Language profile of children with specific language impairment

Research on specific language impairment [SLI] in Arabic-speaking children is currently nonexistent. Distinct linguistic characteristics of Arabic make it valuable as a means of studying manifestations of SLI and providing insights into the nature of SLI. The study aimed to provide a linguistic profile of Arabic speaking children with SLI to help meticulous diagnosis and choice of proper lines of intervention strategies. This study included 135 children of both sexes with age range [4-9] years. They were diagnosed as SLI by using the Arabic language test. Descriptive statistics done for all study group then subjects were classified: 1- According to the age into 5 subgroups to detect and analyze the age-related effects on their linguistic performance. II - According to the clinical and linguistic profiles into mixed receptive-expressive type [R-E], expressive type [EX] and phonological type [Ph]. It was found that 33.3% SLI children were mixed receptive-expressive [GI] subtype, 17.8% were expressive [G2] subtype and 48.9% ere phonological [G3] subtype. The most affected language parameters were the phonology, Syntax both receptive and expressive with a more affection of the expressive part, then the pragmatic. Semantics was the least affected. Prosody was normal. The most frequent syntactic errors were verb tense, preposition, negation, superlatives, pronouns, adverbs and plurals. As regard phonology substitution errors were the most frequent type to occur with the phonemes /g/,/d/,/r/,z/,/d/ and /s/ to be the most frequent. The devoicing, gliding are the commonest substitution errors and the final position of the words are the commonest to be affected

Medialization thyroplasty using medpor [R] implant material under superficial cervical plexus blocks

Medialization thyroplasty has rapidly gained popularity as the treatment of choice for unilateral vocal fold immobility over other methods applied for treatment of glottic insufficiency. The reasons for this are the physiologic aspect of medialization thyroplasty and ability of monitoring during surgery. In this study medialization thyroplasty type I was performed according to Isshiki Technique using Medpor as an implant material in 12 patients with unilateral vocal fold paralysis under bilateral superficial cervical plexus blocks with minimal sedation. Pre-and post-operative phoniatric assessment included auditory perceptual assessment, acoustic analysis of voice and videolaryngostroboscopy. All the patients showed improvement in the assessment parameters with no detected complications

Correction of velopharyngeal incompetence by the use of the spuperiorly based lined pharyngeal flap with lateral ports

In this study the superiorly based lined pharyngeal flap with lateral ports was used to correct modaerate to severe velopharyngeal incompetence [VPI] due to sevseral causes after failure of speech therapy in 20 patients. All the patients were diagnosed and documented preoperatively using the assessment protocol for VPI cases in the Phoniatric Unit. They were referred again one month after surgery in the ENT department for postoperative documentation and speech therapy. All the patients showed marked subjective and objective improvement of the degree of hypernasality and complete closure of the velopharyngeal gap endoscopically. The overall speech intelligibility showed continuous improvement with postoperative speech therapy. Although all the patients snored postoperatively, none of them suffered from obstructive sleep apnea