Effectiveness of Intense Accent Modification Training With Refugees From Burma.

Purpose: This pilot research project sought to determine if an intensive accent modification training program that included See the Sound-Visual Phonics and prosodic gestures improved articulation, prosody, and intelligibility measures in refugees from Burma.

Participants: Four individuals (two men, two women) aged 20-67 participated in this study, and they were recruited from a state organization supporting refugees who have resettled in the United States.

Method: All participants completed the Proficiency in Oral English Communication (POEC) and Assessment of Intelligibility of Dysarthric Speech (AIDS) to measure pre- and posttraining changes.

Aberrant expression of S-SCAM causes the loss of GABAergic synapses in hippocampal neurons.

The duplication and deletion mutations of the S-SCAM/MAGI-2 gene are associated with schizophrenia and infantile spasms, respectively. S-SCAM is a unique synaptic scaffolding protein that localizes to both excitatory and GABAergic synapses. However, consequences of aberrant S-SCAM expression on GABAergic synapses is little studied.

Isolation of Mouse Epidermal Keratinocytes and Their In Vitro Clonogenic Culture.

The protocol described here is a reliable method of harvesting primary keratinocytes from adult female mice (54 ± 2 days old) yielding approximately 30 x 10 viable cells per mouse. Primary adult mouse keratinocytes are harvested from the dorsal skin of female mice. Male mice (~6 weeks old) can be used for keratinocyte harvesting depending on the requirements of the experiment.