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Increasing cultural and linguistic diversity among children and families brings new challenges for early intervention professionals. The purpose of this study was to identify the specific roles and needs of speech-language pathologists (SLPs) who practice in early intervention settings with culturally and linguistically diverse families of d/Deaf multilingual learners (DMLs). Thirteen SLPs completed an online survey about their practices and needs. Interviews were conducted with five parents of DMLs. Results showed that SLPs have lower self-satisfaction with families of DMLs compared to mainstream families. Parents were highly satisfied with the support they received. Both groups of participants reported a need for specific tools or adaptations, especially if there was no shared language. Thematic analysis identified three themes: communication and partnership, professional resources for responding to diversity, and diversity of parental profiles. This article provides an insight into the perspectives of both professionals and culturally and linguistically diverse parents, and identifies specific aspects of early intervention services with parents of DMLs: developing partnership in the context of cultural and/or linguistic differences, discussing topics related to multilingualism, and providing highly adaptable family-centered services.

Dans cette communication, nous décrirons une première étude visant à caractériser la perception et la production de consonnes occlusives voisées et non voisées auprès d’enfants présentant une surdité et porteurs d’implant(s) cochléaire(s), et d’enfants normo-entendants. Une tâche de perception catégorielle a ainsi montré des profils différents entre nos deux groupes d’enfants, les enfants implantés présentant des performances dans des tâches d’identification et de discrimination qui différaient de celles de leurs pairs entendants, pouvant suggérer une perception moins catégorielle. Au niveau productif, tandis que les deux groupes d’enfants présentaient des performances équivalentes en termes d’adéquation des productions voisées et non voisées, les analyses acoustiques réalisées sur les productions ont montré des valeurs de Voice Onset Time significativement plus courtes chez les enfants implantés.

We present here the first neuroimaging data for perception of Cued Speech (CS) by deaf adults who are native users of CS. CS is a visual mode of communicating a spoken language through a set of manual cues which accompany lipreading and disambiguate it. With CS, sublexical units of the oral language are conveyed clearly and completely through the visual modality without requiring hearing. The comparison of neural processing of CS in deaf individuals with processing of audiovisual (AV) speech in normally hearing individuals represents a unique opportunity to explore the similarities and differences in neural processing of an oral language delivered in a visuo-manual vs. an AV modality. The study included deaf adult participants who were early CS users and native hearing users of French who process speech audiovisually. Words were presented in an event-related fMRI design. Three conditions were presented to each group of participants. The deaf participants saw CS words (manual + lipread), words presented as manual cues alone, and words presented to be lipread without manual cues. The hearing group saw AV spoken words, audio-alone and lipread-alone. Three findings are highlighted. First, the middle and superior temporal gyrus (excluding Heschl's gyrus) and left inferior frontal gyrus pars triangularis constituted a common, amodal neural basis for AV and CS perception. Second, integration was inferred in posterior parts of superior temporal sulcus for audio and lipread information in AV speech, but in the occipito-temporal junction, including MT/V5, for the manual cues and lipreading in CS. Third, the perception of manual cues showed a much greater overlap with the regions activated by CS (manual + lipreading) than lipreading alone did. This supports the notion that manual cues play a larger role than lipreading for CS processing. The present study contributes to a better understanding of the role of manual cues as support of visual speech perception in the framework of the multimodal nature of human communication., SCOPUS: ar.j, info:eu-repo/semantics/published

It is known that deaf individuals usually outperform normal hearing subjects in speechreading; however, the underlying reasons remain unclear. In the present study, speechreading performance was assessed in normal hearing participants (NH), deaf participants who had been exposed to the Cued Speech (CS) system early and intensively, and deaf participants exposed to oral language without Cued Speech (NCS). Results show a gradation in performance with highest performance in CS, then in NCS, and finally NH participants. Moreover, error analysis suggests that speechreading processing is more accurate in the CS group than in the other groups. Given that early and intensive CS has been shown to promote development of accurate phonological processing, we propose that the higher speechreading results in Cued Speech users are linked to a better capacity in phonological decoding of visual articulators.

Two experiments investigated whether profoundly deaf children's rhyming ability was determined by the linguistic input that they were exposed to in their early childhood. Children educated with Cued Speech (CS) were compared to other deaf children, educated orally or with sign language. In CS, speechreading is combined with manual cues that disambiguate it. The central hypothesis is that CS allows deaf children to develop accurate phonological representations, which, in turn, assist in the emergence of accurate rhyming abilities. Experiment 1 showed that the deaf children educated early with CS performed better at rhyme judgement than did other deaf children. The performance of early CS-users was not influenced by word spelling. Experiment 2 confirmed this result in a rhyme generation task. Taken together, results support the hypothesis that rhyming ability depends on early exposure to a linguistic input specifying all phonological contrasts, independently of the modality (visual or auditory) in which this input is perceived., SCOPUS: ar.j, info:eu-repo/semantics/published

Deaf children exposed to Cued Speech (CS: system designed to reduce lip-reading ambiguity) either before age 2 (“early”) or later at school (“late”) were presented with words and pseudowords with or without CS. The first goal was to examine the effects of adding CS to lip-reading on phonological perception. Results showed that CS substantially improved performance suggesting that CS corrects for lip-reading ambiguities. CS effects were significantly larger in the “early” than the “late” group, particularly with pseudowords. The second goal was to establish the way in which lip-reading and CS combine to produce unitary percepts. To address this issue, two types of phonological misperception resulting from CS's structural characteristics were analysed; substitutions based on the similarity between CS units, and intrusions of a third syllable for bisyllabic pseudowords requiring three CS units. The results showed that the frequency of such misperceptions increased with CS. The integration of CS and lip-read ...

It is known that deaf individuals usually outperform normal hearing subjects in speechreading; however, the underlying reasons remain unclear. In the present study, speechreading performance was assessed in normal hearing participants (NH), deaf participants who had been exposed to the Cued Speech (CS) system early and intensively, and deaf participants exposed to oral language without Cued Speech (NCS). Results show a gradation in performance with highest performance in CS, then in NCS, and finally NH participants. Moreover, error analysis suggests that speechreading processing is more accurate in the CS group than in the other groups. Given that early and intensive CS has been shown to promote development of accurate phonological processing, we propose that the higher speechreading results in Cued Speech users are linked to a better capacity in phonological decoding of visual articulators.

La deficience auditive est un handicap invisible, mais lourd de consequences pour les enfants concernes. Leur developpement cognitif, linguistique, scolaire et social est toujours affecte a des degres divers. La perte auditive ne determine pas a elle seule l’importance des deficits qui peuvent s’installer : des facteurs tels que l’etiologie, l’âge du diagnostic, l’implication parentale, la qualite et la nature de l’environnement linguistique sont susceptibles d’influencer l’evolution de l’enfant vers la maitrise d’une premiere langue, que cette langue soit parlee ou signee. Car c’est bien l’acquisition d’une langue qui constitue un des enjeux fondamentaux de l’education d’un enfant sourd. Le present ouvrage est le premier a poser les jalons d’une evaluation multidisciplinaire, sur la base des pratiques educatives et des modeles de developpement de l’enfant entendant les plus actuels. A tous les educateurs et les professionnels soucieux d’adopter des pratiques a la fois rigoureuses, realistes et ajustees a l’enfant et a sa famille, l’ouvrage offre une mise a jour des connaissances recentes, un cadre theorique rigoureux, des concepts porteurs, des pistes d’evaluation concretes et une ouverture aux champs d’investigation du futur. Cet ouvrage collectif se veut enfin le reflet du dialogue entre les chercheurs et les cliniciens, qui est sans doute la meilleure facon de contribuer au developpement toujours plus harmonieux des enfants sourds et malentendants.

Deaf children rely mainly on lipreading to understand spoken language. The phonological representations they develop from the lipread signal are underspecified, leading to poor performances in all mental activities relying on such representations. To overcome these difficulties, systems have been designed that deliver entirely visually specified information about the phonological contrasts of spoken language. The paper explores the consequences of exposure to one of such systems, namely cued-speech (CS) on the development of phonological representations. Deaf children exposed early to CS at home show a reliance on inner speech for rhyming, remembering, and spelling similar to that displayed by hearing children but different from that of deaf children not exposed early to CS. We argue that the degree of specificity of phonological information delivered to the deaf children is more important than the modality though which they perceive speech for the development of phonological abilities.

The effects of some anticonvulsant drugs have been investigated on gamma-hydroxybutyrate release from rat hippocampal and striatal slices. Sodium valproate and ethosuximide inhibited the depolarization-evoked release of gamma-hydroxybutyrate induced by 40 mM K+. The IC50 values for these two drugs are in the concentration range of valproate and ethosuximide that exists in rat brain after administration of anticonvulsant doses to the animals. Trimethadione and pentobarbital are without significant effects. It can be concluded that the inhibition of gamma-hydroxybutyrate release, particularly that observed for hippocampus, might explain the protective effect of valproate and ethosuximide on gamma-hydroxybutyrate-induced seizures and perhaps on other kinds of epileptoid phenomenon.