Publication Type: Invited Paper
Abstract: This point of discussion comes from the perspective of the director of African American Studies. These talking points focus on what I have found to be the most significant areas for developing and sustaining the African American Studies program, specifically, defining the program’s direction and coalition building. At the heart of this project is the need to recognize and articulate a philosophical understanding of African American Studies. Beginning with Wahneema Lubiano’s statement, “The imperative of the work of Afro-American cultural discourse is and had been (whether explicitly stated or implicitly engaged) to engage itself in a two-part project:…the necessary reclamation of a history and a culture as a revision of the ‘big lies’ of the colonizer and …the resort to cultural modes of struggle necessary in the face of a global economy that marginalizes third world and minority people,” African American Studies at the University of Alabama has a three-fold mission: intellectual, representational, outreach. This presentation examines this mission in practice.

Publication Type: Individual Poster
Abstract: Background and Aims: Infant-directed speech (ID) has specific prosodic characteristics that are distinct from adult-directed speech (AD). A slower speech rate is one such characteristic, and has often been assumed/claimed to be a universal property of ID.
In English, ID speech has been found to have shorter utterances and longer pauses than AD. Even after pauses are removed, the number of syllables uttered per unit of time has been found to be fewer in ID than AD. When function words and content words are separated, slower speech rates have been found only in content words. To test whether slower speech rate is a universal characteristic of ID, it is necessary to analyze ID from different languages. To date, however, data from other languages is limited. In this paper, we present data from Japanese ID. Japanese provides useful contrast to English since Japanese mothers’ interaction with their infants and their ID speech have been reported to show distinct characteristics from American mothers.

Method: 22 Japanese mothers were brought to the laboratory, and their speech to their 18-24 month-old infants and to an adult experimenter was recorded. Approximately 40 minutes of recordings from each mother, totaling about 14 hours, were phonetically transcribed. From these data, (1) duration of utterances (defined as continuous speech separated by at least 200 msec of pauses), (2) duration of pauses, (3) number of syllables per second excluding pauses, were calculated.

Key Results: The duration of ID utterances was significantly shorter than AD utterances, and ID speech contained significantly more frequent and longer pauses than AD. These are consistent with English ID speech. The number of syllables per unit time was, however, no fewer in ID than AD. Approximately half of the 22 mothers had faster speech rate in AD, while the other half had a faster speech rate in ID. Morphological analysis of the data showed that ID contained significantly fewer case particles or other function words than AD. Thus, it was not the frequent occurrence of function words (with shorter syllables) in the ID speech that contributed to the faster speech rate.

Conclusions: Like other languages, ID speech in Japanese had shorter utterances and more pauses. But the actual speech rate of Japanese mothers, viz., how fast each syllable is articulated, was not any slower in ID than AD. The present data shows that the slower speech rate is NOT a universal characteristic of ID speech.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Review Method: Peer Reviewed
Abstract: In his 1966 masterpiece ˜The good, the bad and the ugly", director Sergio Leone narrated the story of three men who pursue information about the location of a buried treasure of coins. The construction of a common migration law for the EU contains some parallels with the film. First, there are three different actors: the European Parliament (˜the good"), the Council (˜the bad") and the Commission (˜the ugly"). Secondly, there are different evolving alliances and events that change the balance of power among the players.

Historically, the European Parliament consistently argued for a comprehensive and migrant-friendly approach. Nevertheless, its recent acceptance on June 2008 of the so-called Return Directive has cast doubts as to whether this y approach will continue in the future or not. This Directive provides with common standards and procedures in Member States for returning illegally staying third-country nationals. Measures comprise the detention up to 18 months of illegal migrants, the expulsion of unaccompanied minors, the imposition of a re-entry ban for five years and the possibility to expulse migrants to countries which are not their country of origin. Consequently, there has been a tremendous amount of criticism, coming from different International Organizations and States notably from Latin America, directed at the behaviour of the European Parliament in its approval of the Directive negotiated with the Council without introducing a single amendment. Consequently, a question arises: Is the European Parliament becoming bad and ugly or has its involvement improved the Directive in a way which would not have been possible without its participation? An analysis of the final text of the Directive and of the procedure of the negotiations with the Council that led to the adoption of the Directive is necessary. Furthermore, the paper will assess the implications for Latin American irregular migrants by taking a brief look at its implementation in Italy and Spain.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Abstract: Background and Aims: Recent research has shown that hearing-impaired infants with cochlear implants (CIs) do not prefer speech sounds over silence, as measured by looking time at a checkerboard pattern (Houston, Pisoni, Kirk, Ying, & Miyamoto, 2003). The same infants are capable of discriminating these novel speech sounds even though they do not prefer them to silence. Are infants with CIs simply uninterested in speech sounds? It is well known that young infants with normal hearing prefer the highly exaggerated characteristics of infant-directed speech to adult-directed speech. It might also be the case that implanted infants would attend more to speech over silence if the speech were presented in an infant-directed manner. The present study investigated the effects of auditory deprivation and cochlear implantation on infants’ attention to infant-directed speech, adult-directed speech, and silence.
Methods: We tested normal-hearing (NH) 4.5- to 24.5-month-old infants (N = 70) and hearing-impaired infants with CIs (N = 3). Using an infant-controlled visual preference procedure, attention was measured by infants’ looking time to a checkerboard pattern. We presented infants with three conditions: 1) ID speech, in which four women produced four sentences in an infant-directed manner, 2) AD speech, in which the same women produced the same four sentences in an adult-directed manner, and 3) silence.
Key Results: As expected, the results revealed that 4.5- and 12-month-old NH infants looked longer at the checkerboard pattern during ID speech more than AD speech and silence (p < .01). Although 6- and 24-month-old NH infants preferred speech over silence (p < .01), they did not show any preference for ID speech over AD speech. Surprisingly, all three hearing-impaired infants with CIs preferred silence to both ID speech and AD speech.
Conclusions: Most previous studies that have shown preferences for infant-directed over adult-directed speech have been conducted with infants younger than 5 months of age. Perhaps the results of the normal-hearing infants reveal a developmental trend to attend to different properties of speech as they acquire speech perception and language skills (e.g., phonology, lexicon). The unexpected results of the CI infants may be due to their unique speech therapy experiences in which they are trained to explicitly respond to sound, or may be due to other issues associated with hearing-impairment. These important new findings serve to broaden understanding of implanted infants’ abilities to perceive and understand speech.
[Supported by NIH/NIDCD Training Grant T32DC00012 and NIH/NIDCD Research Grant R01DC006235.]

Publication Type: Abstract
Abstract: Objective: American Council on Pharmaceutical Education (ACPE) guidelines require increasing early practice experience (EPE) hours. The goal of this research was to evaluate student perceptions of the effectiveness of self- and preceptor-directed EPE.
Methods: During the third professional year, one EPE activity is provided via a precepted direct patient care experience and a second EPE experience is provided via a self-directed medical record review. For the academic years 2005-06 and 2006-07, the third year class was divided into two groups. Fall semester, one group completed the on-site patient care experience and the second group completed a self-directed medical record review. Spring semester, students switched groups. Students completed surveys before either experience and at the end of each experience to gain insight into their perceptions of the value of each experience, including strengths and weaknesses of the activities, and perceptions of their confidence in making patient specific recommendations.
Results: Initial results for the 2005-06 academic year indicate: 1) Completion of both EPE activities improved student pharmacists’ perceptions of their confidence to make patient specific recommendations. 2) Preceptor-directed EPE was viewed as extremely beneficial by student pharmacists while self-directed EPE was viewed less favorably. 3) 50% of student pharmacists indicated that the sequence of the activities was an important consideration.
Implications: This work in progress will determine how student pharmacists perceive self-directed as compared to preceptor-directed EPE. Results will assist with decisions on placement of EPE activities in our curriculum