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Phonological processing is usually associated with the activation of cortical areas, especially in the left cerebral hemisphere. This study examined if phonologically elicited evoked potentials can be recorded directly from the subthalamic nucleus in patients with Parkinson’s Disease (PD). Seven PD patients who had undergone implantation of deep brain electrodes for the stimulation of the subthalamic nucleus were included. Local field potentials were recorded in a pre-attentive auditory phonological task, an attentive auditory phonological discrimination task, and a word recognition task. Auditory evoked potentials related to phonological, but not lexical processing, could be demonstrated in the subthalamic nucleus for all three tasks. Only minor changes were found after levodopa administration. This study demonstrates that the subthalamic nucleus is involved in early phonological perception, which puts the subthalamic nucleus in a position to modify phonological perception in a larger cortico-subcortical network.

The case is reported of a bilingual (Dutch English) speaking woman who started to stutter after a whiplash trauma. Although the pattern of dysfluency was quite similar in both languages (more dysfluencies in propositional speech than in non-propositional speech; function words and monosyllabic words more affected than content words and polysyllabic words, respectively), stuttering severity differed significantly. The patient had more dysfluencies in her native language. Contrary to what is commonly seen in bilinguals with developmental stuttering, language proficiency was apparently not a determining factor for stuttering severity.

Inleiding: Logopedisten moeten in staat zijn verschillende spraak- en taalstoornissen te herkennen. Dikwijls zien we dat studenten deze vaardigheid pas echt kunnen leren en oefenen in rechtstreeks contact met patienten gedurende hun stage.

The purpose of this study was to document the articulation patterns in children with velo-cardio-facial syndrome. The subjects were 2 children with this syndrome, aged 6 years 6 months and 3 years 11 months. Phonetically transcribed speech samples collected by means of a picture naming test formed the basis for this study. The speech samples were subjected to two types of analyses: independent analyses describing the children’s sound productions regardless of their relation to the adult targets and relational analyses comparing the children’s productions with the adult standard form. It was found that the articulatory problems in velo-cardio-facial syndrome are not simply due to a delay in speech sound acquisition. Articulation errors found in this syndrome are uncharacteristic of normal speech development. Whether errors are syndrome-specific awaits further investigation.