Discrimination and identification of voicing and place contrasts in aphasic patients.

Examined the relationship between ability to discriminate and identify 3 synthetic speech continua representing vowel, voicing, and place contrasts and level of auditory language comprehension in 19 41–68 yr old male aphasics and 8 42–65 yr old non-brain-damaged controls. Aphasics were assigned to a good or a moderate comprehension group (GCG and MCG) on the basis of their auditory language comprehension scores. Both groups of aphasics performed the same as controls on the vowel contrasts. In comparison with controls, aphasics in the MCG had difficulty perceiving voicing and place contrasts, whereas aphasics in the GCG had difficulty perceiving place contrasts only. The MCG had more difficulty than the other 2 groups in discriminating stimuli at the inner boundary of each phoneme category. They were also most impaired in identifying the endpoints of the place and voicing continua. Place contrasts were more difficult to identify than voicing contrasts for both aphasic groups. In terms of the relationship between discrimination and identification, the majority of Ss either discriminated and identified the stimuli at equal levels of performance, or discriminated but did not identify the stimuli. Results indicate that auditory language comprehension predicts, to some extent, perception of voicing and place contrasts. (French abstract) (20 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Bilingual switching: The phonological level.

Investigated whether J. Macnamara's (1967) 2-switch model of bilingual functioning is applicable to the phonological level. 20 Canadian French-English bilingual high school seniors were tested for their perception and production of the phonological feature of voice onset time. Ss were tested twice, once in a French language set and once in an English language set. The perceptual functions obtained under the 2 language set conditions were virtually identical, whereas the production distributions were significantly different in the 2 conditions. Results suggest that the 2-switch model can be applied to the phonological level. (French summary) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Respirator performance ratings for speech intelligibility

The gene for Cyclin D1 (CCND1) lies within chromosomal region 11q13 and codes for a cell cycle regulator essential for G1 phase progression. This G1-cyclin is a putative protooncogene whose clonal rearrangement and/or amplification and mRNA overexpression occurs in several types of human neoplasias, including head and neck squamous cell carcinomas. Data from the literature suggest that amplification and overexpression of the CCND1 gene could lead to destabilisation of cell cycle control mechanisms and uncontrolled cell proliferation. We developed a differential PCR system for the determination of CCND1 gene amplification in head and neck squamous cell carcinomas. A 115 bp CCND1 fragment and a 150 bp gamma-interferon fragment are amplified simultaneously in the same reaction tube under optimized conditions. Statistical analysis of amplification data obtained by differential PCR revealed excellent correlation with amplification data obtained by conventional Southern hybridization.