International survey of the utilisation of physiotherapy in treatment centers for survivors of torture

Introduction: Literature about treatment of survivors of torture tends to focus on counseling and primary medical care. There are fewer published articles about the utilization of physiotherapy at treatment centers for survivors of torture and other forms of trauma. Methods: Lists were compiled of about 169 treatment centers receiving funding from the United National Voluntary Fund, 150 from the International Rehabilitation Council for Torture Victims, and another 40 treatment centers in the United States through the National Capacity Building Project. A survey about utilization of physiotherapy at treatment centers for survivors was created which included questions about the utilization of physiotherapy, treatment modalities provided by physiotherapists, other professionals working at the centers, perceived barriers to providing physiotherapy and interest in collaboration as a global physiotherapy community.  Surveys were emailed to centers in French, Spanish and/or English. Results: 87 responses were received, for a response rate of 43% (87 of 200 emails sent). Approximately 30% of centers report that their clients have no access to physiotherapy, with one third of the centers having physiotherapy on staff (in contrast with 85% of survey respondents having psychotherapy/counseling on staff, 73% having social work on staff and 55% primary medicine). About one third of responding torture treatment programs reported being able to refer to physiotherapists outside of their centers. Therapeutic exercise, manual therapy, massage, and group activities and exercises were the most commonly reported treatment modalities provided by physiotherapists. Lack of funds or resources and shortage of physiotherapy personnel were perceived as being the biggest challenges limiting clients’ access to physiotherapy. Twenty-nine of the respondents (33%) were physiotherapists, and of these, 90% reported being interested in collaborative activities with other physiotherapists working with survivor of torture

Structural and interactional aspects of adverbial sentences in English mother-child interactions:an analysis of two dense corpora

We analysed both structural and functional aspects of sentences containing the four adverbials “after”, “before”, “because”, and “if” in two dense corpora of parent-child interactions from two British English-acquiring children (2;00–4;07). In comparing mothers’ and children's usage we separate out the effects of frequency, cognitive complexity and pragmatics in explaining the course of acquisition of adverbial sentences. We also compare these usage patterns to stimuli used in a range of experimental studies and show how differences may account for some of the difficulties that children have shown in experiments. In addition, we report descriptive data on various aspects of adverbial sentences that have not yet been studied as a resource for future investigations

Disfluency and Laughter Annotation in a Light-weight Dialogue Mark-up Protocol

Hough J, de Ruiter L, Betz S, Schlangen D. Disfluency and Laughter Annotation in a Light-weight Dialogue Mark-up Protocol. Presented at the The 7th Workshop on Disfluency in Spontaneous Speech (DiSS), Edinburgh, UK

Children's use of prosody and word order to indicate information status in English noun phrase conjuncts

Our study investigates the influence of information status on word order and prosody in children and adults. Using an elicited production task, we examine the ordering and intonation of noun phrases in phrasal conjuncts in 3-5-year-old and adult speakers of English. Findings show that English-speaking children are less likely to employ the "old-before-new" order than adults and are also not adult-like in using prosody to mark information status. Our study suggests that even though intonation and word order are linguistic devices that are acquired early, their use to mark information status is still developing at age four

Iconicity affects children’s comprehension of complex sentences:The role of semantics, clause order, input and individual differences

Complex sentences involving adverbial clauses appear in children’s speech at about three years of age yet children have difficulty comprehending these sentences well into the school years. To date, the reasons for these difficulties are unclear, largely because previous studies have tended to focus on only sub-types of adverbial clauses, or have tested only limited theoretical models. In this paper, we provide the most comprehensive experimental study to date. We tested four-year-olds, five-year-olds and adults on four different adverbial clauses (before, after, because, if) to evaluate four different theoretical models (semantic, syntactic, frequency-based and capacity-constrained). 71 children and 10 adults (as controls) completed a forced-choice, picture-selection comprehension test, providing accuracy and response time data. Children also completed a battery of tests to assess their linguistic and general cognitive abilities. We found that children’s comprehension was strongly influenced by semantic factors – the iconicity of the event-to-language mappings – and that their response times were influenced by the type of relation expressed by the connective (temporal vs. causal). Neither input frequency (frequency-based account), nor clause order (syntax account) or working memory (capacity-constrained account) provided a good fit to the data. Our findings thus contribute to the development of more sophisticated models of sentence processing. We conclude that such models must also take into account how children’s emerging linguistic understanding interacts with developments in other cognitive domains such as their ability to construct mental models and reason flexibly about them

Effectiveness of attentional bias modification training as add-on to regular treatment in alcohol and cannabis use disorder:A multicenter randomized control trial

BACKGROUND: Attentional bias for substance-relevant cues has been found to contribute to the persistence of addiction. Attentional bias modification (ABM) interventions might, therefore, increase positive treatment outcome and reduce relapse rates. The current study investigated the effectiveness of a newly developed home-delivered, multi-session, internet-based ABM intervention, the Bouncing Image Training Task (BITT), as an add-on to treatment as usual (TAU). METHODS: Participants (N = 169), diagnosed with alcohol or cannabis use disorder, were randomly assigned to one of two conditions: the experimental ABM group (50%; TAU+ABM); or the control group (50%; split in two subgroups the TAU+placebo group and TAU-only group, 25% each). Participants completed baseline, post-test, and 6 and 12 months follow-up measures of substance use and craving allowing to assess long-term treatment success and relapse rates. In addition, attentional bias (both engagement and disengagement), as well as secondary physical and psychological complaints (depression, anxiety, and stress) were assessed. RESULTS: No significant differences were found between conditions with regard to substance use, craving, relapse rates, attentional bias, or physical and psychological complaints. CONCLUSIONS: The findings may reflect unsuccessful modification of attentional bias, the BITT not targeting the relevant process (engagement vs. disengagement bias), or may relate to the diverse treatment goals of the current sample (i.e., moderation or abstinence). The current findings provide no support for the efficacy of this ABM approach as an add-on to TAU in alcohol or cannabis use disorder. Future studies need to delineate the role of engagement and disengagement bias in the persistence of addiction, and the role of treatment goal in the effectiveness of ABM interventions

DUEL: A Multi-lingual Multimodal Dialogue Corpus for Disfluency, Exclamations and Laughter

Hough J, Tian Y, de Ruiter L, et al. DUEL: A Multi-lingual Multimodal Dialogue Corpus for Disfluency, Exclamations and Laughter. In: 10th edition of the Language Resources and Evaluation Conference. 2016

The rates of Type Ia Supernovae. II. Diversity of events at low and high redshift

This paper investigates on the possible systematic difference of Supernovae Ia (SN Ia) properties related to the age and masses of the progenitors that could introduce a systematic bias between low and high redshift SN Ia's. The relation between the main features of the distribution of the delay times (DTD) and the masses of the progenitors is illustrated for the single (SD) and double degenerate (DD) models. Mixed models, which assume contributions from both the SD and DD channels, are also presented and tested versus the observed correlations between the SN Ia rates and the parent galaxy properties. It is shown that these correlations can be accounted for with both single channel and mixed models, and that the rate in S0 and E galaxies may effectively provide clues on the contribution of SD progenitors to late epoch explosions. A wide range of masses for the CO WD at the start of accretion is expected in almost all galaxy types; only in galaxies of the earliest types the properties of the progenitors are expected to be more uniform. For mixed models, late type galaxies should host SD and DD explosions in comparable fractions, while in early type galaxies DD explosions should largely prevail. Events hosted by star forming galaxies span a wide range of delay times; \textit{prompt} events could dominate only in the presence of a strong star-burst. It is concluded that nearby SN Ia samples should well include the young, massive and hot progenitors that necessarily dominate at high redshift.Comment: 22 pages, 15 figures, MNRAS accepte

How habitat-modifying organisms structure the food web of two coastal ecosystems

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