The Norwegian Hearing in Noise Test for Children.

OBJECTIVES: The aims of this study were to create 12 ten-sentence lists for the Norwegian Hearing in Noise Test for children, and to use these lists to collect speech reception thresholds (SRTs) in quiet and in noise to assess speech perception in normal hearing children 5 to 13 years of age, to establish developmental trends, and to compare the results with those of adults. Data were collected in an anechoic chamber and in an audiometric test room, and the effect of slight room reverberation was estimated. DESIGN: The Norwegian Hearing in Noise Test for children was formed from a subset of the adult sentences. Selected sentences were repeatable by 5- and 6-year-old children in quiet listening conditions. Twelve sentence lists were created based on the sentences' phoneme distributions. Six-year-olds were tested with these lists to determine list equivalence. Slopes of performance intensity (PI) functions relating mean word scores and signal to noise ratios (SNRs) were estimated for a group of 7-year-olds and adults. HINT normative data were collected for 219 adults and children 5 to 13 years of age in anechoic and audiometric test rooms, using noise levels 55, 60, or 65 dBA. Target sentences always originated from the front; whereas, the noise was presented either from the front, noise front (NF), from the right, noise right (NR) or from the left, noise left (NL). The NR and NL scores were averaged to yield a noise side (NS) score. All 219 subjects were tested in the NF condition, and 95 in the NR and NL conditions. Retest of the NF at the end of the test session was done for 53 subjects. Longitudinal data were collected by testing 9 children as 6, 8, and 13 years old. RESULTS: NF and NS group means for adults were -3.7 and -11.8 dB SNR, respectively. Group means for 13-year-olds were -3.3 and -9.7, and for the 6-year-olds group means were -0.3 and -5.7 dB SNR, as measured in an anechoic chamber. NF SRTs measured in an audiometric test room were 0.7 to 1.5 higher (poorer) than in the anechoic chamber. Developmental trends were comparable in both rooms. PI slopes were 8.0% dB SNR for the 7-year-olds and 10.1% for the adults. NF SRTs in the anechoic chamber improved by 0.7 dB per year over an age range of 5 to 10 years. Using a PI slope 8 to 10% per dB, the estimated increase in percent intelligibility was 4 to 7% per year. Adult SRTs were about 3 dB lower than those for 6-year-olds, corresponding to 25 to 30% better intelligibility for adults. CONCLUSIONS: Developmental trends in HINT performance for Norwegian children with normal hearing are similar to those seen in other languages, including American English and Canadian French. SRTs approach adult normative values by the age of 13; however, the benefits of spatial separation of the speech and noise sources are less than those seen for adults.

Dietary intake and nutritional status in a Scandinavian adult cystic fibrosis-population compared with recommendations.

BACKGROUND: Malnutrition is a well-known complication in cystic fibrosis (CF). There is good evidence that maintaining a normal body-weight correlates well with improved survival in CF. Energy intake in excess of 120% of the estimated average requirement (EAR) has been advised since 1980s. OBJECTIVES: To investigate the nutritional intake and status in the adult Scandinavian CF-population. SUBJECTS/METHODS: A cross-sectional multi-centre study was used to investigate the nutritional status of 456 adult CF-patients (2003 2006). Height and weight were measured and body mass index (BMI) and z-scores were calculated. Pulmonary function was examined by dynamic spirometry. A 7-day pre-coded food record (FR) obtained energy and nutrient intake data in 180 patients. RESULTS: The mean energy intake was 114 (SD 30.0)% of EAR and thus significantly lower than the target of 120% EAR (p< 0.001) for patients with pancreatic insufficiency (PI) (n=136). Mean BMI was 22.0 (SD 2.9), the prevalence of BMI <18 was 13% and the prevalence of BMI ≥25 was 15% (n=136). Mean BMI was 20.8 (SD 2.4) in PI-patients with FEV(1) <70% and 23.2% (SD 3.0), in PI-patients with FEV(1) ≥70%, mean difference 2.4, (95% CI: 1.5, 3.3) (p<0.001), but there was no difference in energy intake. BMI ≥18.5 and a reported energy intake <120% were revealed in 54% of the PI-patients. CONCLUSIONS: The energy intake did not reach the recommended 120% EAR, but the prevalence of underweight was lower than reported in other studies. The recommendation may exceed the requirement for a number of CF-patients. The nutritional status must still be closely monitored and nutritional advice and intervention should be individualised and adjusted to actual needs.

Assessing prosodic skills in five European languages: cross-linguistic differences in typical and atypical populations.

Following demand for a prosody assessment procedure, the test Profiling Elements of Prosody in Speech-Communication (PEPS-C), has been translated from English into Spanish, French, Flemish and Norwegian. This provides scope to examine receptive and expressive prosodic ability in Romance (Spanish and French) as well as Germanic (English and Flemish) languages, and includes the possibility of assessing these skills with regard to lexical tone (Norwegian). Cross-linguistic similarities and differences relevant to the translation are considered. Preliminary findings concerning 8-year-old neurotypical children speaking the five languages are reported. The appropriateness of investigating contrastive stress in Romance as well as Germanic languages is considered: results are reported for assessing this skill in Spanish and English speakers and suggest that in Spanish it is acquired much later than in English. We also examine the feasibility of assessing and comparing prosodic disorder in the five languages, using assessments of prosody in Spanish and English speakers with Williams syndrome as an example. We conclude that, with caveats, the original design of the UK test may indicate comparable stages of prosodic development in neurotypical children and is appropriate for the evaluation of prosodic skills for adults and children, both neurotypical and with impairment, in all five languages.

Semi-spontaneous oral text production: measurements in clinical practice.

Functionally relevant assessment of the language production of speakers with aphasia should include assessment of connected speech production. Despite the ecological validity of everyday conversations, more controlled and monological types of texts may be easier to obtain and analyse in clinical practice. This article discusses some simple measurements for the analysis of semi-spontaneous oral text production by speakers with aphasia. Specifically, the measurements are related to the production of verbs and nouns, and the realization of different sentence types. The proposed measurements should be clinically relevant, easily applicable, and linguistically meaningful. The measurements have been applied to oral descriptions of the 'Cookie Theft' picture by eight monolingual Norwegian speakers, four with an anomic type of aphasia and four without any type of language impairment. Despite individual differences in both the clinical and the non-clinical group, most of the measurements seem to distinguish between speakers with and without aphasia.

Brain dynamics of word familiarization in 20-month-olds: effects of productive vocabulary size.

The present study investigated the brain mechanisms involved during young children's receptive familiarization with new words, and whether the dynamics of these mechanisms are related to the child's productive vocabulary size. To this end, we recorded event-related potentials (ERPs) from 20-month-old children in a pseudoword repetition task. Results revealed distinct patterns of repetition effects for children with large and small productive vocabularies. High producers showed evidence of recognizing the novel words already after three presentations, while the low producers needed five presentations to display a recognition effect. The familiarization process was manifested in the modulations of two components, the N200-400 and a later fronto-central component, which appeared to increase in amplitude until a certain level of encoding was reached and then decrease with further repetition. These findings suggest a relation between the onset of the productive vocabulary spurt and the rate of receptive word familiarization.

Productive vocabulary size predicts event-related potential correlates of fast mapping in 20-month-olds.

Although it is well documented that children undergo a productive vocabulary spurt late in the second year, it is unclear whether this development is accompanied by equally significant advances in receptive word processing. In the present study, we tested an electrophysiological procedure for assessing receptive word learning in young children, and the impact of productive vocabulary size for performance in this task. We found that 20-month-olds with high productive vocabularies displayed an N400 incongruity effect to violations of trained associations between novel words and pictures, whereas 20-month-olds with low productive vocabularies did not. However, both high and low producers showed an N400 effect for common real words paired with an incongruous object. These findings indicate that there may be substantial differences in receptive fast mapping efficiency between typically developing children who have reached a productive vocabulary spurt and typically developing children who have not yet reached this productive spurt.

Verb and sentence processing in Norwegian aphasic speakers compared to Dutch and English aphasic speakers: experimental evidence.

The article reports on a comparative study of the abilities of aphasic speakers and normal control subjects to comprehend and produce verbs and sentences. The analysis is based on test results obtained as part of the standardization procedure for a test battery originally developed for Dutch and since translated and adapted for English and Norwegian. With a few exceptions, there is extensive similarity in the test results between the different languages. The exceptions can be accounted for with reference both to structural differences between the languages and to coincidental aspects of informant selection and scoring procedures. The Norwegian version contains an additional sub-test on past tense inflection, which correlates significantly with at least two other sub-tests in the test battery.

Brain responses to lexical-semantic priming in children at-risk for dyslexia.

Deviances in early event-related potential (ERP) components reflecting auditory and phonological processing are well-documented in children at familial risk for dyslexia. However, little is known about brain responses which index processing in other linguistic domains such as lexicon, semantics and syntax in this group. The present study investigated effects of lexical-semantic priming in 20- and 24-month-olds at-risk for dyslexia and typically developing controls in two ERP experiments. In both experiments an early component assumed to reflect facilitated lexical processing for primed words was enhanced in the at-risk group compared to the control group. Moreover, an N400-like response which was prominent in the control group was attenuated or absent in at-risk children. Results suggest that deficiencies in young children at-risk for dyslexia are not restricted to perceptual and lower-level phonological abilities, but also affect higher order linguistic skills such as lexical and semantic processing.

On the distinction between Norwegian [symbols: see text] from a phonetic perspective.

The present study uses electropalatography (EPG) and electromagnetic articulography (EMA) in the description of the articulation of the two East Norwegian fricatives [symbols: see text] in the speech of seven normal adult speakers. The motivation for studying these two phonemes is twofold: there is a merger between the places of articulation of these two fricatives in the speech of the young. A description of the articulation in the speech of mature speakers who have the distinction, may throw light on the mechanisms behind the merger. Furthermore, identifying possible articulatory variation between normal speakers is important in order to establish an articulatory base line for clinical work. Our investigation has shown considerable overlap between the phonetic realizations of the two phonemes, as well as substantial variation between speakers in their articulation. There is, however, a clear acoustic distinction between the two phonemes for all speakers, and the acoustic patterns between speakers are similar.