as well as to the development of innovative treatments for auditory problems among adults and young people.Our brain has the capability to...
A U.S. scientist says she has received federal funding to study how children perceive various varieties of foreign-accented English. Indiana University Assistant Professor Tessa Bent says the funding from the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act will help her and her colleagues determine how such accents might influence speech development in children. In the real world children hear speech that contains an enormous amount of variability, including factors like a talker's dialect, gender,...
A UQ researcher has revealed a new treatment for a speech disorder that commonly affects those who have suffered a stroke or brain injury.PhD graduate Dr Rachel Wenke has shown in a recent study that the Lee Silverman Voice Treatment® may be an effective option for dysarthria patients suffering from stroke and traumatic brain injury (TBI).Dysarthria is a speech disorder which negatively affects a person's ability to communicate as they can be difficult to understand and may sound like they...
New research by a Rice University psychologist clearly identifies the parts of the brain involved in the process of choosing appropriate words during speech.The study, published in the current issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, could help researchers better understand the speech problems that stroke patients experience.When speaking, a person must select one word from a competing set of words. For example, if the speaker wants to mention a specific animal, he has...
Montreal, June 30, 2005. A study published today in the prestigious journal Nature by Dr. Michael Petrides and colleagues at the Montreal Neurological Institute (MNI) at McGill University, challenges current thinking that speech developed as a result of new structures that evolved in the human brain. Dr. Petrides and colleagues have identified a distinct brain region that controls jaw movements in macaque monkeys that is comparable to Broca's area - the region in the human brain...
