Publications by authors named "Maria Restrepo"

Purpose: The Parent-Enhanced Moved by Reading to Accelerate Comprehension in English (Parent EMBRACE) program offers a bilingual parent-training literacy intervention for Latino families. Within the context of shared book reading, the application leverages both the home language and technology to increase parent question-asking during shared reading. Research goals were to (a) examine the potential of the Parent EMBRACE tutoring system at teaching parents to increase the quantity and variety of their question-asking during shared book reading, (b) examine changes to parents' reading attitudes or motivation, and (c) examine whether children's reading attitude is correlated with parent interactions.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

We explored women's narratives about their experiences as victim-survivors of multiple forms of armed conflict violence and intimate partner violence (IPV) in Colombia and examined pathways that clarify the relationships between these two types of violence. Thematic analysis of 47 interviews identified connections that explain how armed conflict influences IPV at all levels of the socio-ecology. At the societal level, armed conflict events amplified patriarchal notions and intensified men's expressions of hypermasculinity through violence.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

"Are you LISTENING?" may be one of the most frequent questions preschoolers hear from their parents and teachers, but can children be taught to listen carefully-and thus better comprehend language-and if so, what changes occur in their brains? Twenty-seven four- and five-year-old children were taught a language simulation strategy to use while listening to stories: first, they practiced moving graphics on an iPad to correspond to the story actions, and then they practiced imagining the movements. Compared to a control condition, children in the intervention answered comprehension questions more accurately when imagining moving the graphics and on a measure of transfer using a new story without any instruction and with only immovable graphics. Importantly, for children in the intervention, the change in comprehension from the first to the sixth day was strongly correlated with changes in EEG mu and alpha desynchronization, suggesting changes in motor and visual processing following the intervention.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF
Article Synopsis
  • Intensive care unit-acquired weakness is a common complication that negatively impacts patients' recovery during and after hospital stays.
  • A clinical trial assessed a multi-component early mobility protocol compared to standard care in ICU patients, focusing on pain control and delirium prevention.
  • Results showed that the intervention group had significantly less muscle weakness and better mobility scores at discharge, although there were no notable differences in ventilation-free days or mortality rates.
View Article and Find Full Text PDF

In a single-step spinning process, we create a thin-walled, robust hollow fiber support made of Torlon polyamide-imide featuring an intermediate polyethyleneimine (PEI) lumen layer to facilitate the integration and covalent attachment of a dense selective layer. Subsequently, interfacial polymerization of m-phenylenediamine and trimesoyl chloride forms a dense selective polyamide (PA) layer on the inside of the hollow fiber. The resulting thin-film composite hollow fiber membranes show high NaCl rejections of around 96% with a pure water permeability of 1.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Purpose: The purpose of this study was to determine the significance and directions of the relationships among oral and manual fine motor skills and language abilities among Spanish-English bilingual children. If such relationships exist, this would support a shared biological influence on motor and language development.

Method: Participants included 56 bilingual children, 24 of whom met criteria for developmental language disorder (DLD), recruited based on teacher concern for language and/or reading comprehension abilities.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Armed conflict exposure is associated with multiple mental health problems. However, more needs to be known about the differential effects of particular modalities of armed conflict violence and war methods on mental health. This study a) examined the modalities of violence employed in the Colombian armed conflict and b) assessed their association with mental health problems in armed conflict survivors.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Introduction: Mazes are linguistic disfluencies such as filled pauses, repetitions, or revisions of grammatical, phonological, or lexical aspects of words that do not contribute to the meaning of a sentence. Bilingual children are believed to increase the numbers of mazes in their native or heritage language, the minority language, as they become more proficient in the second language, the societal language. Mazes may increase over time in bilingual Spanish-speaking children as they become more proficient in English, the societal language in the United States.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF
Article Synopsis
  • The study aimed to examine how radiofrequency (RF) energy from a power toothbrush affects the structure and bacteria in dental plaque, which can lead to better dental hygiene practices.
  • Using ToothWave, researchers treated dental plaque samples with RF energy over different time intervals and compared the results to control samples that didn’t receive RF treatment.
  • Results showed that RF significantly reduced viable bacteria in plaque and altered its structure, indicating that RF energy can disrupt plaque effectively, especially when combined with toothpaste.
View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Purpose: Erosive tooth wear (ETW) is characterized by subsurface demineralization and tooth substance loss with crater formation. Remineralization of subsurface demineralization has previously been demonstrated; however, repair of the eroded surface is still under investigation. This study investigated the effectiveness of mouthwashes containing hydrolyzed wheat protein (HWP) in repairing ETW through promotion of organized crystal growth.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Objectives: To determine factors associated with adherence to COVID-19 mitigation measures, related symptoms and testing, as well as pandemic-related income loss among Venezuelan refugee and migrant adults in urban and border areas of Colombia.

Design: Phone-based respondent-driven sampling SETTING: Bogotá and Norte de Santander, Colombia.

Participants: 605 adult Venezuelan refugees and migrants residing in Bogotá (n=305) and Norte de Santander (n=300), who arrived in Colombia after 2014 and completed the survey in August and September 2020.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Purpose: The purpose of the study was to examine the change in specific English microstructure features according to language ability in preschool Spanish-English dual language learners.

Method: We collected English narratives from 22 Spanish-English dual language learners with typical language development (TD) and 22 Spanish-English dual language learners with developmental language disorder (DLD) at the beginning and end of their first year in Head Start. Children came from Spanish-speaking homes and were exposed to English and Spanish in their preschool classrooms.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Background: Despite favorable short-term outcomes, Fontan palliation is associated with comorbidities and diminished quality of life (QOL) in the years after completion. We hypothesized that poor Fontan hemodynamics and ventricular function are associated with worse QOL.

Methods: This was a single-center study of Fontan survivors aged more than 12 years.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Purpose: We evaluated the efficacy of a reading comprehension intervention with dual language learners (DLLs) with documented English reading comprehension difficulties, half of whom had a developmental language disorder. The intervention EMBRACE (Enhanced Moved by Reading to Accelerate Comprehension in English) required children to move images on an iPad to both improve and demonstrate understanding of multichapter stories. Additionally, we determined the characteristics of students who most benefit from the intervention.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Three-dimensional (3D) neural microtissues are a powerful in vitro paradigm for studying brain development and disease under controlled conditions, while maintaining many key attributes of the in vivo environment. Here, we used primary cortical microtissues to study the effects of neuroinflammation on neural microcircuits. We demonstrated the use of a genetically encoded calcium indicator combined with a novel live-imaging platform to record spontaneous calcium transients in microtissues from day 14-34 in vitro.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

U.S. cities contain unknown numbers of undocumented "manufactured gas" sites, legacies of an industry that dominated energy production during the late-19th and early-20th centuries.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Objective: To improve the ability of psychiatry researchers to build, deploy, maintain, reproduce, and share their own psychophysiological tasks. Psychophysiological tasks are a useful tool for studying human behavior driven by mental processes such as cognitive control, reward evaluation, and learning. Neural mechanisms during behavioral tasks are often studied via simultaneous electrophysiological recordings.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

We examined sixth graders' detection of inconsistencies in narrative and expository passages, contrasting participants who were monolingual speakers (N = 85) or Spanish-English DLLs (N = 94) when recruited in pre-kindergarten (PK). We recorded self-paced reading times and judgments about whether the text made sense, and took an independent measure of word reading. Main findings were that inconsistency detection was better for narratives, for participants who were monolingual speakers in PK, and for those who were better word readers.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Purpose The purpose of this study was to examine whether oral bilingualism could be an advantage for children with hearing loss when learning new words. Method Twenty monolingual and 13 bilingual children with hearing loss were compared with each other and with 20 monolingual and 20 bilingual children with normal hearing on receptive vocabulary and on three word-learning tasks containing nonsense words in familiar (English and Spanish) and unfamiliar (Arabic) languages. We measured word learning on the day of the training and retention the next day using an auditory recognition task.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

This study examines bilingual effects in Spanish-English bilingual children with good maintenance of the minority language. The present study compares the performance of a group of Spanish-monolingual children (MON; =30) with two groups of Spanish-speaking bilingual children (Low English proficiency group: LEP; =36; High English proficiency group, HEP; =36) on the elicited productions of Spanish articles and object clitics. Our results suggest that children with LEP performed significantly lower than MON children of the same age on both articles and clitics in Spanish.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Hyperhidrosis is a condition of excessive sweating beyond physiological parameters that can seriously impair quality of life. This study aims to evaluate the oral oxybutynin effectiveness in hyperhidrosis, besides its tolerance and safety. In a real-life long-term study, 30 patients with primary hyperhidrosis and Hyperhidrosis Disease Severity Scale (HDSS) with score of at least two were submitted to a questionnaire to assess demographic data, HDSS and side effects of oxybutynin.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Purpose Speech-language pathologists have both a professional and ethical responsibility to provide culturally competent services to dual language learners (DLLs). In this tutorial, we recommend that clinicians use a comprehensive assessment of converging evidence to make diagnostic decisions in DLLs in accordance with the American Speech-Language-Hearing Association's Code of Ethics. The content of this tutorial is most appropriate for Spanish-English DLLs between the ages of 4 and 8 years.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

The primary purpose of political, civil, socioeconomic, and cultural rights is to protect the dignity of all human beings. Good mental health and well-being is defined by the "social, psychosocial, economic, and physical environment that enables individuals and populations to live a life of dignity, with full enjoyment of their rights and in the equitable pursuit of their potential." Stigmatization, discrimination, and negative stereotypes are barriers to mental health and well-being.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Purpose Cultural competence is crucial for the successful provision of speech, language, and hearing services. The purpose of this study was to assess and describe gains in cultural awareness, cultural competence, and self-efficacy after service-learning study abroad experiences and to examine whether gains in these areas are related to higher clinical skills ratings in speech-language pathology and audiology students. Method Sixteen speech-language pathology and audiology students participated in two international study abroad experiences (Nicaragua and Malawi).

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Monoterpene indole alkaloids (MIAs) are specialized metabolites synthesized in many plants of the Apocynaceae family including Catharanthus roseus and Rauvolfia sp. MIAs are part of the chemical arsenal that plants evolved to face pet and herbivore attacks, and their high biological activities also confer pharmaceutical properties exploited in human pharmacopeia. Developing robust and straightforward tools to elucidate each step of MIA biosynthetic pathways thus constitutes a prerequisite to the understanding of Apocynaceae defense mechanisms and to the exploitation of MIA cytotoxicity through their production by metabolic engineering.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF