Referential transparency of verbs in child-directed input by Japanese and American caregivers.

Children acquiring Japanese differ from those acquiring English with regard to the rate at which verbs are learned (Fernald & Morikawa, ). One possible explanation is that Japanese caregivers use verbs in referentially transparent contexts, which facilitate the form-meaning link. We examined this hypothesis by assessing differences in verb usage by Japanese and American caregivers during dyadic play with their infants (5-22 months).

A call for compassionate opioid overdose response.

High dose and long-acting opioid overdose reversal drugs can precipitate withdrawal in people who are opioid dependent. Products recently brought to market for community use in the United States (US) have drawn international concern because of their increased risk of withdrawal. At the March 18-19, 2024, Compassionate Overdose Response Summit & Naloxone Dosing Meeting, a panel of harm reduction experts issued the following call to action: 1) people who use drugs should be directly involved in decisions regarding the research, development, selection, and distribution of opioid overdose reversal products; 2) regulatory agencies and pharmaceutical manufacturers should carefully consider and communicate the risk and duration of withdrawal associated with higher dose and longer-acting opioid antagonists; 3) take-home naloxone kits should include at least two doses of an intramuscular (IM) product containing 0.

Examples From Three Leader States.

While the federal government continues to pursue a punitive "War on Drugs," some states have adopted evidence-based, human-focused approaches to reducing drug-related harm. This article discusses recent legal changes in three states that can serve as models for others interested in reducing, rather than increasing, individual and community harm.

Parent American Sign Language skills correlate with child-but not toddler-ASL vocabulary size.

Most deaf children have hearing parents who do not know a sign language at birth, and are at risk of limited language input during early childhood. Studying these children as they learn a sign language has revealed that timing of first-language exposure critically shapes language outcomes. But the input deaf children receive in their first language is not only delayed, it is much more variable than most first language learners, as many learn their first language from parents who are themselves new sign language learners.

Learning a Sign Language Does Not Hinder Acquisition of a Spoken Language.

Purpose: The purpose of this study is to determine whether and how learning American Sign Language (ASL) is associated with spoken English skills in a sample of ASL-English bilingual deaf and hard of hearing (DHH) children.

Method: This cross-sectional study of vocabulary size included 56 DHH children between 8 and 60 months of age who were learning both ASL and spoken English and had hearing parents. English and ASL vocabulary were independently assessed via parent report checklists.

Adjective position and referential efficiency in American Sign Language: Effects of adjective semantics, sign type and age of sign exposure.

Previous research has pointed at communicative efficiency as a possible constraint on language structure. Here we investigated adjective position in American Sign Language (ASL), a language with relatively flexible word order, to test the incremental efficiency hypothesis, according to which both speakers and signers try to produce efficient referential expressions that are sensitive to the word order of their languages. The results of three experiments using a standard referential communication task confirmed that deaf ASL signers tend to produce absolute adjectives, such as color or material, in prenominal position, while scalar adjectives tend to be produced in prenominal position when expressed as lexical signs, but in postnominal position when expressed as classifiers.

Do parents modify child-directed signing to emphasize iconicity?

Iconic signs are overrepresented in the vocabularies of young deaf children, but it is unclear why. It is possible that iconic signs are easier for children to learn, but it is also possible that adults use iconic signs in child-directed signing in ways that make them more learnable, either by using them more often than less iconic signs or by lengthening them. We analyzed videos of naturalistic play sessions between parents and deaf children ( = 24 dyads) aged 9-60  months.

Hearing parents learning American Sign Language with their deaf children: a mixed-methods survey.

Hearing parents with deaf children face difficult decisions about what language(s) to use with their child. Sign languages such as American Sign Language (ASL) are fully accessible to deaf children, yet most hearing parents are not proficient in ASL prior to having a deaf child. Parents are often discouraged from learning ASL based in part on an assumption that it will be too difficult, yet there is little evidence supporting this claim.

Legality of drug checking equipment in the United States: A systematic legal analysis.

Background: Fentanyl and fentanyl analogs are increasingly prevalent in the nation's illicit drug supply. While fentanyl-related deaths were previously confined largely to states east of the Mississippi, they are now increasing rapidly throughout much of the United States. Contaminants other than fentanyl are also present in illicitly obtained drugs.

Mapping Word to World in ASL: Evidence from a Human Simulation Paradigm.

Across languages, children map words to meaning with great efficiency, despite a seemingly unconstrained space of potential mappings. The literature on how children do this is primarily limited to spoken language. This leaves a gap in our understanding of sign language acquisition, because several of the hypothesized mechanisms that children use are visual (e.

Prevalence rates of anxiety, depressive, and eating pathology symptoms between the pre- and peri-COVID-19 eras: A meta-analysis.

COVID-19 emerged in 2019 and has since killed more than two and a half million people worldwide. Several studies have investigated the role of COVID-19 on the prevalence of mental health outcomes, with general findings indicating elevated rates of mental health issues as compared to the pre-COVID-19 era. However, the effect of specific demographic features is less clear.

Flexible fast-mapping: Deaf children dynamically allocate visual attention to learn novel words in American Sign Language.

Word learning in young children requires coordinated attention between language input and the referent object. Current accounts of word learning are based on spoken language, where the association between language and objects occurs through simultaneous and multimodal perception. In contrast, deaf children acquiring American Sign Language (ASL) perceive both linguistic and non-linguistic information through the visual mode.

Lexical Recognition in Deaf Children Learning American Sign Language: Activation of Semantic and Phonological Features of Signs.

Children learning language efficiently process single words, and activate semantic, phonological, and other features of words during recognition. We investigated lexical recognition in deaf children acquiring American Sign Language (ASL) to determine how perceiving language in the visual-spatial modality affects lexical recognition. Twenty native- or early-exposed signing deaf children (ages 4 to 8 years) participated in a visual world eye-tracking study.

Nouns and verbs in parent input in American Sign Language during interaction among deaf dyads.

Parent input during interaction with young children varies across languages and contexts with regard to the relative number of words from different lexical categories, particularly nouns and verbs. Previous work has focused on spoken language input. Little is known about the lexical composition of parent input in American Sign Language (ASL).

Deaf Children of Hearing Parents Have Age-Level Vocabulary Growth When Exposed to American Sign Language by 6 Months of Age.

Objective: To examine whether children who are deaf or hard of hearing who have hearing parents can develop age-level vocabulary skills when they have early exposure to a sign language.

Study Design: This cross-sectional study of vocabulary size included 78 children who are deaf or hard of hearing between 8 and 68 months of age who were learning American Sign Language (ASL) and had hearing parents. Children who were exposed to ASL before 6 months of age or between 6 and 36 months of age were compared with a reference sample of 104 deaf and hard of hearing children who have parents who are deaf and sign.

Laws limiting prescribing and dispensing of opioids in the United States, 1989-2019.

Background And Aims: Opioid overdose is a public health emergency in the United States. In an attempt to reduce potentially inappropriate opioid prescribing, many US states have adopted legal restrictions on the ability of medical professionals to prescribe or dispense opioids for pain. This review describes the major elements of relevant US state laws and the ways in which they have changed over time.