Assessment of Quality of Outcomes within a Local United Way Organization: Implications for Sustaining System Level Change

This paper provides a historical case study of efforts to implement and sustain "outcomes based funding" in a large United Way system in Central Ohio. The case study describes how community practitioners employed specific strategies to promote sustainability. The use of these strategies corresponds to several techniques suggested in the sustainability literature. This case study is offered as a means of considering how practitioners helped sustain the shift to outcomes based funding within the United Way system. In addition, this case study demonstrates how skills related to implementation and sustainability might be transferred to other situations where practitioners are interested in promoting change within large organizations and/or communities. The authors suggest that skills related to implementation and sustainability are essential to community practice.     

Moving up from the segment: a comment on Aichert and Ziegler's syllable frequency and syllable structure in apraxia of speech, Brain and Language, 88, 148-159, 2004

In a recent article, explore whether apraxia of speech (AOS) can be explained by disruption of the phonetic plans for high frequency syllables. This approach is a hybrid one, combining the notion of a mental syllabary with an explanation that the impairment in AOS results from reduced access to supra-segmental phonetic plans. In this commentary, we explore Aichert and Ziegler's approach and suggest that in testing a hybrid model it is important to be cautious in identifying implications for the two source models.     

The effects of distributional learning on rats' sensitivity to phonetic information

During the first year of life, infants show decreased sensitivity to phonetic differences not used in their native language and increased sensitivity to the differences that are used. It has been shown that this change in speech perception is a function of the distributional properties of the input. The present study explores whether the mechanism responsible for the developmental changes regarding the organization of phonetic categories is a general mechanism shared with other animals. The results demonstrate that the distributional exposure to a phonetic continuum affects the subsequent discrimination of these phonemes in rats, indicating that the ability to use distributional cues to change the phonetic category structure extends beyond humans.     

Active masks and active inhibition: a comment on Lleras and Enns (2004) and on Verleger, Jaskowski, Aydemir, van der Lubbe, and Groen (2004)

Verleger, Jaskowski, Aydemir, van der Lubbe, and Groen and Lleras and Enns have argued that negative compatibility effects (NCEs) obtained with masked primes do not reflect self-inhibition processes in motor control. Instead, NCEs are assumed to reflect activation of the response opposite to the prime, triggered by the presence of prime/targetlike features in the mask. Thus, no NCEs should be elicited when masks do not contain such task-relevant features. In Experiments 1 and 3, the authors demonstrate that NCEs can be obtained when masks contain only irrelevant features. Experiment 2 demonstrates that positive compatibility effects (PCEs) will occur with such masks when masked primes are presented peripherally. These results are inconsistent with the mask-induced activation accounts but are in line with the self-inhibition hypothesis of the NCE. Although perceptual interactions and mask-induced motor activations may contribute to NCEs under certain conditions, they cannot provide a full explanation for these effects.