A descriptive Study of a Community-Based Home-Visiting Program with Preschool Children Prenatally Exposed to Alcohol

BACKGROUND

Research suggests that prenatal alcohol exposure (PAE) and Fetal Alcohol Spectrum Disorder (FASD) increases the risk of insecure caregiver-child attachment and related negative child emotional-behavioural outcomes. Research also shows positive effects of attachment-focused interventions in preventing disrupted caregiver-child attachment relationships; however, such interventions have not been specifically adapted for children with FASD.

OBJECTIVES

This paper describes the implementation, challenges, and results of a community home-based attachment intervention, Circle of Security® (COS), with preschool children affected by PAE/FASD in Manitoba, Canada.

METHODS

Twelve caregiver-child dyads completed the FASD adapted COS intervention. Children's ages ranged from 2-5 years.

RESULTS

Results support a positive influence of this individualized intervention on child behaviour and parent efficacy. There was a significant reduction in parent stress that was maintained at 3-month follow-up, and a clinically significant reduction in child behavioural issues was noted. Children showed increased ability to communicate their needs more effectively to their parent. Parents also showed an improvement in their ability to attend to their child's cues.

CONCLUSIONS

This study supports the use of community home-based attachment intervention for caregivers of children with PAE/FASD.

Sign language ability in young deaf signers predicts comprehension of written sentences in English

We investigated the robust correlation between American Sign Language (ASL) and English reading ability in 51 young deaf signers ages 7;3 to 19;0. Signers were divided into ‘skilled’ and ‘less-skilled’ signer groups based on their performance on three measures of ASL. We next assessed reading comprehension of four English sentence structures (actives, passives, pronouns, reflexive pronouns) using a sentence-to-picture-matching task. Of interest was the extent to which ASL proficiency provided a foundation for lexical and syntactic processes of English. Skilled signers outperformed less-skilled signers overall. Error analyses further indicated greater single-word recognition difficulties in less-skilled signers marked by a higher rate of errors reflecting an inability to identify the actors and actions described in the sentence. Our findings provide evidence that increased ASL ability supports English sentence comprehension both at the levels of individual words and syntax. This is consistent with the theory that first language learning promotes second language through transference of linguistic elements irrespective of the transparency of mapping of grammatical structures between the two languages.

Recognition of categorised words: repetition effects in rote study

In the recognition-memory mirror effect one stimulus class exhibits both more hits and fewer false alarms than a contrasting class. This outcome is frequently detected when strong (e.g., repeated, long-duration study) and weak items have appeared in different lists but less so within lists. The mirror effect may reflect people's assignment of a more lenient recognition criterion to the weak than the strong class. The present study asked whether a paradigm that has yielded within-list mirror effects when participants make gist ratings during study (Singer, 2009, 2011) likewise obtains in rote study. In Experiments 1 and 2 people studied words from category pairs such that the stimuli from one category only were repeated three times. Both hits and false alarms were consistently higher for the repeated than the unrepeated condition, a pattern labelled "concordant" (rather than mirror). This might reflect the either a positive "distribution shift" of the repeated-category lures or a metacognitive strategy. Experiment 3 coupled the same study procedure with two-alternative forced-choice testing (2AFC) to deny the distribution shift explanation. The sorts of strategy that might favour repeated over unrepeated lures are considered.

Distinctiveness and repetition in item recognition

We scrutinized the hypothesis that the distinctiveness of unrepeated stimuli yields an enhancement of their memorability, when contrasted with repeated stimuli. In three conditions of a variant of von Restorff's (1933) isolation paradigm, unrepeated stimuli were respectively rendered either distinctive, by intermixing them with repeated stimuli from a different category, or nondistinctive, by having both unrepeated and repeated items originate in the same category or categories. The recognition-memory strength difference between unrepeated and repeated stimuli, in terms of a signal-detection measure of sensitivity, was less when the unrepeated stimuli were distinctive than when they were not distinctive. This implies that the relative weakness of unrepeated stimuli may be offset by distinctiveness that accrues from their infrequency. These findings are considered with reference to contemporary theoretical treatments of distinctiveness.

Analytical applications of flow injection with chemiluminescence detection--a review

This paper reviews the literature on analytical applications of flow injection (FI) techniques with chemiluminescence (CL) detection from 1995-1999. The focus is on the application of FI-CL to the quantitative determination of specific analytes in real sample matrices. Therefore, entries have been tabulated under the most appropriate application area, ie pharmaceutical, environmental, foods and beverages and biomedical, as defined by the matrix that has been analysed. Each table lists analytes alphabetically and gives details of the exact sample matrix, the limit of detection (as reported in the original paper) and comments on the CL reaction used.