Providing reproductive health promotion in drug treatment clinics: A Formative Evaluation of a Pilot Program

Background and Purpose: Prenatal substance use continues to be a critical public health concern. Integrating reproductive health promotion with addiction treatment is a promising approach to addressing this issue. This study was designed to understand strengths and challenges of a pilot reproductive health program, consisting of preconception/interconception health classes, childbirth education classes, and access to free doula services, for people in addiction treatment. Methods: The study design was a qualitative formative evaluation. Observations of the program (n=9) were conducted along with interviews (n=12) with clients, counselors, and program facilitators. Results: Strengths included a good fit between the program and clients’ needs and commitment to further integrate the program. Challenges included inconsistent participation and issues of facilitator selection and training. Barriers were noted related to the complex and chaotic lives of the clientele. Techniques to address inconsistent participation through mandated attendance as well as rotating and reviewing content showed mixed success. Conclusion: The study found the program to be well-regarded by stakeholders, but several structural challenges were identified. Future programs should strive for greater integration between treatment providers and reproductive health facilitators. Research is also needed to assess the effectiveness of providing integrated reproductive health education to clients engaged in addiction treatment

The Auditory Comprehension of Unaccusative Verbs in Aphasia

Some persons with aphasia, particularly those diagnosed with a Broca’s aphasia, exhibit a delayed time course of lexical activation in canonically ordered S-V-O sentences (Ferrill et al., 2012) and delayed re-activation of displaced arguments in sentences that contain syntactic dependencies (Love et al., 2008). These patterns support the Delayed Lexical Activation (DLA) hypothesis: Lexical activation is delayed relative to the normal case, and thus lexical activation and syntactic operations are de-synchronized; that is, lexical access is too slow for normally fast-acting syntactic operations. This delay in lexical access leads to what appear to be syntactic comprehension deficits in aphasia. In the current study we further examined lexical activation during sentence comprehension in persons with aphasia by using unaccusative verbs. Unaccusative verbs are a type of intransitive verb with a single argument that is base generated in object position and displaced to the surface subject position, leaving behind a copy or trace (‘gap’) of the movement (see, for example, Burzio, 1986), as in: 1. The girl vanished Thus there is a syntactic dependency between the two positions. When encountering sentences that contain syntactic dependencies (e.g., object relatives, Wh-questions) neurologically unimpaired individuals immediately reactivate the displaced argument at the gap (Shapiro et al., 1999; Love et al., 2008). In contrast to this immediate reactivation, prior findings indicate that neurologically unimpaired individuals do not reactivate the displaced argument in similar sentences with unaccusative verbs until 750ms downstream from the gap (Friedmann et al., 2008). This built-in delay observed with unaccusative verbs in neurologically healthy participants provides a unique opportunity to further examine lexical delays in individuals with Broca’s aphasia. Importantly, individuals with Broca’s aphasia may have unaccusative verb deficits. Previous research has found that persons with aphasia have difficulty producing unaccusative verbs. Offline truth-value judgment tasks with intransitive sentences containing unaccusative verbs do not reveal comprehension deficits (Lee & Thompson, 2004). However, in a sentence-picture matching task, McAllister et al. (2009) found lower accuracy for intransitive sentences that contained unaccusative verbs than transitive sentences. We entertain the following hypothesis: The delayed lexical access routines better synchronize with the delay of reactivating the argument of unaccusatives, suggesting that individuals with Broca’s aphasia should evince a pattern like that of unimpaired individuals. Alternatively, participants with Broca’s aphasia might show activation even further downstream from the gap, given that in other sentence constructions containing syntactic dependencies they exhibit a delayed pattern of reactivation compared to neurologically unimpaired individuals

Farmers in transition: Taking charge in stressful times

The Oklahoma Cooperative Extension Service periodically issues revisions to its publications. The most current edition is made available. For access to an earlier edition, if available for this title, please contact the Oklahoma State University Library Archives by email at [email protected] or by phone at 405-744-6311

Verb Phrase Ellipsis: A Research Tool

We describe a ubiquitous linguistic construction, Verb-Phrase Ellipsis (VPE), in which the verb phrase in the second clause is phonetically unrealized (___): The pharmacist bought a house and the electrician did __ too, according to the real estate agent. VPE is a useful and promising tool to investigate and differentiate interpretive processes in normal and disordered language processing. We present linguistic analyses of VPE and its properties. We then review the processing literature on VPE, and finally introduce the first of a series of experiments we are currently running on VPE processing in aphasia

Farmers in transition: Taking charge in stressful times

The Oklahoma Cooperative Extension Service periodically issues revisions to its publications. The most current edition is made available. For access to an earlier edition, if available for this title, please contact the Oklahoma State University Library Archives by email at [email protected] or by phone at 405-744-6311

Farmers in transition: Taking charge in stressful times

The Oklahoma Cooperative Extension Service periodically issues revisions to its publications. The most current edition is made available. For access to an earlier edition, if available for this title, please contact the Oklahoma State University Library Archives by email at [email protected] or by phone at 405-744-6311

The time-course of lexical activation during sentence comprehension in aphasia

We present a cross-modal priming study using simple active sentence constructions to map out the time-course of lexical activation throughout a sentence. Preliminary findings suggest that in contrast to our unimpaired listeners who demonstrated immediate initial activation of a lexical item and a linear, relatively gradual decay, our participants with agrammatic aphasia demonstrated a pattern of late initial activation, and then immediate decay.  We surmise that this delayed lexical access coupled with the accelerated time-course of decay contributes to what appears to be a disrupted integration process

Negotiation strategies

The Oklahoma Cooperative Extension Service periodically issues revisions to its publications. The most current edition is made available. For access to an earlier edition, if available for this title, please contact the Oklahoma State University Library Archives by email at [email protected] or by phone at 405-744-6311

Negotiation strategies

The Oklahoma Cooperative Extension Service periodically issues revisions to its publications. The most current edition is made available. For access to an earlier edition, if available for this title, please contact the Oklahoma State University Library Archives by email at [email protected] or by phone at 405-744-6311