Screening For Language Disorders in Primary Care Settings

The acquisition of language ability is one of the most important milestones in early child development.The ability to communicate with others extends beyond the use of spoken words and includes tone of voice,facial expression,

Factors influencing parent satisfaction with preventive health services for the early detection of speech and language delay in preschool children

The aim of this study was to identify parent and child characteristics which could influence parent satisfaction with preventive health services designed to detect preschool children with speech and language (SL) delay. This study was conducted on 101 children aged 18 to 36 months who participated in an organized SL delay early detection program. Validated instruments were used to assess children’s and parents’ characteristics. Satisfaction was evaluated using the client satisfaction questionnaire for the three activities of the program: 1) a public information session about SL development, 2) parent training sessions for parents concerned by their child SL development, and 3) a child’s SL assessment. Multiple logistic regressions were used to identify all independent factors (p < 0.05) associated with satisfaction and to estimate the odds ratios (OR) for satisfaction. Economically disadvantaged parents were less prone to participate in the first two activities of the early detection program. Older parents were more satisfied with the public information session (OR = 1.33 for 1 year increment;p = 0.001). Distressed parents were less satisfied with both the parent training sessions (OR = 0.28;p = 0.009) and the SL assessment (OR = 0.43;p = 0.046). Parents whose child had health problems at birth were less satisfied with the public information session (OR = 0.14, p = 0.03) and the SL assessment (OR = 0.33, p = 0.036). There is a need to better adapt the delivery of preventive services for the early detection of SL delay, especially for disadvantaged and distressed parents and for those whose child had suffered from health problems at birth.

Relationship between linguistic functions and cognitive functions in a clinical study of Chinese patients with post-stroke aphasia

Background There has been a long debate among scholars surrounding the relationship between language and cognition. The worldwide study of aphasia is actively exploring the function of language from cognitive point of view. This study aimed to investigate the relationship between linguistic functions and cognitive functions in a clinical study of Chinese patients with post-stroke aphasia. Methods Cognitive functions of 63 Chinese patients with aphasia following a stroke were assessed with the Chinese version of the second edition of Loewenstein Occupational Therapy Cognitive Assessment （LOTCA） battery and their linguistic functions were tested with the Western Aphasia Battery （WAB） Scale, respectively. The correlation between the results observed on the LOTCA battery and those on the WAB was analyzed. Aphasia quotient, performance quotient, cortical quotient, and linguistic function of the patients were compared. Then, each language function was analyzed by way of dependent adopt multiple regression analysis. Results The total score of 63 patients as shown on the LOTCA battery was significantly correlated with the aphasia quotient, performance quotient, and cortical quotient observed on the WAB Scale （P 〈0.05, P 〈0.01）. However, the correlation between visuomotor organization under LOTCA and repeat under WAB was not significant （P 〉0.05）. The attention of LOTCA and WAB＇s spontaneous speech, repeat, naming, and aphasia quotient was not relevant either （P 〉0.05）. In addition, correlations between the results observed on the LOTCA battery and the WAB were significant （P 〈0.05, P 〈0.01）. Among the significant variables finally entered into the standardized canonical discriminant functions, main factors affected the aphasia. Multiple regression analysis showed that orientation, spatial perception, and visual perception had a notable influence on aphasia quotient and naming. Orientation and thinking operation was found to have a notable influence on spontaneous speech. Spatial perception and visual perception was found to have a notable influence on auditory comprehension. Thinking operation and orientation was found to have an obvious influence on reading. Thinking operation, spatial perception, and attention was found to have a notable effect on writing （P 〈0.01）. Conclusion There exists a close relationship between linguistic functions and cognitive orientation, spatial perception, visual perception, and thinking operation in a clinical study of Chinese patients with post-stroke aphasia.

A Multiple Feature Approach for Disorder Normalization in Clinical Notes

In this paper we propose a multiple feature approach for the normalization task which can map each disorder mention in the text to a unique unified medical language system（UMLS）concept unique identifier（CUI）. We develop a two-step method to acquire a list of candidate CUIs and their associated preferred names using UMLS API and to choose the closest CUI by calculating the similarity between the input disorder mention and each candidate. The similarity calculation step is formulated as a classification problem and multiple features（string features,ranking features,similarity features,and contextual features） are used to normalize the disorder mentions. The results show that the multiple feature approach improves the accuracy of the normalization task from 32.99% to 67.08% compared with the Meta Map baseline.