Early hearing loss and language abilities in children with Down syndrome

BACKGROUND: Although many children with Down syndrome experience hearing loss, there has been little research to investigate its impact on speech and language development. Studies that have investigated the association give inconsistent results. These have often been based on samples where children with the most severe hearing impairments have been excluded and so results do not generalize to the wider population with Down syndrome. Also, measuring children's hearing at the time of a language assessment does not take into account the fluctuating nature of hearing loss in children with Down syndrome or possible effects of losses in their early years. AIMS: To investigate the impact of early hearing loss on language outcomes for children with Down syndrome. METHODS & PROCEDURES: Retrospective audiology clinic records and parent report for 41 children were used to categorize them as either having had hearing difficulties from 2 to 4 years or more normal hearing. Differences between the groups on measures of language expression and comprehension, receptive vocabulary, a narrative task and speech accuracy were investigated. OUTCOMES & RESULTS: After accounting for the contributions of chronological age and nonverbal mental age to children's scores, there were significant differences between the groups on all measures. CONCLUSIONS & IMPLICATIONS: Early hearing loss has a significant impact on the speech and language development of children with Down syndrome. Results suggest that speech and language therapy should be provided when children are found to have ongoing hearing difficulties and that joint audiology and speech and language therapy clinics could be considered for preschool children.

Two case studies on generating administrative process applications with AdminDSL

Some organizations end up reimplementing the same class of business process over and over: an "administrative process", which consists of managing a form through several states and involving various roles in the organization. This results in wasted time that could be dedicated to better understanding the process or dealing with the fine details that are specific to the process. Existing virtual office solutions require specific training and infrastructure andmay result in vendor lock-in. In this paper, we propose using a high-level domain-specific language (AdminDSL) to describe the administrative process and a separate code generator targeting a standard web framework. We have implemented the approach using Xtext, EGL and the Django web framework, and we illustrate it through two case studies: a synthetic examination process which illustrates the architecture of the generated code, and a real-world workplace survey process that identified several future avenues for improvement.