Visual cortical activity before and after cochlear implantation: A follow up ERP prospective study in deaf children.

ERPs were recorded in response to presentation of static colored patterned stimuli in 25 children (19 to 80months of age at cochlear implantation, CI) with very early prelingual profound deafness (PreLD), 21 postlingual profoundly deaf children (PostLD) (34 to 180months of age at CI) and gender- and age-matched control hearing children. Recording sessions were performed before CI, then 6 and 24months after CI. Results showed that prelingual and, at a lesser degree, postlingual auditory deprivation altered cortical visual neural activity associated to colored shapes from both P1 and N1 cortical processing stages.

The perception of speech modulation cues in lexical tones is guided by early language-specific experience.

A number of studies showed that infants reorganize their perception of speech sounds according to their native language categories during their first year of life. Still, information is lacking about the contribution of basic auditory mechanisms to this process. This study aimed to evaluate when native language experience starts to noticeably affect the perceptual processing of basic acoustic cues [i.

Infants Discriminate Voicing and Place of Articulation With Reduced Spectral and Temporal Modulation Cues.

Purpose: This study assessed the role of spectro-temporal modulation cues in the discrimination of 2 phonetic contrasts (voicing and place) for young infants.

Method: A visual-habituation procedure was used to assess the ability of French-learning 6-month-old infants with normal hearing to discriminate voiced versus unvoiced (/aba/-/apa/) and labial versus dental (/aba/-/ada/) stop consonants. The stimuli were processed by tone-excited vocoders to degrade frequency-modulation cues while preserving: (a) amplitude-modulation (AM) cues within 32 analysis frequency bands, (b) slow AM cues only (<16 Hz) within 32 bands, and (c) AM cues within 8 bands.

[Speech perception in the first two years].

The development of speech perception relies upon early auditory capacities (i.e. discrimination, segmentation and representation).

The role of spectro-temporal fine structure cues in lexical-tone discrimination for French and Mandarin listeners.

The role of spectro-temporal modulation cues in conveying tonal information for lexical tones was assessed in native-Mandarin and native-French adult listeners using a lexical-tone discrimination task. The fundamental frequency (F0) of Thai tones was either degraded using an 8-band vocoder that reduced fine spectral details and frequency-modulation cues, or extracted and used to modulate the F0 of click trains. Mandarin listeners scored lower than French listeners in the discrimination of vocoded lexical tones.

Perception of speech modulation cues by 6-month-old infants.

Purpose: The capacity of 6-month-old infants to discriminate a voicing contrast (/aba/-/apa/) on the basis of amplitude modulation (AM) cues and frequency modulation (FM) cues was evaluated.

Method: Several vocoded speech conditions were designed to either degrade FM cues in 4 or 32 bands or degrade AM in 32 bands. Infants were familiarized to the vocoded stimuli for a period of either 1 or 2 min.

Phonetic processing during the acquisition of new words in 3-to-6-year-old French-speaking deaf children with cochlear implants.

Unlabelled: The present study explores phonetic processing in deaf children with cochlear implants (CIs) when they have to learn phonetically similar words. Forty-six 34-to-78-month-old French-speaking deaf children with CIs were tested on 16 different trials. In each trial, they were first trained with two word-object pairings, and then a third object was presented and labeled with one of the familiar words.

[Technological innovation and healthcare professionals' workloads: an ambiguous relationship].

This is an integrative review with the aim of tracing the scientific production concerning the influence of technological innovation in health care professionals' workloads. Fifty-seven (57) publications presented from 2004 to 2009 were selected from the LILACS and PubMed databases. In the selected studies field research using qualitative approaches and carried out in hospitals predominated.

Perception of speech features by French-speaking children with cochlear implants.

Purpose: The present study investigates the perception of phonological features in French-speaking children with cochlear implants (CIs) compared with normal-hearing (NH) children matched for listening age.

Method: Scores for discrimination and identification of minimal pairs for all features defining consonants (e.g.

Six-month-old infants discriminate voicing on the basis of temporal envelope cues (L).

Young deaf children using a cochlear implant develop speech abilities on the basis of speech temporal-envelope signals distributed over a limited number of frequency bands. A Headturn Preference Procedure was used to measure looking times in 6-month-old, normal-hearing infants during presentation of repeating or alternating sequences composed of different tokens of /aba/and /apa/ processed to retain envelope information below 64 Hz while degrading temporal fine structure cues. Infants attended longer to the alternating sequences, indicating that they perceive the voicing contrast on the basis of envelope cues alone in the absence of fine spectral and temporal structure information.

Reading and reading-related skills in children using cochlear implants: prospects for the influence of cued speech.

We assessed the reading and reading-related skills (phonemic awareness and phonological short-term memory) of deaf children fitted with cochlear implants (CI), either exposed to cued speech early (before 2 years old) (CS+) or never (CS-). Their performance was compared to that of 2 hearing control groups, 1 matched for reading level (RL), and 1 matched for chronological age (CA). Phonemic awareness and phonological short-term memory were assessed respectively through a phonemic similarity judgment task and through a word span task measuring phonological similarity effects.

Word learning and phonetic processing in preschool-age children.

Consonants and vowels have been shown to play different relative roles in different processes, including retrieving known words from pseudowords during adulthood or simultaneously learning two phonetically similar pseudowords during infancy or toddlerhood. The current study explores the extent to which French-speaking 3- to 5-year-olds exhibit a so-called "consonant bias" in a task simulating word acquisition, that is, when learning new words for unfamiliar objects. In Experiment 1, the to-be-learned words differed both by a consonant and a vowel (e.

Phonetic specificity in early lexical acquisition: new evidence from consonants in coda positions.

Use of precise consonantal information while learning new words has been established for onset consonants in previous studies, which showed that infants as young as 16 to 20 months of age can simultaneously learn two new words that differ only by a syllable-initial consonant (Havy & Nazzi, 2009; Nazzi, 2005; Nazzi & New, 2007; Werker, Fennell, Corcoran, & Stager, 2002). However, there is no systematic evidence to show whether specific phonetic information in other positions within the syllable can be used while learning new words. To the contrary, Nazzi (2005) found that when tested using the same task, 20-month-olds can learn two words that differ only by a consonant, but fail to do so if they differ only by a vowel, leaving open the possibility that specificity is limited to syllable-onset positions.

A perceptual equivalent of the labial-coronal effect in the first year of life.

Several studies have investigated infants' acquisition of the phonological (prosodic or phonotactic) regularities of their native language at the lexical level, by showing that infants around 910 months of age start preferring lists of words that have a more versus less frequent phonological structure. The present study investigates whether a similar acquisition pattern of preferences can be found for labial-coronal (LC) words over coronal-labial (CL) words, a bias classically interpreted in terms of production constraints but that could also be explained in terms of relative frequency of frequent LC and less frequent CL words in many languages including French, the language used here. Results show that a preference for bisyllabic LC words emerges between 6 and 10 months of age in French-learning infants (Experiment 1), and that the non-preference at 6 months is not due to the infants' inability to discriminate the two lists of words (Experiment 2).

Discrimination of speech sounds based upon temporal envelope versus fine structure cues in 5- to 7-year-old children.

Purpose: To investigate the capacity of young children and adults with normal hearing to discriminate speech on the basis of either relatively slow (temporal envelope, E) or fast (temporal fine structure, TFS) auditory cues.

Method: Vowel-consonant-vowel nonsense disyllables were processed to preserve either the E or the TFS information in 16 adjacent frequency bands. The band signals were then recombined and resulting stimuli were presented for discrimination to adults or 5-, 6-, and 7-year-old children using an odd-ball paradigm.

Infantile hemangiomas are arrested in an early developmental vascular differentiation state.

Infantile hemangiomas, the most common tumors of infancy, are vascular tumors characterized by rapid proliferation of endothelial cells during the first few months of postnatal life followed by slow spontaneous involution, whose molecular pathogenesis remains unclear. The recent identification of developmental expression of vascular lineage-specific markers prompted us to characterize infantile hemangiomas for the expression of lymphatic endothelial hyaluronan receptor-1 (LYVE-1), Prox-1, CD31 and CD34. We found that LYVE-1, a specific marker for normal and tumor-associated lymphatic vessels, was strongly expressed in tumor cells of infantile hemangiomas (n=28), but not in other vascular tumors including pyogenic granulomas (n=19, P<0.

[Interdisciplinary education for health: planning nurse undergraduate programs].

Interdisciplinary teaching as an educational alternative which allows for global education of individuals who are also professionals is shown in this article as an educational planning report organized by the undergraduate Nursing program from Regional University of Blumenau (FURB), located in the city of Blumenau, in the state of Santa Catarina, Brazil. We show this didactic-pedagogical perspective from a theoretical perspective that presents ethics as an alternative for an education process aimed at the global community. This is a didactic proceeding supported by the methodology of "culture circles", proposed by Paulo Freire.

Tumor lymphangiogenesis: a novel prognostic indicator for cutaneous melanoma metastasis and survival.

Malignant melanomas of the skin are distinguished by their propensity for early metastatic spread via lymphatic vessels to regional lymph nodes, and lymph node metastasis is a major determinant for the staging and clinical management of melanoma. However, the importance of tumor-induced lymphangiogenesis for lymphatic melanoma spread has remained unclear. We investigated whether tumor lymphangiogenesis occurs in human malignant melanomas of the skin and whether the extent of tumor lymphangiogenesis may be related to the risk for lymph node metastasis and to patient survival, using double immunostains for the novel lymphatic endothelial marker LYVE-1 and for the panvascular marker CD31.

A critical role of placental growth factor in the induction of inflammation and edema formation.

Angiogenesis is a prominent feature of a number of inflammatory human diseases, including rheumatoid arthritis, psoriasis, and cutaneous delayed-type hypersensitivity (DTH) reactions. Up-regulation of placental growth factor (PlGF), a member of the vascular endothelial growth factor (VEGF) family, has been found in several conditions associated with pathologic angiogenesis; however, its distinct role in the control of angiogenesis has remained unclear. To directly investigate the biologic function of PlGF in cutaneous inflammation and angiogenesis, DTH reactions were investigated in the ear skin of wild-type mice, of PlGF-deficient mice, and of transgenic mice with targeted overexpression of human PlGF-2 in epidermal keratinocytes, driven by a keratin 14 promoter expression construct.

Language discrimination by newborns: toward an understanding of the role of rhythm.

Three experiments investigated the ability of French newborns to discriminate between sets of sentences in different foreign languages. The sentences were low-pass filtered to reduce segmental information while sparing prosodic information. Infants discriminated between stress-timed English and mora-timed Japanese (Experiment 1) but failed to discriminate between stress-timed English and stress-timed Dutch (Experiment 2).

Do weak syllables count for newborns?

Does the newborn's well-known sensitivity to human speech include awareness of the distinction between strong and weak syllables, as has been shown for older infants and adults? The non-nutritive high-amplitude sucking paradigm was used to investigate whether weak syllables play a role in neonate perceptual representation. Two-day-old French infants were tested on their capacity to discriminate phonetically highly varied words containing syllables with various strong vowels versus the weak, reduced vowel schwa in natural, isolated English words. Twenty infants heard lists of weak-strong and lists of strong words (e.

Organization and discrimination of repeating sound sequences by newborn infants.

A study was conducted to determine whether newborn infants organize auditory streams in a manner similar to that of adults. A series of three experiments investigated the ability of 3- to 4-day-old infants to discriminate repeated rising and falling four-tone sequences in two configurations of source timbre and spatial position. It was hypothesized that if the sequences were organized into two auditory streams on the basis of timbre and spatial position, one of the configurations should be discriminable from its reversal while the other should not.

High-amplitude sucking and newborns: the quest for underlying mechanisms.

This study seeks to determine whether newborns are sensitive to an operant-conditioning task involving an unprepared relation between a response and a stimulus. The High-Amplitude Sucking procedure, which is based on such a relation by reinforcing nonnutritive sucking with auditory stimulation, was used. In order to verify that newborns learn the contingency between sucks and sounds in the HAS paradigm, three experiments were carried out.

Newborns discriminate the rhythm of multisyllabic stressed words.

Three experiments were run to test whether newborns were able to discriminate different stress patterns in multisyllabic stressed Italian words that varied both in consonants and in number of syllables. A high-amplitude sucking procedure was adopted in which the experimental group heard 2 sets of stimuli alternating minute by minute, whereas the control group heard only a single set of stimuli. The results showed that stress patterns were discriminated in 2 disyllabic phonetically unvaried words (Experiment 1), in 2 trisyliabic consonant-varied words (Experiment 2), and in 2 sets of disyllabic words varied in consonants within and between words (Experiment 3).

Morae and syllables: rhythmical basis of speech representations in neonates.

Are neonates sensitive to the different rhythmical units that are used in different spoken languages? And do they use these units to represent and discriminate multisyllabic words? In the present study, we used the High-Amplitude Sucking procedure to test whether 3-day-old French infants discriminate lists of Japanese words. The lists of words differed either in the number of syllabic units or in the number of sub-syllabic units such as morae. In Experiment 1, infants heard bisyllabic versus trisyllabic words (e.