SPEECH SOUND DISORDER

Specialization of the brain for language is early emerging and essential for language learning in young children. Fragile X Syndrome (FXS) is a neurogenetic disorder marked by high rates of delays in both expressive and receptive language, but neural activation patterns during speech and language processing are unknown. We report results of a functional Near Infrared Spectroscopy (fNIRS) study of responses to speech and nonspeech sounds in the auditory cortex in a sample of 2- to 10-year-old...

Noise-induced cochlear synaptopathy has been studied for over 25 years with no known diagnosis for this disorder in humans. This type of "hidden hearing loss" induces a loss of synapses in the inner ear but no change in audiometric thresholds. Recent studies have shown that by two months post synaptopathy-inducing noise exposure, synapses in some animal species can regenerate. Animal studies to date have focused primarily on peripheral hearing measures to diagnose ribbon synapse loss, while...

Background: Chiari malformation is a condition involving caudal descent of the hindbrain which herniates the cerebellar tonsils through the foramen magnum. The purpose of this study was to quantify auditory deficits in an affected individual and to explore the hypothesis that cerebellar malformation specifically disrupts binaural processing. Methods: We present audiometric, electrophysiologic, imaging and auditory perceptual findings for a 17-year-old female with Chiari 1 malformation and for a...

Autism is a common neurodevelopmental disorder that despite its complex etiology, is marked by deficits in prediction that manifest in a variety of domains including social interactions, communication, and movement. The tendency of individuals with autism to focus on predictable schedules and interests that contain patterns and rules highlights the likely involvement of the cerebellum in this disorder. One candidate-autism gene is contact in associated protein 2 ( CNTNAP2 ), and variants in this...