Affirming Practices With LGBTQIA+ Patients Seeking Speech and Hearing Care.

Due to heightened risks of healthcare discrimination as well as ongoing worldwide attacks on their rights and liberties, LGBTQIA+ people need safe and affirming environments to access their medical care. Studies have found that 8% of all LGBTQ individuals and 22% of transgender individuals avoid seeking health care when they need it due to fears of discrimination. Audiologists and speech pathologists must take a hard look at their practices to ensure that both LGBTQIA+ patients and staff are welcome, safe, and affirmed. This article proposes both short- and long-term interventions to patient interactions, office environments, and patient paperwork that can be easily implemented in most practices to ensure that LGBTQIA+ individuals are safe and comfortable to seek the care they need.

Lexical processing of nouns and verbs at 36 months of age predicts concurrent and later vocabulary and school readiness.

Children's lexical processing speed at 18 to 25 months of age has been linked to concurrent and later language abilities. In the current study, we extend this finding to children aged 36 months. Children (N = 126) participated in a lexical processing task in which they viewed two static images on noun trials (e.g., an ear of corn and a hat), or two dynamic video clips on verb trials (e.g., a woman stretching and the same woman clapping), and heard an auditory prompt labeling one of them (e.g., "Where is she stretching?"). They also participated in standard assessments of language and school readiness. The results indicated that lexical processing speed (i.e., how long they required to look to the labeled image or scene) was associated with measures of concurrent receptive vocabulary, as well as receptive vocabulary and school readiness two years later, although the associations are weaker than for younger children.