A group of children with dyslexia (mean ages 9 and 14 years) was studied, together with group of children without dyslexia matched for age. Participants were monolingual native speakers of the Bosnian language with transparent orthography. In total, the diagnostic tests were performed with 41 children with dyslexia and 41 nondyslexic children. The participants were asked to produce monosyllables, /pa/, /ta/, and /ka/, and the trisyllable /pataka/, as fast as possible. Analysis was undertaken in four ways: (1) time of occlusion duration for plosives (duration of stop), (2) voice onset time for plosives, (3) diadochokinetic rate—articulators rate measured by pronunciation of monosyllables and the trisyllable, and (4) time of moving articulators from one gesture to another—time of interval length (from the explosion of one plosive to the start of the explosion of another plosive). The results suggest that children with dyslexia have significant problems with the speed of articulatory movements involved in speech production.

A study was carried out on a group of 505 preschool children. The children were given tests measuring their phonological discrimination, rhyme, initial phoneme detection and letter knowledge. In general, phonological discrimination and initial phoneme tasks are easier than the rhyme task. As children increased in age, phonological awareness and letter knowledge both increased. There are differences in phonological awareness between children according to their number of letter known. Letter knowledge is associated with all phonological measures and all variables of phonological awareness were good predictors of letter knowledge.

Abstract The main purpose of this study was to examine the phonological skills among children with reading disabilities of the Bosnian/Croatian/Serbian language, where each phoneme is represented by a grapheme following a certain phonemic principle. The sample consists of 15 children with reading disabilities and 15 children without reading disabilities, where "The diagnostic set for examination of the speech, language, reading and writing abilities among children" was used for examination of their phonological capacity. Phonological skills in children are very important for reading and writing acquisition. The results of the study showed that children with reading disabilities achieved poorer results in all tasks examining the phonological skills, compared to children without reading difficulties. The results of our study comply with results of studies conducted for other languages. The study highlights the importance of the mentioned skills for acquiring reading skills in the Bosnian/Croatian/Serbian language and the significance of deficient phonological abilities for the etiology of reading disabilities. Based on the conducted study, it can be concluded that phonological skills are very important for acquiring reading and writing abilities. Key words: reading disabilities, phonological skills, phonemic synthesis and analysis 1. Introduction Phonology deals with the system of sounds that exist within a specific language, whereas phonetics deals with the physical reality of the speech sounds, independently of their meaning and function (1). Phonological skills involve the manipulation of phonological constituents of the spoken words in tasks such as blending, segmenting and rhyming. Different researchers reported that children who learn to read well can rhyme at the age of four and they can blend and segment orally presented words and sounds by the end of first grade (2). A number of longitudinal studies found that children who show poor phonological awareness before they have learned to read are at risk of developing a reading disability (3). Reading accuracy is well predicted by early phonological and language skills (4). The relationship between phonemic awareness and learning to read is a two-way process: phonemic awareness is a precondition for learning to read and learning to read facilitates further progress of phonemic awareness (5). Results of different studies showed that phonemic awareness does not develop itself spontaneously, but it partly depends on the literacy (6). When the child learns to read, he/she must be able to detect phonemes that make up spoken words in order to understand that these separate sound units can be represented by letters or group of letters, that is, graphemes in the written language. If the child has not mastered phoneme segmenting, it will be very difficult for him/her to achieve reading and writing fluency (7). In the past 15 years, it has been considered that deficient phonological processing represents the main cause of reading and writing difficulties (8). Most cases of reading disabilities arise because of difficulties in the process of word recognition. These difficulties occur due to deficiencies in the processes of phonological coding, where letter patterns are transformed into phonological codes (9). Dyslexia involves deficiency within the language system, especially at the level of a phonological module. Children with dyslexia need more time to retrieve appropriate phonemes and sometimes while speaking these children retrieve a phoneme that sounds similar to the one they intended to pronounce. The children with dyslexia lack phonemic awareness and they experience difficulty noticing basic sounds - phonemes that make up all spoken and written words (10). The majority of studies about phonological skills among children with dyslexia have been conducted in English speaking countries. The Bosnian language is characterized with a phonemic alphabet, where each letter conesponds to one sound. …

Background: Individuals who suffer from multiple sclerosis, aside from other symptoms, usually have voice changes such as poor control of pitch, variations in voice intensity, altered voice quality and resonance disorders. Purpose: The purpose of this study was to determine voice acoustic characteristics in individuals with multiple sclerosis and to compare those results with control group. Methods: This study was conducted on 17 subjects, both males and females, of chronological age between 27 and 55 years. All subjects were diagnosed with multiple sclerosis by professional neurologist. Control group consisted of 17 subjects who matched with experimental group of the same age and sex. The study was conducted at the Clinic for Neurology, University Clinical Centre Tuzla. Sustained phonation of vowel /A/ was analyzed by computer programme for voice analysis MDVP (Multi Dimensional Voice Program). Results: Results of our study exhibited statistically significant differences between subjects with multiple sclerosis and control subjects in variables standard deviation of fundamental frequency and phonatory F0 range. We also found statistically significant differences between variable related to pitch perturbation (jitter) and peak-to-peak amplitude variation. Statistically significant differences were also determined between subjects with multiple sclerosis and control subjects in variables related to degree of irregular vocalization, noise to harmonic ratio and variable related to amplitude tremor intensity index. Conclusion: Results of this study showed that subjects with multiple sclerosis exhibited significant variation in voice acoustic characteristics compared to control group. MDVP can be a useful tool for further monitoring of voice characteristics alterations in patients with multiple sclerosis during diagnostic and treatment processes.