Shivani Tiwari

Manipal Academy of Higher Education | MAHE · Department of Speech and Hearing

BACKGROUND: The growing need and popularity of telepractice over conventional direct therapy by speech-language pathologists (SLPs) demand validation of assessment of oral language and literacy domains via telepractice mode. Considering the limited research on the validation of standardised oral language and literacy tele-assessment in autistic chi...

Professionals and educator’s beliefs and existing practices for children with autism spectrum disorder and families in the Indian context are less known. Hence, there is a need to review the current emergent literacy practices followed by healthcare professionals for children with autism spectrum disorder. The present study aimed to investigate the...

BACKGROUND: While digital technology has helped in various aspects as learning, social communication and entertainment, it poses substantial risk for young children. Amongst the various effects, excessive screen time has been identified as a risk for autism. OBJECTIVES: Against the background of increasing use of digital devices and lack of data on...

Background Autism spectrum disorder (ASD) is a lifelong condition requiring continued rehabilitation services. However, children with ASD who seek rehabilitation services tend to drop out once they enter puberty, because of varying reasons, some of which are unknown. This study intended to explore the reasons for not availing of rehabilitation serv...

Introduction: The broad autism phenotype (BAP) comprises milder language and cognitive deficits seen in the nonautistic relatives of individuals with autism. BAP represents the range of individuals with a higher number of these characteristics than average but a lower number than would point to a diagnosis of autism. The Broad Autism Phenotype Que...

Background: Most of the evidence explaining the language-literacy link is derived from children learning to read and write alphabetic orthography. Aim: This study investigated the literacy deficits in children learning to read Kannada, a Dravidian language that employs an alphasyllabary. Methods: A group of 15 children with language impairment...

Background: Assessment of parenting behaviors in parents of children with autism is crucial in the assessment and treatment processes. Efficient tools and instruments with known psychometric properties are needed to assess parenting behaviors in parents of children with autism. Given the lack of such tools in the Indian context, there is a need to...

Background: Many healthcare professionals, including pediatricians, psychiatrists, Clinical Psychologists (CPs), Occupational Therapists (OTs), and Speech-Language Pathologists (SLPs), are involved in the identification and intervention of Autism Spectrum Disorders (ASD) in children. Distinctive training backgrounds and professional exposure can r...

Background: Speech-language pathologists (SLPs) are significant team members in the identification, assessment, and rehabilitation of children with autism. With a recent upsurge in the number of children with autism, there arises a need to examine SLPs knowledge and skills in identification and intervention of children with autism. Aim: The pres...

Context In the wake of increasing prevalence of autism globally, with a substantial change in understanding of the disorder, it is essential to update knowledge of the healthcare professionals involved in the intervention of children with autism. Special educators are important team members in the rehabilitation of children with autism. There are o...

Specific Language Impairment (SLI) remains an underinvestigated disorder in morphologically complex agglutinative languages such as Kannada. Currently, only a few case reports are available on SLI in Dravidian languages. The morphological complexity inherent to Dravidian languages such as Kannada provides a potential avenue to verify one of the two...

Purpose Inborn Errors of Metabolism (IEMs) are a group of complex genetic conditions, predominantly affecting the pediatric population. While the understanding and identification of various IEMs has significantly improved over recent times, not much is known about the communication disorders in this population. The present study focused on identifi...

Introduction Sentence comprehension, the process of deriving meaning from a string of words, may take place when the sentence is presented individually or in discourse, auditory or visually. Many factors influence sentence comprehension including complexity, syntactic structure, lexical structure, prosodic structure and cognitive processes1. The s...

Typical development of oral language skills during early years underpins the acquisition of more complex literacy skills acquired in later years. Numerous studies in the past suggest that early language problems are associated with later literacy problems. Children with SLI (CwSLI), therefore, provide us with unique opportunity to unveil such link....

Lexical access in bilinguals has been debated for the last several decades. Although a large majority of bilingual people often experience aphasia in both languages, some show language-selective disturbances. Yet, selective difficulties in retrieving words that share similar semantic and phonological forms in the two languages have seldom been repo...

In the current study, we examined the nature of crosslinguistic generalization of treatment for Indian bilinguals with aphasia. We recruited three bilingual (Kannada-English) persons with aphasia and used the treatment protocol described by Edmonds and Kiran (2006). Our findings showed a striking similarity with the previous study, thus providing f...

Deficits of grammatical morphology constitute clinical markers in SLI assessment. Evidence from the recent past suggests that SLI markers vary cross-linguistically. Examination of morphosyntactic deficits in bilingual children with SLI (CwSLI) provides unique evidence in manifestation of SLI cross-linguistically. In this context, present study inve...

Introduction The last two decades witnessed several novel treatment approaches to aphasia therapy. Semantic feature-based therapy is one of such treatment approaches that gained considerable research attention (Boyle & Coelho, 1995). More importantly, this treatment approach has been found effective in bilingual persons with aphasia. For instance,...

In the past, several authors have proposed comparable sets of clinical features to differentiate acquired neurogenic stuttering (ANS) from developmental stuttering (DS). Further, people with ANS have been reported to show no changes in their dysfluencies during various fluency-enhancing conditions. Although these features have been criticized on th...

Background: Vascular lesion of the subcortical structures leads to aphasia. Cortical hypoperfusion has been proposed to be the etiological mechanism in aphasia following subcortical vascular lesion. Subcortical aphasia shows considerable variability in its clinical profile. Such variability has been attributed to the variable sites of cortical hyp...

The neural underpinnings of acquired neurogenic stuttering (ANS) remain largely speculative owing to the multitude of etiologies and cerebral substrates implicated with this fluency disorder. Systematic investigations of ANS under various fluency-enhancing conditions have begun only in the recent past and these studies are indicative of the heterog...

The reading acquisition literature is mainly based on alphabetic orthographies and is largely silent on reading acquisition in alphasyllabic orthographies. In this context, as a preliminary attempt, the present study investigated akshara (orthographic character of alphasyllabary) knowledge in a group of Grade III children learning to read an unexpl...

This study aimed to investigate the issues speech-language pathologists (SLPs) face in the rehabilitation of people with aphasia (PwA) in India. A survey questionnaire was distributed to 540 SLPs through e-mail. Among 437 survey recipients, 61 SLPs participated in the study. The questionnaire explored various „client-related’ and „clinician-related...

The neural substrates of stuttering have been a topic of extensive debate in the field of both neuroscience and communication disorders. Although a consensus on this issue is yet to emerge, the recent neuroimaging studies have shown consistent neural over-activations in the right hemisphere suggestive of its possible compensatory role in stuttering...

In the context of the ongoing and overwhelming debate on the 'language-specific' versus 'language non-specific' nature of bilingual lexical selection, the current study aimed at investigating this issue using a 'semantic relatedness judgment' paradigm. A group of proficient Malayalam-English bilinguals were required to judge the semantic relatednes...

In the context of the ongoing and overwhelming debate on the 'language-specific' versus 'language non-specific' nature of bilingual lexical selection, the current study aimed at investigating this issue using a 'semantic relatedness judgment' paradigm. A group of proficient Malayalam-English bilinguals were required to judge the semantic relatednes...

Working memory like in first language acquisition plays a crucial role in learning the second language also. However the role of different memory measures in vocabulary development for bilinguals as a function of age is not known. In this context present study aimed at investigating and comparing the relation of different memory measures (phonologi...

Anomalous lateralization of linguistic functions is observed in a small group of right-handed subjects with unilateral brain damage as either crossed aphasia (aphasia after right-hemisphere damage) or crossed nonaphasia (left hemisphere damage without aphasia but with symptoms of right hemisphere damage such as visuospatial deficits). The incidence...

Anomalous lateralization of linguistic functions is observed in a small group of right-handed subjects with unilateral brain damage as either crossed aphasia (aphasia after right-hemisphere damage) or crossed non-aphasia (left hemisphere damage without aphasia but with symptoms of right hemisphere damage such as visuospatial deficits). The incidenc...

The organization of mental lexicon has been extensively debated and discussed in the contemporary psycholinguistics. Specifically, this study investigated into the nature of organization of semantically related and unrelated concepts in the mental lexicon. A group of 19 participants (age range: 17-23 years; 11 females & 8 males) was required to jud...

Pragmatic Language Impairment (PLI) is a developmental communication disorder, characterized by semantic and pragmatic deficits; relatively adequate phonology and syntax; and mild autistic features. The symptom profile overlaps with Pervasive Developmental Disorder (PDD) and Specific Language Impairment (SLI). The present paper attempts to highligh...

The organization of mental lexicon has been extensively debated and discussed in the contemporary psycholinguistics. Specifically, this study investigated into the nature of organization of semantically related and unrelated concepts in the mental lexicon. A group of 19 participants (age range: 17-23 years; 11 females & 8 males) was required to jud...

Schizophrenia is a thought disorder, displaying unusual language and cognitive impairments. There exists a dearth of studies relating the language deficits to the onset of the disorder. This study profiled few aspects of semantic and pragmatic abilities in acute and chronic schizophrenics and compared with their cognitive abilities. One acute schiz...

Atypical aphasias have been rarely reported in the literature. The occurrence of such aphasias raises serious criticism on our current understanding of the brain-language relationship. This case report discusses a subject who exhibited predominantly posterior language symptoms following damage to the anterior areas in the brain. The subject also re...