Flooding in imagination vs flooding in vivo: A comparison with agoraphobics

In this investigation of agoraphobic patients, 3 different flooding procedures were compared: (1) prolonged exposure in vivo, (2) flooding in the imagination by a ‘live’ therapist and (3) a combination of flooding in the imagination and flooding in vivo. After an intermediate-test all clients were treated by the self-observation method, with a minimum of therapeutic intervention. Assessments were made at the beginning of treatment, during and at the end of treatment and at the follow-up one month later. Assessments were carried out by the therapist (in vivo measurement; phobic anxiety and avoidance scales; anxious mood and panic), by an independent observer (idem. minus in vivo measurement) and by the client (phobic anxiety and avoidance scales; FSS; social anxiety scale; SDS and I-E scale). Prolonged exposure in vivo plainly proved to be superior to flooding in the imagination. Combined flooding resulted in a greater improvement than flooding in the imagination, though only on the therapist's ratings. Self-observation did not add much to the effect of prolonged exposure in vivo and of flooding combined whereas self-observation, preceded by flooding in the imagination, resulted in a significant improvement on nearly all the variables.     

Phonotactic knowledge of word boundaries and its use in infant speech perception

The development of a lexicon critically depends on the infant’s ability to identify wordlike units in the auditory speech input. The present study investigated at what age infants become sensitive to language-specific phonotactic features that signal word boundaries and to what extent they are able to use this knowledgeto segment speech input. Experiment 1 showed that infants at the age of 9 months were sensitive to the phonotactic structure of word boundaries when wordlike units were presented in isolation. Experiments 2 to 5 demonstrated that this sensitivity was present even when critical items were presented in context, although only under certain conditions. Preferences for legal over illegal word boundary clusters were found when critical items were embedded in two identical syllables, keeping language processing requirements and attentional requirements low. Experiment 6 replicated the findings of Experiment 1. Experiment 7 was a low-pass-filtered version of Experiment 6 that left the prosody of the stimulus items intact while removing most of the distinctive phonotactic cues. As expected, no listening preference for legal over illegal word boundary clusters was found in this experiment. This clearly suggests that the preferential patterns observed can be attributed to the infants’ sensitivity to phonotactic constraints on word boundaries in a given language and not to suprasegmental cues.     

Sensitivity to inflectional morphology in aphasia: A real-time processing perspective

The present study investigates Broca's aphasics' sensitivity to morphological information in an on-line task. German is used as the test language because it is highly inflected. Results from two word monitoring experiments show first that Broca's patients like normal controls are sensitive to the presence of a contextually incorrect inflection. Contrary to normals, they are, however, not sensitive to the absence of an obligatory inflection even when its presence is syntactically highly constrained. Second, they reveal that Broca's aphasics are only sensitive to the presence of an incorrect inflection when it functions as a marker of lexical category (noun vs. verb) and not when it functions as a diacritical marker (second person singular vs. third person singular). The results are taken as evidence for the claim that Broca's aphasics are impaired in the ability to process the full syntactic information encoded in closed class elements in a fast, automatic, and obligatory way.     

Roles of Genetic Counselors in South Africa

Genetic counseling is a growing health profession in South Africa. Training (set up in 1988) and registration are in place, but job creation remains challenging. The aim of the present study was to investigate the roles played by genetic counselors in the provision of genetic services, in South Africa. A questionnaire comprising items on the types of roles they performed was constructed and counselors were asked to make the log-books, in which they recorded their daily counseling activities, available. A check list was drawn up so that relevant information could be collected systematically from these log-books. Then departmental statistics were accessed from the two universities providing genetic services and genetic counselor training. Structured interviews were conducted with the genetic counselors (16 of 23 participated), and data were collected from their completed questionnaires, log-books and the departmental statistics, for the years 2007 and 2008. These data were analyzed and the findings showed that the counselors counseled about one third (39 %) of all the cases seen at genetic clinics per annum, and the total numbers were increasing. They counseled for 57 different genetic disorders, and their clients represented the range of local ethnic groups. They also had educational, research, marketing and administrative roles. They expected to expand these roles and advance the profession in future. Genetic counselors are versatile, playing several significant roles. As these become better recognized, demand for their services should increase, jobs should be created and the service expanded.