slp tidings

Speech-language pathology, lingustics, neuroscience, humor, advocacy, and more!

[autisticadvocacy]

Opinion | Let’s Not Ration Health Care

Former Representative Tony Coelho says some medical professionals are trying to marginalize seniors and the disabled in this crisis.

“Some medical professionals are trying to marginalize seniors and the disabled in this crisis.”

[snaplanguage]

What is Language Deprivation?

This is sweet!

[specgram]

“Time changes all things: there is no reason why language should escape this universal law. ”

—Ferdinand de Saussure

[specgram]

“If you didn’t hear the story clearly, don’t carry it off with you under your arm. ”

—Thai proverb

[jessiesams]

[autisticadvocacy]

From her apartment in Boston’s North End, Collette Divitto’s cookie business is taking shape.

Collette Divitto started her cookie business to take her career in her own hands

[decodering]

Dos and don'ts on designing for accessibility

Karwai Pun, GOV.UK:

The dos and don’ts of designing for accessibility are general guidelines, best design practices for making services accessible in government. Currently, there are six different posters in the series that cater to users from these areas: low vision, D/deaf and hard of hearing, dyslexia, motor disabilities, users on the autistic spectrum and users of screen readers.

[…] Another aim of the posters is that they’re meant to be general guidance as opposed to being overly prescriptive. Using bright contrast was advised for some (such as those with low vision) although some users on the autistic spectrum would prefer differently. Where advice seems contradictory, it’s always worth testing your designs with users to find the right balance, making compromises that best suit the users’ needs.

[github]

[linguisten]

[deactivated-blog]

seeking autistic adults for healthcare research

My name is Stacy and I am a multiply disabled, autistic student finishing a customized degree in Disability Justice.

I am seeking autistic participants for the research portion of my senior thesis project exploring the positive and negative healthcare experiences of autistic adults.

What: a short demographic survey, and an open-ended interview with four questions/prompts

How: The interviews will be conducted in the most accessible format for each participant. Phone, text-chat (with a variety of platform options), Skype, or face-to-face (for Utah participants)

Who: Professionally or self-diagnosed autistics between 18-64 years old (US only please)

When: Interviews need to be finished by early August; scheduling is flexible

PLEASE complete the brief survey at this link if you are interested: http://goo.gl/forms/An1uphp5mnwwNPr22

(the survey asks for your autism quotient score. It is an imperfect measurement, but is currently the tool used in most academic research that includes self-diagnosis. If you don’t know your score you can take the quiz here: https://psychology-tools.com/autism-spectrum-quotient/)

You can contact me via email at [email protected] if you have any questions.

Please share widely!

[laughingatmynightmare]

This one has been clawing the back of my throat for a week.

If you haven’t seen it yet, there’s a story circulating about a 14-year-old girl named Jerika Bolen who has SMA Type 2 and is choosing to end her life next month. By the accounts of she and her family, she lives with incredible daily pain and the pain meds just aren’t cutting it any longer. Jerika, lauded by her friends and family as “wise beyond her years,” says that her quality of life no longer warrants being alive.

The media is having a field day with Jerika, fighting each other to see who can write the most heart-wrenching story. They’re calling her a hero. An inspiration. They’re ignoring the fact that she’s a child, and that the whole situation is riddled with ethical controversy. Worst of all, they’re painting a grossly simplified and untrue picture: SMA is so painful and debilitating that suicide is not only logical, but commendable.

First, I want to speak directly to Jerika. I’m sorry for what I imagine you’re going through right now. To some extent, I’ve been in your shoes. I know what it’s like to have a story go viral, and I know what it’s like to be criticized on a massive scale. It sucks, and I know that the things being written by the media are probably not how you want to be portrayed. I know it’s hard to control. That’s the nature of the beast. Simultaneously, I know almost nothing about your life or your pain, and I do not feel it is my place to weigh in on your decision. I wish you nothing but the very best.

To everyone else, I want to urge you to read Jerika’s story with caution. SMA is being dangerously misrepresented in most of the stories I’ve seen.

Many of the articles are claiming that SMA Type 2 kills people “before they reach adolescence.” This is not true. With advances in medical technology, the common story is that we are living into our 40s and 50s and 60s, with families and careers and passions.

More articles are stating that SMA Type 2 causes “debilitating pain.” Again, not even close to true. In Jerika’s specific case, it seems as if her (highly uncommon) 38 surgeries in 14 years are the cause of her immense pain. On average, people with SMA Type 2 do not live with severe daily pain. (Sometimes my butt hurts after sitting all day. Sometimes my hips get sore from lack of movement. Sometimes my shoulders ache. All of these pains are sporadic, and all of them are fixable with seating adaptations that I’m just too lazy to pursue.)

Yes, SMA is a progressive disease, meaning that over time, we get weaker, but again, the articles use this fact to suggest that a worthwhile life requires physical ability. I know a writer with SMA who writes brilliantly with his voice and a lip-controlled mouse and is routinely published in the New York Times, Los Angeles Times, and Chicago Tribune. I know a painter with SMA who has trouble lifting his arms but will blow your socks off with the work he creates. I know a mother with SMA who is raising children and working full time with 24/7 ventilator support.

These are the common stories of SMA: people thriving and making the most of the cards they’ve been dealt.

I said it before and I’ll say it again, there are times when living with SMA truly just blows. It’s one hell of a disease both physically and emotionally.

But the beauty in life still far outweighs the negative for the overwhelming majority of us, and I think that’s the story we need to be focusing on.

[autisticadvocacy]

My family sent him away because he had Down syndrome, but he created another family for himself in his group home.

The first time I saw my brother, Jimmy, he was 60 years old

[signinggifs]

Eat

with the dominant hand in a “flattened o” hand shape tap the chin or mouth with the fingertips. 

Verbs and Adjectives in ASL

[foreignerongermansoil]

Excerpt from Kató Lomb’s “Polyglot: How I Learn Languages”

[polysprachig]

GO READ THE WHOLE BOOK IT IS AMAZING @POLYGLOTS @LANGUAGE LEARNERS 

[linguisten]

Were a language ever completely “grammatical” it would be a perfect engine of conceptual expression. Unfortunately, or luckily, no language is tyrannically consistent. All grammars leak.

Edward Sapir, Language (1921), p. 39 (via linguisten)

[wuglife]

Where did the vowel space get its shape?

Quick answer: The jaw.

Slightly longer answer: The jaw is attached like a hinge, so it doesn’t drop straight down when you open your mouth. Moreover, your jaw is the part that’s moving, not the rest of your head. So, when your mouth opens, it’s like a door swinging open: it moves along a circular path relative to the immobile parts of your head.

But the vowel space isn’t rounded, it’s a trapezoid. This is due to the simplification of a complex shape to something easier to draw and conceptualize. Here’s a gif of how the tongue moves to create different mouth shapes that correspond to different vowels.

Close/High + Back = [u]

Mid + Back = [o] or [ɔ]

Open/Low + Back = [ɑ]

Open/Low + Front = [æ]

Mid + Front = [e] or [ɛ]

Close/High + Front = [i]

(Note: This isn’t showing all of the vowels of English, which is why I group some of the -High, -Low vowels together)

[wuglife]

Why linguists need physics

In designing my lectures for the beginning of the semester, I realized it might not be clear to incoming students why they need to learn about wavelength and frequency and addition of waves to form complex waves. It’s not strictly necessary to study phonology, but without a basic background in the physics of sound, you end up being limited in your understanding of how the sounds are created (and which ones are even possible). Sure, there’s quite a lot of anatomy knowledge that contributes as well, but even with a fantastic understanding of the vocal tract’s shape and configuration, you’re still missing a major component.

So let’s back up a moment. The vocal tract.

Sound is generated by the vocal folds (marked with a black oval) when air pressure builds up underneath them and pushes against them so hard that they burst open. But since you’re pushing them together really hard, as soon as the pressure drops again, they snap back shut. This snapping action creates a noise, and when it happens very rapidly, it creates a buzzing sound.

Actually, this buzzing sound is very similar to the sound you make when you blow a raspberry. It’s the same mechanism, but with your lips pressed together instead of your vocal folds.

So where’s the physics? Well, we need to understand the shape of sound waves to understand why they sound the way they do. A simple wave (a sinusoidal wave) will sound like a simple, boring tone.

If you look at the wave created by blowing a raspberry, it looks really different.

The reason is that this buzz wave is composed of many, many sine waves, all overlapping and influencing each other. And it is physics that allows us to decompose the complex wave into something more interpretable.

I’m not going to go into what a Fast Fourier Transform (FFT) is here, but it is basically the technique that figures out what all the simple waves are that are added together to get a complex wave.

The next place physics plays a big role is in the transformation of this buzzy sound from the vocal folds into a speech sound. This transformation happens when the buzzy wave passes through the long, complex tube of your throat, mouth, and nose.

Some components of the complex wave (certain frequencies) are amplified when they pass through an area of your vocal tract that is just the right length. You can think about this like two people swinging a jump rope. When they’re rotating their arms at the same pace, the jump rope goes around in big circles, like it’s supposed to. But if they’re out of sync, the rope collapses and turns into a slithery worm and makes it a very boring game. When a component of the wave is “in sync” with an area of the vocal tract, it gets louder, like the jump rope making full, big circles. But when a component is “out of sync”, it gets quieter, and doesn’t do much. This is how the vocal tract shapes our voice into speech.

But the question here is which components are amplified and which are damped (made quieter)? That is answerable by measuring the wavelengths of the components of the source noise and comparing them to the physical sizes of the spaces in the vocal tract. When a component wave fits snugly in a space (i.e., a whole number of wavelengths fit in the distance from one wall of the vocal tract to another), that is when you get amplification. Several of the regions of amplification (resonances) are useful in determining what vowel is being produced, for instance. And that is one way in which physics is useful when you’re studying speech sounds and linguistics.

[allthingslinguistic]

What It's Like to Be Noam Chomsky's Assistant

The renowned linguist’s longtime personal aide describes the view from the front row.

An interesting article by Bev Stohl, Noam Chomsky’s personal assistant. My favourite part was definitely the background into that Ali G interview: 

I have no idea how Sacha Baron Cohen’s Ali G character sneaked through my gate to ask Noam outrageous things like, “How many words does you know?” and “What is some of them?” I do remember that Noam came to me afterward looking dazed. “No more men in gold suits,” he said, sighing.

Bev Stohl also has a blog where she writes entertainingly about her life and other Chomsky anecdotes. This story about Chomsky’s struggles with a coffeemaker amused me quite a lot.