Brain implant allows mute man to speak

sea-maid submitted, created time 1 month 2 weeks (www.nature.com)

An electrode implanted into the brain of a man with locked-in syndrome has enabled him to use a speech synthesizer to produce vowel sounds as he thinks them. The same team is now working on a chip that can also produce consonants.

Locked-in syndrome is a type of paralysis in which patients are unable to voluntarily move anything but their eyelids. However, they are fully conscious

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First Genetic Clue to Common Speech Disorder

piggy submitted, created time 2 months 1 day (sciencenow.sciencemag.org)

Blonterstaping. Perplisteronk. Contramponist. People who have trouble remembering and repeating nonsense words like these have a common speech and language disorder called specific language impairment (SLI). Although SLI clearly runs in families, the genes responsible have been hard to pin down. Now, a group has found the first such gene, one that had been previously tied to a language disorder in autism

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Deaf people feel their way to speech

sea-maid submitted, created time 3 months 3 weeks (www.newscientist.com)

Anyone who's done a bad Elvis impression knows that contorting your mouth makes talking feel wrong – never mind how ridiculous you sound. People who have lost their hearing use the same sense to retain their speech, new research suggests.

The article compares deaf people's ability to tell how things will sound by the way the word feels in their mouths to a tennis player's ability to tell whether a shot will land in or out of the scoring zone by the way the shot feels on their arms and rackets.

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Secret of Newborn's First Words Revealed

Drug restores speech in Alzheimer's but experts worry

sea-maid submitted, created time 5 months 2 weeks (news.yahoo.com)

Alzheimer's patients given a popular rheumatoid arthritis drug showed seemingly dramatic improvements in a small study, but some doctors worried that the early findings will raise premature hopes in patients and their families

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Speech Gene Helps Birds Sing