Factors Affecting the Writing Performance in Hearing and Deaf Children: An Insight into Regularities and Irregularities of the Arabic Orthographic System.

This study aims to account for the underlying causes of spelling errors in hearing and deaf children who speak a dialectal form of Arabic that substantially differs from the standard written one. It presents a general overview of the spoken Arabic language and its written system, drawing attention to some of the phonological and orthographic regularities and irregularities used in constructing and decoding Arabic words and sentences. It also accounts for the diglossic factors that interfere with the process of phoneme-to-grapheme mapping. The spelling outcomes of a group of hearing children are compared with another group of orally educated deaf children, who in addition to the complexity and diglossity of Arabic, have limited hearing abilities. Both groups performed two written tasks, one representing the standard form and the other representing the dialect. These tasks identified the types of spelling and segmentation errors and the effects of the committed errors on children's awareness of the concept of word and word boundaries. Analysis of the results reveals their spelling errors' nature and frequencies, and progressively categorizes the most prominent errors in practicing each language form. The deaf group (n = 30) produced significantly more errors than the hearing group (n = 36) in the dysphonetic errors and the word omission categories. The findings indicate that the sociolinguistic context of the Arabic language and the orthographic nature of the Arabic script are both important factors affecting hearing and deaf children's awareness of the concept of word as well as their spelling performance. These results may enable educators to understand the underlying factors of Arabic spelling and produce targeted error correction strategies to maximize children's learning outcomes.

Disparities in health literacy during the COVID-19 pandemic between the hearing and deaf communities.

BACKGROUND: Barriers to communication for those with hearing loss are not only associated with social, emotional, educational and occupational difficulties, but also with reduced access to essential healthcare services, health information, and poorer health outcomes (Emond et al., 2015). These concerns are amplified with mandates such as physical distancing and the use of masks, which although needed to prevent respiratory transmission of SARS-Cov-2, obscure access to facial features needed for lipreading and sign language. OBJECTIVES: To compare the disparities of health knowledge and practice surrounding COVID-19, if any, among hearing and Deaf or Hard of Hearing (DHH) individuals. METHODS: A total of 110 (70 hearing and 40 DHH) participants were recruited in the unique linguistic context of Kuwait and Saudi Arabia utilising a cross-sectional electronic survey. Participants were differentiated according to status of hearing loss, communication mode, as well as country, age, sex, occupation, education level and satisfaction with available information. Various aspects of knowledge relating to COVID-19 and associated public health measures were tested by means of a questionnaire. RESULTS: A multivariate regression analysis showed that both the degree of hearing loss, and use of sign language as the primary means of communication were associated with lower scores. In addition, disparities exist in the use of health information sources, where DHH participants relied mostly on social media compared to the hearing group who relied predominantly on official government sources. CONCLUSIONS: In light of the pandemic, bridging the gap in health literacy for DHH individuals is essential in both policy and practice, in order to ensure equal access to healthcare and universal compliance with health directives at the population level.

Diglossia in the Etiology of Schizophrenia: A Hypothesis.

A hypothesis offering diglossia as a potential risk factor for schizophrenia is presented. This is supported primarily by an account of the numerous co-occurrences between the diglossic phenomenon and the established risk factors and features of schizophrenia, such as language impairment, working memory dysfunction, social adversity, urbanicity, migration, and ethnicity, as well as some of the broader educational elements including illiteracy, reading deficits, and poor academic attainment. With an emphasis on the inherent role of language in schizophrenia and the demand for elucidating a mechanism behind its risk factors, we propose that a diglossic environment in childhood may constitute a neurodevelopmental insult predisposing to the development of the disorder. This relationship may be mediated by the reduced lateralization of language in the brain, which has been observed in relation to schizophrenia.

NMDAR hypofunction and somatostatin-expressing GABAergic interneurons and receptors: A newly identified correlation and its effects in schizophrenia.

This review investigates the association between N-methyl-d-Aspartate receptor (NMDAR) hypofunction and somatostatin-expressing GABAergic interneurons (SST +) and how it contributes to the cognitive deficits observed in schizophrenia (SZ). This is based on evidence that NMDAR antagonists caused symptoms resembling SZ in healthy individuals. NMDAR hypofunction in GABAergic interneurons results in the modulation of the cortical network oscillation, particularly in the gamma range (30-80 Hz). These gamma-band oscillation (GBO) abnormalities were found to lead to the cognitive deficits observed in the disorder. Postmortem mRNA studies have shown that SST decreased more significantly than any other biomarker in schizophrenic subjects. The functional role of Somatostatin (SST) in the aetiology of SZ can be studied through its receptors. Genetic knockout studies in animal models in Huntington's disease (HD) have shown that a specific SST receptor, SSTR2, is increased along with the increased NMDAR activity, with opposing patterns observed in SZ. A direct correlation between SSTR and NMDAR is hence inferred in this review with the hope of finding a potential new therapeutic target for the treatment of SZ and related neurological conditions.