Early lap-reading experiences have been shown to benefit normally hearing children. Within this lap-reading context, children are exposed to more diverse vocabulary, complex syntactic structures, story grammar constructs, and higher level thinking skills such as inferencing, predicting, and evaluating. There is also evidence that children with hearing impairment benefit from lap-reading experiences, but with more modest effects. It has been hypothesized that greater effects have not been documented due to the fact that many hearing parents may be uncomfortable or may lack adequate skills to teach their deaf children literacy skills in sign and print as do deaf parents by reading and sharing stories from books with their deaf children (Marschark & Harris, 1996). In addition, the reading skills of deaf children have historically been, and continue to be lower than those of normally hearing children. It is hypothesized by this researcher that a factor which contributes to the reading difficulties seen in the majority of deaf children is a lack of linguistic and literacy exposure and practice that comes from early lap-reading experiences with an adult, who is competent in the language of the child. The Gallaudet Shared Reading Project represents an attempted intervention that has had some success; though there are inherent limitations to the program. An experimental approach that uses the Iowa E-Book seeks to make up for the limitations of the Shared Reading Project. This study involves the use of four mother-child dyads in a single subject design study that seeks to answer two research questions. The first involves testing the effects of including a signing narrator in the Iowa E-Book on the development of deaf children's knowledge of sign vocabulary and book related concepts. The second involves assessing changes in the parent-child interactions that occur while using the Iowa E-Book with and without sign support.

Passive samplers are not only a versatile tool to integrate environmental concentrations of pollutants, but also to avoid the use of live sentinel organisms for environmental monitoring. This study introduced the use of magnetic silicone polymer composites (Fe-PDMS) as passive sampling media to pre-concentrate a wide range of analytes from environmental settings. The composite samplers were assessed for their accumulation properties by performing lab experiments with two model herbicides (Atrazine and Irgarol 1051) and evaluated for their uptake properties from environmental settings (waters and sediments). The Fe-PDMS composites showed good accumulation of herbicides and pesticides from both freshwater and saltwater settings and the accumulation mechanism was positively correlated with the log Kow value of individual analytes. Results from the studies show that these composites could be easily used for a wide number of applications such as monitoring, cleanup, and/or bioaccumulation modeling, and as a non-intrusive and nondestructive monitoring tool for environmental forensic purposes.

<p>Objective: The design of a prototype avalanche photodiode gamma camera and an adaptable and expandable acquisition board. To test the performance of the acquisition board a photomultiplier base camera is constructed and utilized in various configurations. The APD-based gamma camera is tested on the same acquisition board to evaluate its performance.</p> <p>Results:Spectra have been collected and analyzed utilizing four various detector/system configurations. i) a PET module, utilizing a PMT coupled to a pixilated BGO crystal with a high energy Na-22 source. ii) a single PMT extracted from a PET module akin to the one mentioned previously and coupled to NaI(T1) with a Co-57 source. iii) the same PMT coupled to a CsI(T1) crystal with a variety of sources, including Tc-99m, Ga-67 and Co37. iv) an APD coupled to a CsI(T1) crystal with a variety of sources including Tc-99m and Co-57. Images have been collected from multiple camera configurations, all by a 2 by 2 array. APD's with CsI(T!), PMT's and NaI(T1) and a PET module with PMT's on BGO</p> <p>Conclusion: These requirements have been met with the current design and the system has been tested in a controlled environment. collecting spectrum while operating a single channel and for some configurations, images were collected operating a multi-channel array. A number of steps can be taken to improve upon this prototype, The detector itself may benefit from a pixilated crystal and current APD technology. The acquisition board should be transferred to a multiple printed circuit board design allowing it to be implemented ill a black-box manner. Additionally. the current USB bridge' limits the transfer rate of data between the DSC and the' PC. as a result. alternatives should be investigated.</p> / Master of Science (MSc)

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