Faculty of Humanities
School of Professional Social Sciences
Department of Communication Pathology
Selected Highlights from Research Findings
Two studies involving first language Zulu or Tswana speaking individuals who have suffered brain damage and present with a neuromotor speech disorder were undertaken. The aims were to determine (1) if the results confirm views of breakdown derived from English language studies and (2) if the sound systems of these languages cause language-specific signs. The results confirmed views of breakdown derived from English language studies. Language-independent speech signs were evident in the speech of the participants with either dysarthria of apraxia of speech. However, African Bantu language-specific, these signs are in accord with the underlying disorders in speech motor planning and execution. These results also indicate that the sound system of the language in use should be considered in clinical practice. These studies were performed in cooperation with four final year Speech-Language Pathology students: Meugnet Coetzee, Lilani de Jager, Wendy-Lee Uys and Louraine Mahwayi. An invited publication was prepared for an international book with the title "Motor Speech Disorders: A Cross-Language Perspective" edited by N. Miller and A Lowit.
Contact person: Prof A van der Merwe.
An article was published in the international ISI journal, Aphasiology on the Speech Motor Learning (SML) approach to treating apraxia of speech. Apraxia of speech is a speech motor planning disorder that may occur after damage to the cortical motor areas of the left hemisphere of the brain. This publication was the result of many years of research regarding the theoretical rationale of the approach and the effects of intervention with the SML programme. PARTICIPANT: In the reported study a 54 year old bilingual, university-trained male who had suffered an embolic cerebro-vascular stroke was treated with SML programme. During the first two months after the stroke he did not communicate verbally, but used gestures and writing. The study commenced 30 months post-onset and continued for a period of 18 months. METHOD: A multiple baseline single-subject design across behaviours and contexts was used to assess the effects of treatment. The first six stages of an eleven-stage treatment hierachy were consecutively treated. The last five remaine untreated. OUTCOMES & RESULTS: During treatment, production of untrained nonwords and words containing trained and untrained speech sounds improved. For three treated stages, the improvements was greater during the treatment phase than during baseline, for words, nonwords, or both. Improvement was maintained two years post-treatment. The number of speech errors decreased across the treatment period indicating an increase in speech intelligibility. CONCLUSIONS: Preliminary evidence is provided supporting a general improvement in speech motor planning and programming ability for this participant. The relative value of components of the SML approach, need to be verified in future. A summary of the SML methods can be found at www.apraxia-anitavandermerwe.co.za.
Contact person: Prof A van der Merwe.
An investigatin into the hearing of gold miners with and without TB to determine the effect of TB and its associated risk profile on hearing was conducted by Ms Janet Brits under the supervision of Prof De Wet Swanepoel. Primary occupational health threats in gold mining are noise-induced hearing loss (NIHL) and occupational lung diseases (ODL) including Tuberculosis (TB). Gold miners in South Africa were sampled due to the high incidence of Tuberculosis (TB). TB is associated opportunistic infections and ototoxic medications. The audiological and medical surveillance data of 2698 subjects (between the years 2001 and 2009) were analysed in a retrospective cohort design. This was the first study to demonstrate that gold minders with TB have significantly poorer hearing thresholds independent of noise exposure and a more pronounced declined in hearing over time. Gold miners with more than one incidence of TB demonstrate a significantly larger deterioration of hearing thresholds than those with a single incidence of TB. The exact cause is likely to be a complex interaction between TB, including its treatment and associated risk profile. Monitoring hearing status in miners with TB should be escalated to prevent hearing loss not primarily related to noise exposure but which may be aggravated by it.
Contact person: Prof DCD Swanepoel.
Two studies involving first language Zulu or Tswana speaking individuals who have suffered brain damage and present with a neuromotor speech disorder were undertaken. The aims were to determine (1) if the results confirm views of breakdown derived from English language studies and (2) if the sound systems of these languages cause language-specific signs. The results confirmed views of breakdown derived from English language studies. Language-independent speech signs were evident in the speech of the participants with either dysarthria of apraxia of speech. However, African Bantu language-specific signs such as omission or distortion of tone variation and click weakening/sistortion also occurred. Though language-specific, these signs are in accord with the underlying disorders in speech motor planning and execution. These results also indicate that the sound system of the language in use should be considered in clinical practice. These studies were performed in cooperation with four final year Speech-Language Pathology students: Meugnet Coetzee, Lilani de Jager, Wendy-Lee Uys and Louraine Mahwayi. An invited publication was prepared for an international book with the title "Motor Speech Disorders: A Cross-Language Perspective" edited by N. Miller and A. Lowit.
Contact person: Mev M le Roux.
A postgraduate master's degree research project, by Ms Mirisa Meyer under the supervision of Prof De Wet Swanepoel, was conducted to determine the national status of newborn hearing screening services in the private health care sector of South African and the nature of the services. Ms Meyer received the 2011 award for her research contribution from the South African Association of Audiologists. In this research project all private health sector institutions with obstertric units were surveyed telephonically and self-administered questionnaires where subsequently sent to all private practice audiologists who provide newborn hearing screening services at the units with hearing screening. The results demonstrated that 53% of private sector obstetric units offer some form of newborn hearing screening. Universal hearing screening was only offered by 14% of units whilst the most common approaches were universal screening on some days of the week (18%) and screening on request (18%). Most prominent challenges to successful screening implementation was the apparent omission of newborn hearing screening from maternity birthing packages at the health care institutions. It was clear from the findings that the vast majority of newborns nationally are not screened for hearing loss and existing programmes are not sufficiently systematic and integrated to ensure adequate coverage. Hospital management and paediatric health services are recommended to prioritise hearing screening as part of standard of care birthing services
Contact person: Prof DCD Swanepoel.
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