生殖系基因治疗技术的伦理论争及其核心问题

目前关于生殖系基因治疗技术的伦理争论仍然十分激烈。这些争论的核心环节在于"父母生育一个健康血缘后代的需要"如何获得道德合理性论证,而目前很多研究在某种程度上忽视了这一问题,因而既不能解释这些伦理争论产生的原因,也不能为解决这一问题提供有效的指导。     

Measuring cognitive factors in speech comprehension: The value of using the Text Reception Threshold test as a visual equivalent of the SRT test

The ability to comprehend speech in noise is influenced by bottom-up auditory and top-down cognitive capacities. Separate examination of these capacities is relevant for various purposes. Speech-Reception-Threshold (SRT) tests measure an individual's ability to comprehend speech. This paper addresses the value of the Text-Reception-Threshold (TRT) test (a visual parallel of the SRT test) to assess the cognitive capacities allocated during speech comprehension. We conducted a secondary data analysis, including 87 normally-hearing adults (aged 18 to 78 years). Correlation coefficients between age, TRT, working memory (Spatial Span) and SRT were examined. The TRT and SRT correlated significantly ( r  =   0.30), supporting the value of TRT in explaining inter-individual differences in SRTs. The relations between age and TRT and between SSP and TRT were non-significant. The results indicate that the current TRT test does not fully cover the cognitive aspects relevant in speech comprehension. Adaptation of the test is required before clinical implementation can be considered.     

Speech errors reflect the phonotactic constraints in recently spoken syllables, but not in recently heard syllables

Adults rapidly learn phonotactic constraints from brief production or perception experience. Three experiments asked whether this learning is modality-specific, occurring separately in production and perception, or whether perception transfers to production. Participant pairs took turns repeating syllables in which particular consonants were restricted to particular syllable positions. Speakers’ errors reflected learning of the constraints present in the sequences they produced, regardless of whether their partner produced syllables with the same constraints, or opposing constraints. Although partial transfer could be induced (Experiment 3), simply hearing and encoding syllables produced by others did not affect speech production to the extent that error patterns were altered. Learning of new phonotactic constraints was predominantly restricted to the modality in which those constraints were experienced.     

Family Focused Treatment for Patients with Bipolar Disorder in Turkey: A Case Series

Family-focused therapy (FFT) is a 9-month, 21-session structured psychoeducational treatment for bipolar disorder. Several US-based studies have documented its efficacy as adjunctive to medication for depression stabilization and relapse prevention. However, FFT has never been applied outside of the United States. The objective of this case series is to explore the applicability of FFT in a non-Western culture. Ten patients with bipolar disorder and their family members attended the 9-month FFT as adjunctive to pharmacotherapy in an outpatient specialty clinic in Izmir, Turkey. Patients improved in Global Assessment of Functioning Scores and Clinical Global Impression Scores from pre- to posttreatment. Case studies are given, which illustrate the differences between Western and non-Western families coping with bipolar disorder. FFT was easily applied to a Turkish sample with few changes in format or focus. Adaptations included substitution of oral for written therapeutic tasks or homework assignments. Randomized controlled trials are needed to test the clinical effectiveness of FFT and other psychosocial interventions in non-Western cultures.     

Relational Drawings in Couple Therapy

In couple therapy sessions, partners often get into long and drawn-out discussions, heavy with pain, resentment, and blame. It is vital for the therapist to avoid becoming entangled in these escalating interactions. In this article, as one way of avoiding these interactions, a protocol is proposed of using relational drawings in couple therapy for opening space for new stories. This approach is strongly rooted in extensive therapeutic experience, as well as in dialogical ideas. Not the content of the partners' imagery is central, but rather the dialogical exchange about the drawings. In particular, the focus of the therapist is on the partners' interactions, their hesitations and their surprises. Working in this way opens space for the partners to reflect on what they experience as crucial in their bond. The protocol is illustrated with two detailed case examples.     

Perceptual Bias in Speech Error Data Collection: Insights from Spanish Speech Errors

This paper studies the reliability and validity of naturalistic speech errors as a tool for language production research. Possible biases when collecting naturalistic speech errors are identified and specific predictions derived. These patterns are then contrasted with published reports from Germanic languages (English, German and Dutch) and one Romance language (Spanish). Unlike findings in the Germanic languages, Spanish speech errors show many patterns which run contrary to those expected from bias: (1) more phonological errors occur between words than within word; (2) word-initial consonants are less likely to participate in errors than word-medial consonants, (3) errors are equally likely in stressed and in unstressed syllables, (4) perseverations are more frequent than anticipations, and (5) there is no trace of a lexical bias. We present a new corpus of Spanish speech errors collected by many theoretically naïve observers (whereas the only corpus available so far was collected by two highly trained theoretically informed observers), give a general overview of it, and use it to replicate previous reports. In spite of the different susceptibility of these methods to bias, results were remarkably similar in both corpora and again contrary to predictions from bias. As a result, collecting speech errors “in the wild” seems to be free of bias to a reasonable extent even when using a multiple-collector method. The observed contrasting patterns between Spanish and Germanic languages arise as true cross-linguistic differences.     

Inherent emotional quality of human speech sounds

During much of the past century, it was widely believed that phonemes—the human speech sounds that constitute words—have no inherent semantic meaning, and that the relationship between a combination of phonemes (a word) and its referent is simply arbitrary. Although recent work has challenged this picture by revealing psychological associations between certain phonemes and particular semantic contents, the precise mechanisms underlying these associations have not been fully elucidated. Here we provide novel evidence that certain phonemes have an inherent, non-arbitrary emotional quality. Moreover, we show that the perceived emotional valence of certain phoneme combinations depends on a specific acoustic feature—namely, the dynamic shift within the phonemes' first two frequency components. These data suggest a phoneme-relevant acoustic property influencing the communication of emotion in humans, and provide further evidence against previously held assumptions regarding the structure of human language. This finding has potential applications for a variety of social, educational, clinical, and marketing contexts.     

The ghost of Christmas future: didn't Scrooge learn to be good? Commentary on Magnuson,McMurray, Tanenhaus,and Aslin (2003)

Magnuson, McMurray, Tanenhaus, and Aslin [Cogn. Sci. 27 (2003) 285] suggest that they have evidence of lexical feedback in speech perception, and that this evidence thus challenges the purely feedforward Merge model [Behav. Brain Sci. 23 (2000) 299]. This evidence is open to an alternative explanation, however, one which preserves the assumption in Merge that there is no lexical–prelexical feedback during on‐line speech processing. This explanation invokes the distinction between perceptual processing that occurs in the short term, as an utterance is heard, and processing that occurs over the longer term, for perceptual learning.     

Spectral factors in the perception of vowel quantity in Icelandic

Previous research has shown that the ratio of vowel to rhyme (vowel + consonant) duration is a major cue for quantity in Icelandic. In particular it serves as a higher-order invariant which enables the listener to disentangle those durational transformations of the speech signal which are "extrinsic" (e. g. due to changes in speaking rate) from those which are "intrinsic" to the phonemic message, involving a change of phonemic quantity. Previous research has been based on speech segment contrasts which are purely durational, involving vowels with a uniform spectrum whether phonemically long or short, such as [a] or [I]. This paper looks at the role of spectral factors in vowels which are spectrally dissimilar in their long and short varieties. It is shown that in these cases the spectral differences can be sufficiently great to override the previously established relational invariant for quantity. The implications of this finding for a model of quantity perception are discussed.     

Some Thoughts on Language Use in Therapy

Drawing on the work of Ludwig Wittgenstein and his own experience as a therapist and educator/trainer, the author describes some of the issues involved in helping therapists to find their way out of various muddles and mazes that are deeply embedded in language.