Thesis (M.S.)--University of Michigan, 1981.

Thesis (M.S.)--University of Wisconsin--Madison, 1988. / Typescript. eContent provider-neutral record in process. Description based on print version record. Includes bibliographical references.

Thesis (M.S.)--University of Wisconsin-Madison, 1992. / Typescript. eContent provider-neutral record in process. Description based on print version record. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 81-90).

Magister Public Health - MPH / Background: Appropriate and adequate infant feeding practices are an important factor in achieving optimal health in infants. Inappropriate and inadequate infant feeding practices contribute significantly to ill-health in infants. Both WHO and UNICEF recommend exclusive breastfeeding for the first six months both in the context of HIV and otherwise unless exclusiv formula feeding can meet each of five conditions: acceptable, feasible, affordable, sustainable and safe (AFASS). The modes of infant feeding include exclusive breastfeeding, formula feeding and mixed feeding. Medical recommendations and social pressures related to infant feeding in high HIV-prevalence low-income communities may have shifted infant feeding practices. The aim of this study was to explore factors influencing infant feeding practices and decision making among women in one such community, Kabwata Township, in Lusaka, Zambia. Method: An exploratory qualitative study was conducted at Kabwata Health Centre in Kabwata Township in Lusaka, Zambia. Convenient sampling was used to recruit 32 women for focus group discussions and three key informants (two nurses and one social worker) for individual interviews. Verbal consent was received from all participants. Semi-structured interview guides were used to elicit discussion by all participants. Discussions were tape recorded and transcribed verbatim. Thematic data analysis was used to analyze the qualitative data. Results: Most FGD participants reported that they themselves initiated breastfeeding soon after giving birth, but not all of them breastfed exclusively for the first six months, as is currently recommended. The major factors influencing infant feeding included; influence from family and friends, stigma and discrimination, influence from health care providers, practical realities such as maternal employment and poverty, and cultural/traditional practices. Conclusion: While breastfeeding is valued and accepted, most women do not or cannot exclusively breastfeed for six (6) months for various reasons. Paradoxically, the social value of breastfeeding and the knowledge that breast milk can transmit HIV reinforce mixed feeding as the predominant feeding practice. Key informants reported that women attending health care services at Kabwata health centre were encouraged and taught to breastfeed their infants exclusively for six months. There is a need to re-look at the way the women are being encouraged, taught and supported so that the apparent knowledge and acceptance of breastfeeding can translate into improved infant feeding practices. Awareness campaigns need to include all stakeholders including family members, the community, employers and the women themselves in order to make exclusive breastfeeding easier for the women.

Early interactions between parents and infants are thought to be critical of later development. In particular joint attention has been an area of research and investigations. This study sought to measure joint attention behaviors in infants from 5 to 33 weeks of age under naturalistic conditions: in the home with the mother as the interaction partner given no instructions. Videotapes of the infant-parent interactions were observed and data were collected on behaviors related to joint attention. Given observations occur at younger ages than other studies considered, engagement data results indicate increasing trends for 3 of the 5 infants observed while the direction of infant gaze results indicate patterns consistent with descriptions currently in the literature. Parent behavior data indicate high levels of support in engaging infant attention. Furthering an understanding of joint attention by observing at earlier ages in infant development may be useful in informing teaching programs for infants who have not developed joint attention skills.

Infants of various ages across the first postnatal year have shown behavioral preferences (i.e., more attention) to visual displays when looking resulted in the presentation of Infant-Directed Speech (IDS) compared to Adult-Directed Speech (ADS). Although IDS differs from ADS on a variety of measures, most research has focused on various pitch characteristics (i.e., IDS is higher in absolute pitch and more variable in pitch across utterance length). Work from our lab has found that when the pitch characteristics of IDS were held constant, but the temporal features were manipulated, younger (but not older) infants attended more to slower rates of IDS, even though it was unlikely that they had heard such speech (when speech is spoken at this slow rate, the fundamental frequency cannot be maintained). The purpose of this study was to expand our investigation of how speaking rate affects infant attention by adding the physiological measure of heart rate to our protocol. Of specific interest was whether infants would show differential amounts of heart-rate (HR) decelerations as a function of rate (i.e. greater decelerations to slowed speech). 4-month-old infants were tested with normal IDS (unaltered rate) and slow IDS (rate was twice as slow as normal). Behaviorally, infants did not differentially attend to a display as a function of speech type. Psychophysiologically, infants showed more pronounced HR decelerations to slow than to normal IDS. The discrepancy between measures of attention is discussed, especially with regard to the organization of attention in infants of this age. / Master of Science

INTRODUCTION: In the years that followed the 1994 Back to Sleep Campaign (BSC), a public health initiative designed to prevent Sudden Infant Death Syndrome (SIDS), the prevalence of SIDS decreased by nearly 50%. However, recent research questions the decline in SIDS with an appreciation of contemporaneous factors which may have contributed to it. There is a growing recognition that other, often indiscernible causes of Sudden Unexpected Infant Deaths (SUID) have increased prevalence rates. Several researchers have addressed the possibility of the effects of a diagnostic drift. OBJECTIVE: To evaluate the impact of certain contemporaneous factors on the decline in the prevalence of Sudden Infant Death Syndrome. METHODS: We examined a historically significant time period surrounding the implementation of the BSC, 1984-2009. It is a time-period that incorporates mortality statistics prior to the BSC, as well as immediately following. We utilized 1984-2009 mortality data obtained from the Center for Disease Control and Prevention and evaluated the following prevalence rates: SIDS, unknown and unspecified causes, Accidental Strangulation and Suffocation in Bed (ASSB), and Neglect. We then amalgamated unknown and unspecified causes, ASSB and Neglect into a single representation of non-SIDS SUID. We then proceeded to perform an analysis on these prevalence rates to determine linear trends. RESULTS: All-cause mortality rate decreased linearly by about .929 per 100,000 per year (p<.0001, β=-.929). SIDS mortality rates also experienced a significant decline of about .951 per 100,000 deaths per year (p<.0001, β=-.951). In contrast, the SUID cohort prevalence increased significantly with a rate of .930 per 100,000 per year (p<.0001, β=.930). DISCUSSION: Over our study period, SIDS declined significantly, but by 2001 it experienced a stagnant decline that was different than that from 1984-2000. From 2001 to 2009, our SUID cohort increased dramatically. It is our conclusion that the potential exists for a possible diagnostic drift from SIDS to these other SUID.

No description available.

Previous research on infant perception of speech has shown that infants prefer their mother's voice over the voice of an unfamiliar female. Additionally, infants show a preference for the type of speech that is normally directed towards infants, known as infant-directed (10) speech. The linguistic and prosodic features of 10 speech are typically exaggerated in comparison to speech that is used amongst adults (adult-directed or AD speech). Most previous studies investigating infant preference for 10 speech have used the voice of a woman unfamiliar to the infants tested. The only study to use the maternal voice in testing 10 speech preferences employed 9 and 16-month-old infants. Knowledge of how the maternal voice impacts speech preferences in younger infants is unknown. The current study examined 1-month-old infants' preference for maternal 10 speech, when the alternative was maternal AD speech. Samples of individual mothers' 10 and AD speech were obtained during home visits, and selected utterances were subsequently presented to the infants in a visually based preference procedure. One month-olds showed no preference for either maternal speech type, although acoustic analyses showed that the 10 speech did differ significantly from the AD speech on all prosodic parameters examined. This lack of preference for maternal ID speech in young infants is discussed in a developmental model that depends on experience with maternal speech from prenatal to postnatal life with regard to the formation of infant speech preferences. / Master of Science

Infant speech perception develops within the context of specific language experience. While there is a corpus of empirical evidence concerning infants' perception of linguistic and prosodic information in speech, few studies have explored the interaction of the two. The present investigation was designed to combine what is known about infants' perception of nonnative phonemes (linguistic information) with what is known about infant preferences for ID speech (prosodic information). In particular, the purpose of this series of studies was to examine infant preferences for ID speech within the timeline of the phonemic perceptual reorganization that occurs at the end of the first postnatal year. In Experiment 1, 20 Native-English 10- to 11-month-old infants were tested in an infant-controlled preference procedure for attention to ID speech in their native language versus ID speech in a foreign language. The results showed that infants significantly preferred the ID-native speech. In Experiment 2, the preferred prosodic information (ID speech) was separated from the preferred linguistic information (native speech), as a means of discerning the relative perceptual draw of these types of speech characteristics. Specifically, a second group of 20 10- to 11-month-old infants was tested for a preference between ID speech in a foreign language and AD speech in their native language. In this case the infants exhibited a significant preference for ID-foreign speech, suggesting that prosodic information in speech has more perceptual weight than linguistic information. This pattern of results suggests that infants attend to linguistic-level information by 10- to 11-months of age, and that ID speech may play a role in the native-language tuning process by directing infants' attention to linguistic specifics in speech. / Master of Science