1p36 deletion syndrome affects between 1 in 5,000 to 1 in 10,000 children. It is characterised by severe intellectual impairment, lack of language development, temper tantrums and other behavioural issues. There can be structural abnormalities in the brain which also cause low muscle tone and difficulties in swallowing. Children can take a long time in rolling over, sitting, etc The only treatments which have been widely used are physiotherapy and music therapy, which have had limited impact.
6 months ago I was delighted to welcome a 12 month old little girl with 1p36 deletion onto the Snowdrop programme where we try to harness the inherent plasticity of the brain in order to stimulate development. Today the little girl in question attended with her parents for her first reassessment. we saw some promising improvements. She is now rolling and sitting, her visual performance was improved and she is now listening to the voices around her, which gives her a chance to begin decoding language. She also now recognises her own name. Hand function is also showing good improvement with the development of a pincer grip and we also have gains in social development. As I say, children with this disorder usually have feeding and drinking problems due to their difficulties with swallowing, but we seem to have had a positive effect here with this little one eating and drinking with impunity.
All this in the face of a genetic expression which is acting to prevent development. If we can do this in 6 months of programme, imagine what we can achieve in the long term!
Showing posts with label language and communication. Show all posts
Showing posts with label language and communication. Show all posts
Friday, 3 November 2017
Tuesday, 13 November 2012
The link between music and language development.
This is the reason why exposure to music is a primary factor within the Snowdrop programme for brain injured children. With thanks to 'Medical News Today.'
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Contrary to the prevailing theories that music and language are cognitively separate or that music is a byproduct of language, theorists at Rice University's Shepherd School of Music and the University of Maryland, College Park (UMCP) advocate that music underlies the ability to acquire language.
"Spoken language is a special type of music," said Anthony Brandt, co-author of a theory paper published online this month in the journal Frontiers in Cognitive Auditory Neuroscience. "Language is typically viewed as fundamental to human intelligence, and music is often treated as being dependent on or derived from language. But from a developmental perspective, we argue that music comes first and language arises from music."
Brandt, associate professor of composition and theory at the Shepherd School, co-authored the paper with Shepherd School graduate student Molly Gebrian and L. Robert Slevc, UMCP assistant professor of psychology and director of the Language and Music Cognition Lab.
"Infants listen first to sounds of language and only later to its meaning," Brandt said. He noted that newborns' extensive abilities in different aspects of speech perception depend on the discrimination of the sounds of language - "the most musical aspects of speech."
The paper cites various studies that show what the newborn brain is capable of, such as the ability to distinguish the phonemes, or basic distinctive units of speech sound, and such attributes as pitch, rhythm and timbre.
The authors define music as "creative play with sound." They said the term "music" implies an attention to the acoustic features of sound irrespective of any referential function. As adults, people focus primarily on the meaning of speech. But babies begin by hearing language as "an intentional and often repetitive vocal performance," Brandt said. "They listen to it not only for its emotional content but also for its rhythmic and phonemic patterns and consistencies. The meaning of words comes later."
Brandt and his co-authors challenge the prevailing view that music cognition matures more slowly than language cognition and is more difficult. "We show that music and language develop along similar time lines," he said.
Infants initially don't distinguish well between their native language and all the languages of the world, Brandt said. Throughout the first year of life, they gradually hone in on their native language. Similarly, infants initially don't distinguish well between their native musical traditions and those of other cultures; they start to hone in on their own musical culture at the same time that they hone in on their native language, he said.
The paper explores many connections between listening to speech and music. For example, recognizing the sound of different consonants requires rapid processing in the temporal lobe of the brain. Similarly, recognizing the timbre of different instruments requires temporal processing at the same speed - a feature of musical hearing that has often been overlooked, Brandt said.
"You can't distinguish between a piano and a trumpet if you can't process what you're hearing at the same speed that you listen for the difference between 'ba' and 'da,'" he said. "In this and many other ways, listening to music and speech overlap." The authors argue that from a musical perspective, speech is a concert of phonemes and syllables.
"While music and language may be cognitively and neurally distinct in adults, we suggest that language is simply a subset of music from a child's view," Brandt said. "We conclude that music merits a central place in our understanding of human development."
Brandt said more research on this topic might lead to a better understanding of why music therapy is helpful for people with reading and speech disorders. People with dyslexia often have problems with the performance of musical rhythm. "A lot of people with language deficits also have musical deficits," Brandt said.
More research could also shed light on rehabilitation for people who have suffered a stroke. "Music helps them reacquire language, because that may be how they acquired language in the first place," Brandt said.
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Contrary to the prevailing theories that music and language are cognitively separate or that music is a byproduct of language, theorists at Rice University's Shepherd School of Music and the University of Maryland, College Park (UMCP) advocate that music underlies the ability to acquire language.
"Spoken language is a special type of music," said Anthony Brandt, co-author of a theory paper published online this month in the journal Frontiers in Cognitive Auditory Neuroscience. "Language is typically viewed as fundamental to human intelligence, and music is often treated as being dependent on or derived from language. But from a developmental perspective, we argue that music comes first and language arises from music."
Brandt, associate professor of composition and theory at the Shepherd School, co-authored the paper with Shepherd School graduate student Molly Gebrian and L. Robert Slevc, UMCP assistant professor of psychology and director of the Language and Music Cognition Lab.
"Infants listen first to sounds of language and only later to its meaning," Brandt said. He noted that newborns' extensive abilities in different aspects of speech perception depend on the discrimination of the sounds of language - "the most musical aspects of speech."
The paper cites various studies that show what the newborn brain is capable of, such as the ability to distinguish the phonemes, or basic distinctive units of speech sound, and such attributes as pitch, rhythm and timbre.
The authors define music as "creative play with sound." They said the term "music" implies an attention to the acoustic features of sound irrespective of any referential function. As adults, people focus primarily on the meaning of speech. But babies begin by hearing language as "an intentional and often repetitive vocal performance," Brandt said. "They listen to it not only for its emotional content but also for its rhythmic and phonemic patterns and consistencies. The meaning of words comes later."
Brandt and his co-authors challenge the prevailing view that music cognition matures more slowly than language cognition and is more difficult. "We show that music and language develop along similar time lines," he said.
Infants initially don't distinguish well between their native language and all the languages of the world, Brandt said. Throughout the first year of life, they gradually hone in on their native language. Similarly, infants initially don't distinguish well between their native musical traditions and those of other cultures; they start to hone in on their own musical culture at the same time that they hone in on their native language, he said.
The paper explores many connections between listening to speech and music. For example, recognizing the sound of different consonants requires rapid processing in the temporal lobe of the brain. Similarly, recognizing the timbre of different instruments requires temporal processing at the same speed - a feature of musical hearing that has often been overlooked, Brandt said.
"You can't distinguish between a piano and a trumpet if you can't process what you're hearing at the same speed that you listen for the difference between 'ba' and 'da,'" he said. "In this and many other ways, listening to music and speech overlap." The authors argue that from a musical perspective, speech is a concert of phonemes and syllables.
"While music and language may be cognitively and neurally distinct in adults, we suggest that language is simply a subset of music from a child's view," Brandt said. "We conclude that music merits a central place in our understanding of human development."
Brandt said more research on this topic might lead to a better understanding of why music therapy is helpful for people with reading and speech disorders. People with dyslexia often have problems with the performance of musical rhythm. "A lot of people with language deficits also have musical deficits," Brandt said.
More research could also shed light on rehabilitation for people who have suffered a stroke. "Music helps them reacquire language, because that may be how they acquired language in the first place," Brandt said.
Monday, 16 April 2012
Exposure to speech sounds is the basis of speech production.
This is why, in the Snowdrop programme, there are activities designed to give children the maximum exposure to speech sounds. As I say to every family, there is a link in the brain between exposure to language and language production.
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Experience, as the old saying goes, is the best teacher. And experience seems to play an important early role in how infants learn to understand and produce language.
Using new technology that measures the magnetic field generated by the activation of neurons in the brain, researchers tracked what appears to be a link between the listening and speaking areas of the brain in newborn, 6-month-old and one-year-old infants, before infants can speak.
The study, which appears in this month's issue of the journal NeuroReport, shows that Broca's area, located in the front of the left hemisphere of the brain, is gradually activated during an infant's initial year of life, according to Toshiaki Imada, lead author of the paper and a research professor at the University of Washington's Institute for Brain and Learning Sciences.
Broca's area has long been identified as the seat of speech production and, more recently, as that of social cognition and is critical to language and reading, according to Patricia Kuhl, co-author of the study and co-director of the UW's Institute for Brain and Learning Sciences.
"Magnetoencephalography is perfectly non-invasive and measures the magnetic field generated by neurons in the brain responding to sensory information that then 'leaks' through the skull," said Imada, one of the world's experts in the uses of magnetoencephalography to study the brain.
Kuhl said there is a long history of a link in the adult brain between the areas responsible for understanding and those responsible for speaking language. The link allows children to mimic the speech patterns they hear when they are very young. That's why people from Brooklyn speak "Brooklynese," she said.
"We think the connection between perception and production of speech gets formed by experience, and we are trying to determine when and how babies do it," said Kuhl, who also is a professor of speech and hearing sciences.
The study involved 43 infants in Finland -18 newborns, 17 6-month-olds and 8 one-year olds. Special hardware and software developed for this study allowed the infants' brain activity to be monitored even if they moved and captured brain activation with millisecond precision.
The babies were exposed to three kinds of sounds through earphones - pure tones that do not resemble speech like notes played on a piano, a three-tone harmonic chord that resembles speech and two Finnish syllables, "pa" and "ta." The researchers collected magnetic data only from the left hemisphere of the brain among the newborns because they cannot sit up and the magnetoencephalography cap was too big to securely fit their heads.
At all three ages the infants showed activation in the temporal part of the brain, Broca's area, that is responsible for listening and understanding speech, showing they were able to detect sound changes for all three stimuli. But the pure perception of sound did not activate the areas of the brain responsible for speaking. However, researchers began seeing some activation in Broca's area when the 6-month-old infants heard the syllables or harmonic chords. By the time the infants were one-year old, the speech stimuli activated Broca's area simultaneously with the auditory areas, indicating "cross-talk" between the area of the brain that hears language and the area that produces language, according to Kuhl.
"We think that early in development babies need to play with sounds, just as they play with their hands. And that helps them map relationships between sounds with the movements of their mouth and tongue," she said. "To master a skill, babies have to play and practice just as they later will in learning how to throw a baseball or ride a bike. Babies form brain connections by listening to themselves and linking what they hear to what they did to cause the sounds. Eventually they will use this skill to mimic speakers in their environments."
This playing with language starts, Kuhl said, when babies begin cooing around 12 weeks of age and begin babbling around seven months of age.
"They are cooing and babbling before they know how to link their mouth and tongue movements. This brain connection between perception and production requires experience," she said.
-------------------------------------
Experience, as the old saying goes, is the best teacher. And experience seems to play an important early role in how infants learn to understand and produce language.
Using new technology that measures the magnetic field generated by the activation of neurons in the brain, researchers tracked what appears to be a link between the listening and speaking areas of the brain in newborn, 6-month-old and one-year-old infants, before infants can speak.
The study, which appears in this month's issue of the journal NeuroReport, shows that Broca's area, located in the front of the left hemisphere of the brain, is gradually activated during an infant's initial year of life, according to Toshiaki Imada, lead author of the paper and a research professor at the University of Washington's Institute for Brain and Learning Sciences.
Broca's area has long been identified as the seat of speech production and, more recently, as that of social cognition and is critical to language and reading, according to Patricia Kuhl, co-author of the study and co-director of the UW's Institute for Brain and Learning Sciences.
"Magnetoencephalography is perfectly non-invasive and measures the magnetic field generated by neurons in the brain responding to sensory information that then 'leaks' through the skull," said Imada, one of the world's experts in the uses of magnetoencephalography to study the brain.
Kuhl said there is a long history of a link in the adult brain between the areas responsible for understanding and those responsible for speaking language. The link allows children to mimic the speech patterns they hear when they are very young. That's why people from Brooklyn speak "Brooklynese," she said.
"We think the connection between perception and production of speech gets formed by experience, and we are trying to determine when and how babies do it," said Kuhl, who also is a professor of speech and hearing sciences.
The study involved 43 infants in Finland -18 newborns, 17 6-month-olds and 8 one-year olds. Special hardware and software developed for this study allowed the infants' brain activity to be monitored even if they moved and captured brain activation with millisecond precision.
The babies were exposed to three kinds of sounds through earphones - pure tones that do not resemble speech like notes played on a piano, a three-tone harmonic chord that resembles speech and two Finnish syllables, "pa" and "ta." The researchers collected magnetic data only from the left hemisphere of the brain among the newborns because they cannot sit up and the magnetoencephalography cap was too big to securely fit their heads.
At all three ages the infants showed activation in the temporal part of the brain, Broca's area, that is responsible for listening and understanding speech, showing they were able to detect sound changes for all three stimuli. But the pure perception of sound did not activate the areas of the brain responsible for speaking. However, researchers began seeing some activation in Broca's area when the 6-month-old infants heard the syllables or harmonic chords. By the time the infants were one-year old, the speech stimuli activated Broca's area simultaneously with the auditory areas, indicating "cross-talk" between the area of the brain that hears language and the area that produces language, according to Kuhl.
"We think that early in development babies need to play with sounds, just as they play with their hands. And that helps them map relationships between sounds with the movements of their mouth and tongue," she said. "To master a skill, babies have to play and practice just as they later will in learning how to throw a baseball or ride a bike. Babies form brain connections by listening to themselves and linking what they hear to what they did to cause the sounds. Eventually they will use this skill to mimic speakers in their environments."
This playing with language starts, Kuhl said, when babies begin cooing around 12 weeks of age and begin babbling around seven months of age.
"They are cooing and babbling before they know how to link their mouth and tongue movements. This brain connection between perception and production requires experience," she said.
Friday, 13 January 2012
Social Cues Could Hone Language Development in Children.
New light has been shed on the way children learn to speak — contradicting what researchers previously believed — that could lead to advances in how speech-related disabilities are treated.
Children around the age of two may learn to speak by using social cues and having a parent or other caregiver repeat words back to them, according to a new study by University of Denmark researcher Dr. Ewan MacDonald, along with researchers at the Universities of Toronto and Queen's.
Previously, it was thought that children listened to their own voices to figure out if they were speaking correctly. MacDonald said the results were surprising, but the exact learning method hasn't yet been pinpointed for children younger than two years old.
The experiment was conducted by first getting adults to say a word — in this case "bed" — which was then simultaneously altered and played over headphones to the subject to sound like they were actually saying "bad."
Adults, when they participated, took the feedback from the headphones to adjust their speech and would try again to say bed, but pronounce it closer to "bid" to compensate for the researchers' playback.
The surprising results came when toddlers participated and didn't adjust the way they spoke the word.
MacDonald said this suggests the children aren't using the feedback from their own voice to learn how to speak.
He said the results point to one of two possible conclusions: that children only sometimes listen to their voices — listening when they are practicing their speech and looking for social cues when they are performing — or they rely on social cues from a caretaker to get feedback on how their speech is progressing.
The second option — social cues — is what excites MacDonald.
"They may be using the feedback from the person that they are talking to," MacDonald said. "They may be looking at the person and the social interaction of the person that they are talking to and using that to judge the accuracy of their productions."
MacDonald said that when talking to a parent, positive responses, such as smiling, or repeating words with corrections to pronunciation could be how two-year-old children learn to speak.
"By looking at how the person is responding, they can use that to judge whether they are producing (the word) correctly," he said.
The researcher — who recently moved to the University of Denmark from Queen's University in Kingston, Ont. — said the study findings are the first step to figuring out how people learn to speak.
He said this could lead to developing strategies to assist children with abnormal or delayed speech development.
MacDonald said it is too early in the research to give specific advice to parents with young kids, but the study's results do point a general way forward.
"I think the important message is to just communicate with the child," he said. "It's not just they must correct everything, it's more just everyday communication could actually be important."
Another upside to the results is the possibility that children learn how to speak in much the same way songbirds learn to sing. Studies have shown that some birds learn through similar social cues.
rhiltz@postmedia.com
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