The effects of phonological and morphological training on speech perception scores and grammatical judgments in deaf and hard-of-hearing children

Seventeen primary school deaf and hard-of-hearing children were given two types of training for 9 weeks each. Phonological training involved practice of /s, z, t, d/ in word final position in monomorphemic words. Morphological training involved learning and practicing the rules for forming third-person singular, present tense, past tense, and plurals. The words used in the two training types were different (monomorphemic or polymorphemic) but both involved word final /s, z, t, d/. Grammatical judgments were tested before and after training using short sentences that were read aloud by the child (or by the presenter if the child was unable to read them). Perception was tested with 150 key words in sentences using the trained morphemes and phonemes in word final position. Grammatical judgments for sentences involving the trained morphemes improved significantly after each type of training. Both types of training needed to be completed before a significant improvement was found for speech perception scores. The results suggest that both phonological and morphological training are beneficial in improving speech perception and grammatical performance of deaf and hard-of-hearing children and that both types of training were required to obtain the maximum benefit.

Importance of administrative transparency in the correctional context : knowing the rules

As a class, prisoners are vulnerable to numerous privations while in custody. In particular, prisoners are at a distinct disadvantage in terms of being able to control the central features of their daily lives. The lives of prisoners are circumscribed by numerous rules and regulations and their administration by correctional administrators. It is important that prisoners are aware of the content of the rules that govern their existence and the precise basis upon which power is exercised over them. In a recent freedom of information application in Victoria, a prisoner sought a personal copy of the rules that would govern his life in that particular institution. The prison authorities refused that request. The prisoner then appealed that decision to the Victorian Civil and Administrative Tribunal and was unsuccessful. It is contended that the analysis used in that case was flawed through the misreading of the nature of correctional environment and the fundamental importance of transparency in such a context.

An optimal strategy for extracting probabilistic rules by combining rough sets and genetic algorithm

This paper proposes an optimal strategy for extracting probabilistic rules from databases. Two inductive learning-based statistic measures and their rough set-based definitions: accuracy and coverage are introduced. The simplicity of a rule emphasized in this paper has previously been ignored in the discovery of probabilistic rules. To avoid the high computational complexity of rough-set approach, some rough-set terminologies rather than the approach itself are applied to represent the probabilistic rules. The genetic algorithm is exploited to find the optimal probabilistic rules that have the highest accuracy and coverage, and shortest length. Some heuristic genetic operators are also utilized in order to make the global searching and evolution of rules more efficiently. Experimental results have revealed that it run more efficiently and generate probabilistic classification rules of the same integrity when compared with traditional classification methods.

Rules and resources: a structuration approach to understanding the coordination of childrens`s inpatient health care

Aim. This paper presents findings from a multi-method study exploring the process of care coordination in children's inpatient health care.

Background. Existing work on care coordination is typified by 'black-box' type studies that measure inputs to and outcomes of care coordination roles and practices, without addressing the process of coordination.

Method. Using questionnaires, interviews and observation to collect data in multiple sites in the United Kingdom and Denmark between 1999 and 2005, the study gathered the perceptions of staff and compared these with observed practice. Giddens' structuration theory was used to provide an analytical and explanatory framework.

Findings. Current care coordination practice is diverse and inconsistent. It involves a wide range of clinical and non-clinical staff, many of whom perceive a lack of clarity about who should perform specific coordination activities. Staff draw upon a wide range of different material and non-material resources in coordinating care, the use of which is governed by largely tacit and informal rules.

Conclusions. Care coordination can be usefully conceptualized as a 'structurated' process – one that is continually produced and reproduced by staff using rules and resources to 'instantiate' or bring about care coordination through action. Potentially negative implications of this are manifested in diversity and inconsistency in care coordination practice. However, positive aspects such as the opportunity this provides to tailor care to the needs of the individual patient can be realized.

All that is dark can become white: the rules of the game in Bend it Like Beckham

The “light” and uplifting film, Bend it Like Beckham (2002), is deconstructed to expose its passive ideologies that equate physical darkness with regressive cultural and social outlooks and practices. While Bend it Like Beckham constructs itself as a modern fairy tale of a girl achieving her dream of athletic opportunity and success (with a nice side-dish of romance), the film’s privileging of whiteness is both a cultural and a gendered norm that must be desired and achieved before that dream may come true.

Priming vs. rhyming : orthographic and phonological representations in the left and right hemispheres

The right cerebral hemisphere has long been argued to lack phonological processing capacity. Recently, however, a sex difference in the cortical representation of phonology has been proposed, suggesting discrete left hemisphere lateralization in males and more distributed, bilateral representation of function in females. To evaluate this hypothesis and shed light on sex differences in the phonological processing capabilities of the left and right hemispheres, we conducted two experiments. Experiment 1 assessed phonological activation implicitly (masked homophone priming), testing 52 (M = 25, F = 27; mean age 19.23 years, SD 1.64 years) strongly right-handed participants. Experiment 2 subsequently assessed the explicit recruitment of phonology (rhyme judgement), testing 50 (M = 25, F = 25; mean age 19.67 years, SD 2.05 years) strongly right-handed participants. In both experiments the orthographic overlap between stimulus pairs was strictly controlled using DICE [Brew, C., & McKelvie, D. (1996). Word-pair extraction for lexicography. In K. Oflazer & H. Somers (Eds.), Proceedings of the second international conference on new methods in language processing (pp. 45–55). Ankara: VCH], such that pairs shared (a) high orthographic and phonological similarity (e.g., not–KNOT); (b) high orthographic and low phonological similarity (e.g., pint–HINT); (c) low orthographic and high phonological similarity (e.g., use–EWES); or (d) low orthographic and low phonological similarity (e.g., kind–DONE). As anticipated, high orthographic similarity facilitated both left and right hemisphere performance, whereas the left hemisphere showed greater facility when phonological similarity was high. This difference in hemispheric processing of phonological representations was especially pronounced in males, whereas female performance was far less sensitive to visual field of presentation across both implicit and explicit phonological tasks. As such, the findings offer behavioural evidence indicating that though both hemispheres are capable of orthographic analysis, phonological processing is discretely lateralised to the left hemisphere in males, but available in both the left and right hemisphere in females.