The acquisition of abstract words by young infants.

Young infants' learning of words for abstract concepts like 'all gone' and 'eat,' in contrast to their learning of more concrete words like 'apple' and 'shoe,' may follow a relatively protracted developmental course. We examined whether infants know such abstract words. Parents named one of two events shown in side-by-side videos while their 6-16-month-old infants (n=98) watched. On average, infants successfully looked at the named video by 10 months, but not earlier, and infants' looking at the named referent increased robustly at around 14 months. Six-month-olds already understand concrete words in this task (Bergelson & Swingley, 2012). A video-corpus analysis of unscripted mother-infant interaction showed that mothers used the tested abstract words less often in the presence of their referent events than they used concrete words in the presence of their referent objects. We suggest that referential uncertainty in abstract words' teaching conditions may explain the later acquisition of abstract than concrete words, and we discuss the possible role of changes in social-cognitive abilities over the 6-14 month period.

A randomized trial comparing the diagnostic accuracy of visual inspection with acetic acid to Visual Inspection with Lugol's Iodine for cervical cancer screening in HIV-infected women.

Visual inspection with Acetic Acid (VIA) and Visual Inspection with Lugol’s Iodine (VILI) are increasingly recommended in various cervical cancer screening protocols in low-resource settings. Although VIA is more widely used, VILI has been advocated as an easier and more specific screening test. VILI has not been well-validated as a stand-alone screening test, compared to VIA or validated for use in HIV-infected women. We carried out a randomized clinical trial to compare the diagnostic accuracy of VIA and VILI among HIV-infected women. Women attending the Family AIDS Care and Education Services (FACES) clinic in western Kenya were enrolled and randomized to undergo either VIA or VILI with colposcopy. Lesions suspicious for cervical intraepithelial neoplasia 2 or greater (CIN2+) were biopsied. Between October 2011 and June 2012, 654 were randomized to undergo VIA or VILI. The test positivity rates were 26.2% for VIA and 30.6% for VILI (p = 0.22). The rate of detection of CIN2+ was 7.7% in the VIA arm and 11.5% in the VILI arm (p = 0.10). There was no significant difference in the diagnostic performance of VIA and VILI for the detection of CIN2+. Sensitivity and specificity were 84.0% and 78.6%, respectively, for VIA and 84.2% and 76.4% for VILI. The positive and negative predictive values were 24.7% and 98.3% for VIA, and 31.7% and 97.4% for VILI. Among women with CD4+ count < 350, VILI had a significantly decreased specificity (66.2%) compared to VIA in the same group (83.9%, p = 0.02) and compared to VILI performed among women with CD4+ count ≥ 350 (79.7%, p = 0.02). VIA and VILI had similar diagnostic accuracy and rates of CIN2+ detection among HIV-infected women.

At 6-9 months, human infants know the meanings of many common nouns.

It is widely accepted that infants begin learning their native language not by learning words, but by discovering features of the speech signal: consonants, vowels, and combinations of these sounds. Learning to understand words, as opposed to just perceiving their sounds, is said to come later, between 9 and 15 mo of age, when infants develop a capacity for interpreting others' goals and intentions. Here, we demonstrate that this consensus about the developmental sequence of human language learning is flawed: in fact, infants already know the meanings of several common words from the age of 6 mo onward. We presented 6- to 9-mo-old infants with sets of pictures to view while their parent named a picture in each set. Over this entire age range, infants directed their gaze to the named pictures, indicating their understanding of spoken words. Because the words were not trained in the laboratory, the results show that even young infants learn ordinary words through daily experience with language. This surprising accomplishment indicates that, contrary to prevailing beliefs, either infants can already grasp the referential intentions of adults at 6 mo or infants can learn words before this ability emerges. The precocious discovery of word meanings suggests a perspective in which learning vocabulary and learning the sound structure of spoken language go hand in hand as language acquisition begins.