Automatic speech recognition (ASR) and its use as a tool for assessment or therapy of voice, speech, and language disorders.

In general opinion computerized automatic speech recognition (ASR) seems to be regarded as a method only to accomplish transcriptions from spoken language to written text and as such quite insecure and rather cumbersome. However, due to great advances in computer technology and informatics methodology ASR has nowadays become quite dependable and easier to handle, and the number of applications has increased considerably. After some introductory background information on ASR a number of applications of great interest for professionals in voice, speech, and language therapy are pointed out. In the foreseeable future, the keyboard and mouse will by means of ASR technology be replaced in many functions by a microphone as the human-computer interface, and the computer will talk back via its loud-speaker. It seems important that professionals engaged in the care of oral communication disorders take part in this development so their clients may get the optimal benefit from this new technology.

A cross-linguistic data bank for oral picture naming in Dutch, English, German, French, Italian, Russian, Spanish, and Swedish (PEDOI).

The well established effect of word frequency on adult's picture naming performance is now called into question. This is particularly true for variables which are correlated with frequency, as is the case of age of word acquisition. Since the work of [Carrol and White, 1973] there is growing agreement among researchers to confer an important role in lexical access to this variable. Indeed, it has been shown ( [Hodgson and Ellis, 1998]) that for normal English-speaking adults only the variables 'age-of-acquisition' and 'name agreement' are independent predictors of naming success among the various variables considered. However, when brain-damaged subjects with and without degenerative pathologies are studied, word frequency and word length as well as concept familiarity all give significant effects ( [Hirsh and Funnell, 1995]; [Lambon Ralph et al., 1998]; [Nickels and Howard, 1995]). Finally, it has been suggested that the production of specific error types may be related to such variables. According to [Nickels and Howard, 1994] the production of semantic errors is specifically affected by 'imageability' and in the recent study by [Kremin et al., 2001] 'age of acquisition' predicts (frank) word finding difficulties.