View clinical trials related to Language Disorders.
Filter by:Multiple sclerosis (MS) is an autoimmune disease of the central nervous systems that results in focal inflammatory lesions and then diffuse and degenerative inflammatory phenomena. It is considered to be the leading cause of non-traumatic disability in young adults. Cognitive impairment is a common and disabling part of MS. Studies carried out in the years 1990-2000 estimated their frequency to be between 40 and 60% of MS patients: they reflect the natural history of the disease. Effective treatments for the inflammatory component of the disease that are now available may have led to a reduction in their frequency. Cognitive disorders were identified at an early stage of the disease and affect certain areas preferentially: - The most common achievement is the reduction in the speed of information processing. It is present from the early stage of the disease. Progressive deterioration over time is observed, which is a prognostic factor for long-term cognitive decline. Long-term memory was impaired in 40-65% of patients in historical cohorts. More specifically, encoding and retrieval were affected, with storage and consolidation being preserved. - The attainment of executive functions is also common. - Phonemic and semantic fluency are also disturbed in MS patients. Among cognitive impairments, language impairment has been little studied in MS: in 2016 only 22 controlled studies were identified. The assessments carried out were most often partial, making it impossible to define the characteristics or to conclude that specific linguistic impairments are independent of other cognitive impairments. Finally, recent studies suggest that the frequency of language impairment in MS may be underestimated. Therefore, it seems important to assess the prevalence of language disorders in a large cohort of patients with RRMS or MS, and to characterize these disorders by identifying the linguistic processes involved and the brain substrates involved. This will make it possible to envisage the implementation of more systematic screening for language disorders in MS and to improve patient management, in particular by developing targeted rehabilitation protocols.
The use of non-invasive brain stimulation techniques like transcranial direct-current stimulation (tDCS) for rehabilitation of language is a growing field that needs further studies to determine how best it can be used to enhance treatment outcomes. It has been shown that tDCS can improve language performance in healthy and brain-injured individuals such as increased naming accuracy. However, at present, it is not known what effect tDCS has on higher-level language skills like discourse production (i.e. story telling, giving instructions) in healthy, older speakers. Therefore, the aim of this study is to investigate in healthy older adults, the effect of tDCS on discourse production as well as the ideal tDCS electrode placement for improving language at the discourse level. It is hypothesised that tDCS will result in greater language changes and improvements during discourse production compared to no stimulation.
Modified constraint-induced movement therapy (mCIMT) has been successfully used with children who have hemiplegia (weakness or paralysis on one side of the body.) mCIMT uses a removable cast during treatment and home exercise programs. It has been found that mCIMT can improve use, strength and coordination of a child's affected hand, and may also help improve speech and language skills. The goal of this project is to investigate whether combining mCIMT with speech therapy will enhance speech outcomes in children with cerebral palsy.
Aphasia is a language impairment caused by brain injury such as stroke that affects the ability to understand and express language, read and write due to damage in the language regions of the brain. Non-invasive brain stimulation (NIBS) techniques like transcranial direct-current stimulation (tDCS) have been found to improve aphasia treatment effects in post stroke patient populations such as improved naming abilities. However, the effect of tDCS on more functional, higher level language skills such as discourse production (i.e. story telling, giving instructions) has yet to be understood.Therefore the aim of this study is to determine the potential effectiveness of tDCS as an adjunct to speech and language therapy (SLT) to improve discourse speech production in people with post-stroke aphasia. It is hypothesised that SLT combined with tDCS will result in greater improvements in discourse language production compared to SLT on its own.
The objective of this study was to find if there is a possible association and the impact of epilepsy and epileptiform activity in children with SLI.
Up to 40% of stroke survivors suffer from aphasia, making recovery of language abilities a top priority in stroke rehabilitation. Conventional speech and language therapy may have limited effectiveness. Leveraging multimodal data (behavioral, neuroimaging, and genetics), this study aims to 1) evaluate the efficacy of combining tDCS with speech therapy, 2) examine neural changes associated with recovery, 3) identify factors influencing response to treatment.
The focus of this investigation is to compare the effectiveness of the AAC Generative Language Intervention approach to an AAC Standard of Care condition on preschool sentence productions. All children will use existing AAC iPad applications.
The ability to encode the speech signal is determined by ascending and descending auditory processing. Difficulties in processing these speech signals are well described at the behavioral level in a specific language disorder. However, little is known about the underlying pathophysiological mechanisms. The assumption is that we should observe a degradation of the signal provided by the ear in the deaf subject while in case of specific language impairment it would be a phonemic disorder (possibly linked to a processing disorder auditory). The two population groups should therefore have different abnormalities of their central auditory process - which could be modified by the target remediation for each group.
Children with Down syndrome (DS) have greater difficulty acquiring expressive language than is predicted by their general cognitive abilities and language comprehension (Miller, 1999). To date, interventions to improve communication outcomes for children with DS have met with only modest success. The proposed study is a randomized controlled trial of an early communication intervention combining two evidence-based treatments that teach expressive communication (Enhanced Milieu Teaching; EMT) and joint attention/symbolic play (Joint Attention Symbolic Play Engagement and Regulation; JASPER) using a dual mode (words +AAC). The intervention (a) teaches the foundations of communication (joint attention, play), (b) builds on positive child characteristics of social attention, (c) uses naturalistic strategies to increase the rate and complexity of communication and increase task engagement, (d) addresses the potential value of adding visual support (AAC) to spoken communication, and (e) includes parents as implementers of the intervention to promote generalization across settings and activities, and to ensure maintenance over time. It is hypothesized that children with DS enrolled in the intervention will have better language and communication skills at the end of treatment and followup than children in the BAU comparison group.The study will enroll 82 30 to 54 month old children with DS who have fewer than 20 words. Examining predictors of response to treatment and the effects of treatment on executive functioning will inform both theory and practice.
The investigators will assess the efficacy of Pivotal Response Treatment (PRT) in the treatment of communication deficits in children with intellectual disabilities. By collecting information about parent and child functioning before and after PRT, The investigators will be able to determine whether the intervention is effective in improving child communication and reducing parent stress.