Now in its 3rd edition, this book emphasizes the physiological perspective of voice disorders & the behavioral & emotional factors that can influence these changes. Coverage includes in-depth explorations of patient-interviewing, history-taking, examination & testing.

This book provides a step-by-step guide to understanding and treating psychogenic voice disorder by combining speech and language therapy with skills drawn from the field of cognitive behaviour therapy (CBT). Beginning with a new classification of psychogenic voice disorder, the authors then provide a description of the CBT model and give helpful and systematic guidelines on using this approach in combination with speech and language therapy skills. They provide invaluable guidance on how to extend the standard voice case history to include a psychosocial assessment, and how to apply symptomatic voice therapy principles and techniques for this patient population. Later chapters show how to assess and work with patients suffering from symptoms of anxiety and lowered mood, and how to understand and respond to various forms of psychopathology that may present in association with voice disorder. Finally, detailed case studies illustrate how an experienced therapist might respond to individual assessment and treatment challenges.

Traces the life and death of a nineteen-year-old bulimic and her mother's ensuing journey for answers and healing, in a tale told through the victim's poetry and journal entries as well as her mother's reflections about the disorder. Original.

Many children and adults experience impairment of their communication skills. These communication disorders impact adversely on all aspects of these individuals' lives. In thirty dedicated chapters, The Cambridge Handbook of Communication Disorders examines the full range of developmental and acquired communication disorders and provides the most up-to-date and comprehensive guide to the epidemiology, aetiology and clinical features of these disorders. The volume also examines how these disorders are assessed and treated by speech and language therapists and addresses recent theoretical developments in the field. The handbook goes beyond well-known communication disorders to include populations such as children with emotional disturbance, adults with non-Alzheimer dementias and people with personality disorders. Each chapter describes in accessible terms the most recent thinking and research in communication disorders. The volume is an ideal guide for academic researchers, graduate students and professionals in speech and language therapy.

An examination of more than sixty years of successes and failures in developing technologies that allow computers to understand human spoken language. Stanley Kubrick's 1968 film 2001: A Space Odyssey famously featured HAL, a computer with the ability to hold lengthy conversations with his fellow space travelers. More than forty years later, we have advanced computer technology that Kubrick never imagined, but we do not have computers that talk and understand speech as HAL did. Is it a failure of our technology that we have not gotten much further than an automated voice that tells us to "say or press 1"? Or is there something fundamental in human language and speech that we do not yet understand deeply enough to be able to replicate in a computer? In The Voice in the Machine, Roberto Pieraccini examines six decades of work in science and technology to develop computers that can interact with humans using speech and the industry that has arisen around the quest for these technologies. He shows that although the computers today that understand speech may not have HAL's capacity for conversation, they have capabilities that make them usable in many applications today and are on a fast track of improvement and innovation. Pieraccini describes the evolution of speech recognition and speech understanding processes from waveform methods to artificial intelligence approaches to statistical learning and modeling of human speech based on a rigorous mathematical model--specifically, Hidden Markov Models (HMM). He details the development of dialog systems, the ability to produce speech, and the process of bringing talking machines to the market. Finally, he asks a question that only the future can answer: will we end up with HAL-like computers or something completely unexpected?