Does the Language We’re Born Into Change our Brains?
Researchers hunt the globe to learn more about how our brains process language. Republished from Cosmos magazine. Cosmos is owned by the Royal Institution of Australia, a not-for-profit whose mission is to communicate scientific literacy in order to create a better future. Read the original article. If you’ve ever travelled through a country with a different native language to your own, you’d have noticed
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Face Masks Affect How Children Understand Speech Differently From Adults: New Research
Republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article. While mask-wearing is no longer required in many locations, it remains in use as a way to limit the spread of COVID-19. One of the criticisms of masks has been that they make communication more difficult. A recent report by the UK Department for Education, for example, suggests that mask wearing during the pandemic
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ICP and the Global Disability Summit 2022
Presidents, Prime Ministers, CEOs of global agencies, the head of the WHO: the Global Disability Summit, hosted online in February by the governments of Norway and Ghana, had an impressive attendance list. Representatives of the International Communication Project were also present as participants, scoping the potential for future events and interventions to raise the profile of communication disability. Here are some reflections. International events
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An Advocacy Snapshot in 2021
November 2021 The International Communication Project (ICP) has been advocating with and for people with communication disability since 2014. A key goal has been to raise the profile of communication disability, both general awareness of prevalence and incidence (how they occur and who might have a communication disability); and also to influence the policy landscape. Our work is to ensure that people with communication
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‘They Worry They will Never get Better’: A day in Bolton’s Long COVID Clinic
Sarah Davidson* woke up on the Covid ward at Bolton Royal hospital in March to find she had been turned on to her belly. She had watched enough news reports to know what that meant. “The nurse from the critical care team turned up and said: ‘It’s for your lungs, your breathing stopped’. They proned me for days and days. I was like a
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ICP Works to Place Communication Disability on the Record
At this year’s United Nations Conference of State Parties on the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities, the ICP arranged for statements about communication disability to be made for the record. The following statement was made by Abed Ahmed, who is both a teacher and person with lived experience of communication disability. Abed has a stammer. Children with communication disability, beyond the
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Device Allows Paralyzed Man to Communicate with Words
Conditions such as stroke and neurodegenerative disease can cause anarthria—the loss of the ability to articulate speech. Anarthria hinders communication and reduces quality of life. Researchers have been working to create brain-computer interfaces that help people with anarthria communicate. With a typical interface, the user must spell out messages one letter at a time. An interface that lets the user generate whole words at
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Speech Language Therapy for the People of Vietnam
In 2008 Trinh Foundation Australia (TFA) began collaborating with the University of Medicine Pham Ngoc Thach (UPNT) in Ho Chi Minh City to educate Vietnam’s first ever speech therapists through a two-year training program. With a population of over 97 million, a legacy of defoliants from the Vietnam War, poor maternal and child health and nutrition, and an ageing population, about 7 per cent
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ICP Highlights the Impact of Communication Disabilities on Work and Employment
Raising the profile of communication disabilities at the United Nations (UN) is an important goal of the International Communication Project (ICP). The ICP recently provided a submission to the 24th session of the Committee on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities to highlight the impact of communication disabilities on work and employment ahead of the general discussion in March 2021 on the right of
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How Lockdown has Affected Children’s Speech – and What Parents can do to Help
Yvonne Wren, University of Bristol The pandemic means many children will have spent the best part of a year interacting much less than normal with teachers, friends and family. One of the big questions is how this will have changed the way they have learned to speak. Have lockdown and other COVID-19 measures affected how children acquire the speech and language skills so vital
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