No description available.

Much emphasis has been placed on early detection of developmental delays and disabilities due to increased knowledge regarding the important role early intervention can play in a young child's development. The American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) published policy statements in 2001 and 2006 describing the role of pediatricians in the process of developmental surveillance and screenings. This study seeks to determine the current developmental surveillance and screening practices of pediatricians and family physicians in the southern nine counties of Illinois. Specifically the study aims at looking at to what extent pediatricians/family physicians use standardized developmental screening tools to screen infants and toddlers as described in the AAP recommendations. What methods are pediatricians currently utilizing to screen infants and toddlers (standardized instruments, self made checklists, clinical judgment) In addition, this study looks at to what extent do pediatricians/family physicians follow the AAP's recommendation process for referrals of infants and toddlers identified as at-risk for developmental delays?

<p>Pitch perception depends on two types of cues provided by acoustic stimuli: spectral cues arise from the tonotopic organization of the basilar membrane, while temporal cues are contained within the pattern of action potentials generated in auditory nerve fibers. Filtered iterated rippled noise (IRN) can be used to examine how adults and infants perceive stimuli without resolvable spectral cues. Chapter 2 uses event-related potentials (ERPs) to compare adult perception of IRN and complex harmonic stimuli. Functional imaging studies have revealed a common pitch centre along lateral Heschl’s gyrus, but lack the temporal resolution to index different stages of processing. Chapter 2 reveals differences between feature extraction-related ERP components elicited in response to different pitch-evoking stimuli. However, no differences were observed in the mismatch negativities (MMN), suggesting pitch percepts formed at this stage of processing are independent of stimulus type. Moreover, source estimates for the MMN were consistent with fMRI studies. Chapter 3 demonstrates that infants can perceive the pitch of stimuli that lack resolvable spectral cues. Eight-month-old infants discriminated between 167 Hz and 200 Hz IRN stimuli. However, performance was poor relative to when resolvable spectral cues were present, and required a period of pitch-priming (Experiment 2). Chapter 4 uses ERPs to further examine infants’ perception of IRN. Using an oddball paradigm, 4- and 8-month-old infants were shown to discriminate between 167 Hz and 200 Hz stimuli. However, successful discriminations again required pitch-priming (Experiment 2). Together, these findings suggest that infant pitch percepts are dominated by resolved spectral cues. Infants discriminate between stimuli without resolvable spectral cues, but appear to require a period of priming to do so, at least until 8 months of age. Thus, infant pitch perception may be impaired in challenging listening situations, such as extracting vocal pitch cues in the presence of background noise.</p> / Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

Cognitive scientists have long endeavored to clarify the process by which human beings classify or categorize information. The study discussed here attempts to uncover the underlying nature of the categorization process in children and adults by examining access to information at retrieval. Previous work has suggested that two separate memory systems, memory for the category itself and memory for the specific instance of the category, may exist. This study attempts to further investigate the nature of these two memory systems, their relationship to each other, and their contribution to the process of categorization in children and adults. Using the prototype plus distractor paradigm, children and adults were asked to categorize a set of visual stimuli, and give confidence ratings for their judgments. The findings in this study suggest that memory for category and memory for specific instance are separate and distinct, and can be selectively accessed according to the demands of the task across age groups. Developmental differences are in the form of a U-shaped, non-monotonic path. Findings are consistent with a portrayal of memory as a continuum, with age as one factor in freedom of movement along such a continuum.

No description available.

Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 40-07, Section: B, page: 3438. / Thesis (Ph.D.)--The Florida State University, 1979.

In the Bransford and Franks paradigm, college Freshmen and Sophomores (N = 302) heard tape recorded sentences that were either positively stated or negatively stated (Syntactic Variable) and whose content was semantically compatible or semantically incompatible (semantic variable) with an overall idea set. On acquisition lists, sentences were of one, two, three, and four idea component length, but only one idea component length sentences appeared on recognition lists. Groups differed according to whether the sentences were old (i.e. appeared on both acquisition and recognition lists) or new (i.e. appeared only on recognition list). In Experiment I in which subjects were asked whether they had heard the exact sentence before, the subjects accurately recognized old positively stated, semantically compatible sentences, but they thought that old, negatively and positively stated, semantically incompatible sentences were new. Inversely, subjects incorrectly thought new positively stated semantically compatible sentences were old, but they accurately recognized the new positively and negatively stated, semantically incompatible sentences and the new negatively stated, semantically compatible sentences. In Experiment II, in which subjects were asked whether the sentence meant the same as one heard before, recognition scores closely resembled those observed in Experiment I, suggesting that the subjects were basing their recognition scores upon a meaning criteria in both experiments. The results indicate that subjects construct a semantic memory referent when hearing thematically related sentences, and that the recognition decision is a function of this semantic memory referent and not some artifactually learned size of sentence pools. / Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 43-02, Section: B, page: 0539. / Thesis (Ph.D.)--The Florida State University, 1982.

The purpose of the present study was to explore developmental patterns of negotiation used by young children interacting with their mothers. Participants included a younger cohort of 30 children who were observed between 18 and 30 months of age and an older cohort of 37 children who were observed between 30 and 48 months of age. The children's parents were primarily well-educated, middle to upper-middle class, Caucasians. Behavioral observations in a laboratory toy clean up task was the primary method of documenting child negotiation. Various forms of verbal resistance were coded including resistive episodes (included negotiation and refusal), negotiation and various subcategories of negotiation including the type (on-task or off-task), level (increasing in verbal complexity) and outcome (effective). As predicted, an increase in the frequency of resistive episodes, negotiation and off-task negotiation in the toddler years was followed by a decline frequency of these behaviors in the preschool years. A second pattern revealed that, with age, children used increasingly higher proportions of negotiation. Thus, although children in the older cohort engaged in resistance progressively less often, they were more likely to use negotiation and higher levels of negotiation when they resisted. In regard to caregivers' contributions to negotiation, the findings supported a link between child negotiation and maternal strategies. However, the findings were less conclusive in regard to the relationship between child negotiation and maternal style. / Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 53-12, Section: B, page: 6582. / Major Professor: Janet A. Kistner. / Thesis (Ph.D.)--The Florida State University, 1992.

An instrument was constructed to assess preschool teachers' attitudes toward young children's behaviors and questions regarding sexuality. Two panels of judges consisting of child development professionals and certified sex educators were randomly selected to participate in the instrument development process. The first panel of judges answered open-ended questions from which a 28, multiple choice item scale was developed. A second panel of judges reviewed the multiple choice items for validity. The second panel of judges also ranked the answers according to quality. The judges were asked to review the items and rank the answers twice to determine the consistency of their opinions. Using Aiken's validity and reliability of validity indexes the validity of each item was established. Seven items were judged invalid and deleted. Weights assigned by judges were averaged to compute the answer key. Kendall's coefficient of concordance was utilized to show the agreement of the judges' ranking of the answers. The scale was sent to 128 preschool teachers who work for a nationwide-child care corporation. Eighty-two teachers returned useable scales. Cronbach's coefficient alpha was used to determine interitem reliability which was .54, p < .001. The instrument was designed to be used as a teaching tool. / Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 45-01, Section: B, page: 0379. / Thesis (Ph.D.)--The Florida State University, 1984.

This study was conducted to determine the relationship between certain dimensions of family functioning (cohesion, expressiveness, conflict, organization, independence, control, and general family functioning) and family life cycle stages. The Moos Family Environment Scale and the Family Functioning Index were distributed to a non-random sample of 100 intact families, evenly distributed across five family life cycle stages. Multiple Analysis of Variance, Univariate Analysis of Variance, Scheffe and t tests were performed on the means of average family, male and female scores obtained from the two separate questionnaires, yielding three sets of data for each questionnaire. The results of this analysis showed significant differences between certain life stages on three of the dimensions measured (expression, conflict and control). No significant differences across life stages on the means of the remaining three dimensions and one global measure (cohesion, organization, independence and the Family Functioning Index score) were found at the .05 level. A test of gender difference between the scores on all dependent measures found significant differences only in scores for expression in stage I families. It was concluded that there are some dimensions of family functioning which change across the life cycle of families and others which do not. Discussion of the findings focused on the relative health of the subject families and speculation on reasons for the results obtained. Implications were drawn for theory building about healthy families and clinical work with dysfunctional families. Reference is made to possible social or occupational variables which may affect any future research attempts to clarify family functioning differences across family life cycle stages. / Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 44-07, Section: B, page: 2264. / Thesis (Ph.D.)--The Florida State University, 1983.