Effects of local-market radio ownership concentration on radio localism, the public interest, and listener opinions and use of local radio

The Telecommunications Act of 1996 and ensuing radio ownership consolidation are blamed for harming radio localism and the public interest. Prior studies examined impacts attributed to consolidation on format diversity and other measures; however, none explored influences on listener perceptions. The present research sought to determine effects of local-market ownership concentration on listener opinions and use of radio—potentially indicative of stations’ localism and public service—by surveying listeners in markets categorized by ownership concentration levels. Findings suggest concentration does not strongly influence perceptions; however, overall results indicate potentially negative consequences from local and national consolidation on amounts of local music, news, and public-service programming; live-local programming; and station responsiveness. Findings suggest policy change that could enhance radio localism

Learning and Long-Term Retention of Large-Scale Artificial Languages

Recovering discrete words from continuous speech is one of the first challenges facing language learners. Infants and adults can make use of the statistical structure of utterances to learn the forms of words from unsegmented input, suggesting that this ability may be useful for bootstrapping language-specific cues to segmentation. It is unknown, however, whether performance shown in small-scale laboratory demonstrations of “statistical learning” can scale up to allow learning of the lexicons of natural languages, which are orders of magnitude larger. Artificial language experiments with adults can be used to test whether the mechanisms of statistical learning are in principle scalable to larger lexicons. We report data from a large-scale learning experiment that demonstrates that adults can learn words from unsegmented input in much larger languages than previously documented and that they retain the words they learn for years. These results suggest that statistical word segmentation could be scalable to the challenges of lexical acquisition in natural language learning.National Science Foundation (U.S.) (NSF DDRIG #0746251

Infant Rule Learning: Advantage Language, or Advantage Speech?

<div><p>Infants appear to learn abstract rule-like regularities (e.g., <em>la la da</em> follows an AAB pattern) more easily from speech than from a variety of other auditory and visual stimuli (Marcus et al., 2007). We test if that facilitation reflects a specialization to learn from speech alone, or from modality-independent communicative stimuli more generally, by measuring 7.5-month-old infants’ ability to learn abstract rules from sign language-like gestures. Whereas infants appear to easily learn many different rules from speech, we found that with sign-like stimuli, and under circumstances comparable to those of Marcus et al. (1999), hearing infants were able to learn an ABB rule, but not an AAB rule. This is consistent with results of studies that demonstrate lower levels of infant rule learning from a variety of other non-speech stimuli, and we discuss implications for accounts of speech-facilitation.</p> </div

Overnight consolidation aids the transfer of statistical knowledge from the medial temporal lobe to the striatum

Sleep is important for abstraction of the underlying principles (or gist) which bind together conceptually related stimuli, but little is known about the neural correlates of this process. Here, we investigate this issue using overnight sleep monitoring and functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). Participants were exposed to a statistically structured sequence of auditory tones then tested immediately for recognition of short sequences which conformed to the learned statistical pattern. Subsequently, after consolidation over either 30min or 24h, they performed a delayed test session in which brain activity was monitored with fMRI. Behaviorally, there was greater improvement across 24h than across 30min, and this was predicted by the amount of slow wave sleep (SWS) obtained. Functionally, we observed weaker parahippocampal responses and stronger striatal responses after sleep. Like the behavioral result, these differences in functional response were predicted by the amount of SWS obtained. Furthermore, connectivity between striatum and parahippocampus was weaker after sleep, whereas connectivity between putamen and planum temporale was stronger. Taken together, these findings suggest that abstraction is associated with a gradual shift from the hippocampal to the striatal memory system and that this may be mediated by SWS

Weight Loss and Illness Severity in Adolescents With Atypical Anorexia Nervosa.

BACKGROUND:Lower weight has historically been equated with more severe illness in anorexia nervosa (AN). Reliance on admission weight to guide clinical concern is challenged by the rise in patients with atypical anorexia nervosa (AAN) requiring hospitalization at normal weight. METHODS:We examined weight history and illness severity in 12- to 24-year-olds with AN (n = 66) and AAN (n = 50) in a randomized clinical trial, the Study of Refeeding to Optimize Inpatient Gains (www.clinicaltrials.gov; NCT02488109). Amount of weight loss was the difference between the highest historical percentage median BMI and admission; rate was the amount divided by duration (months). Unpaired t tests compared AAN and AN; multiple variable regressions examined associations between weight history variables and markers of illness severity at admission. Stepwise regression examined the explanatory value of weight and menstrual history on selected markers. RESULTS:Participants were 16.5 ± 2.6 years old, and 91% were of female sex. Groups did not differ by weight history or admission heart rate (HR). Eating Disorder Examination Questionnaire global scores were higher in AAN (mean 3.80 [SD 1.66] vs mean 3.00 [SD 1.66]; P = .02). Independent of admission weight, lower HR (β = -0.492 [confidence interval (CI) -0.883 to -0.100]; P = .01) was associated with faster loss; lower serum phosphorus was associated with a greater amount (β = -0.005 [CI -0.010 to 0.000]; P = .04) and longer duration (β = -0.011 [CI -0.017 to 0.005]; P = .001). Weight and menstrual history explained 28% of the variance in HR and 36% of the variance in serum phosphorus. CONCLUSIONS:Weight history was independently associated with markers of malnutrition in inpatients with restrictive eating disorders across a range of body weights and should be considered when assessing illness severity on hospital admission

Cross-Modal Transfer of Statistical Information Benefits from Sleep

Extracting regularities from a sequence of events is essential for understanding our environment. However, there is no consensus regarding the extent to which such regularities can be generalised beyond the modality of learning. One reason for this could be the variation in consolidation intervals used in different paradigms, also including an opportunity to sleep. Using a novel statistical learning paradigm in which structured information is acquired in the auditory domain and tested in the visual domain over either 30min or 24hr consolidation intervals, we show that cross-modal transfer can occur, but this transfer is only seen in the 24hr group. Importantly, the extent of cross-modal transfer is predicted by the amount of SWS obtained. Additionally, cross-modal transfer is associated with the same pattern of decreasing MTL and increasing striatal involvement which has previously been observed to occur across 24 hours in unimodal statistical learning. We also observed enhanced functional connectivity after 24 hours in a network of areas which have been implicated in cross-modal integration including the precuneus and the middle occipital gyrus. Finally, functional connectivity between the striatum and the precuneus was also enhanced, and this strengthening was predicted by SWS. These results demonstrate that statistical learning can generalise to some extent beyond the modality of acquisition, and together with our previously published unimodal results, support the notion that statistical learning is both domain-general and domain-specific

The impact of sound field systems on learning and attention in elementary school classrooms

Purpose: An evaluation of the installation and use of sound field systems (SFS) was carried out to investigate their impact on teaching and learning in elementary school classrooms. Methods: The evaluation included acoustic surveys of classrooms, questionnaire surveys of students and teachers and experimental testing of students with and without the use of SFS. Students ’ perceptions of classroom environments and objective data evaluating change in performance on cognitive and academic assessments with amplification over a six month period are reported. Results: Teachers were positive about the use of SFS in improving children’s listening and attention to verbal instructions. Over time students in amplified classrooms did not differ from those in nonamplified classrooms in their reports of listening conditions, nor did their performance differ in measures of numeracy, reading or spelling. Use of SFS in the classrooms resulted in significantly larger gains in performance in the number of correct items on the nonverbal measure of speed of processing and the measure of listening comprehension. Analysis controlling for classroom acoustics indicated that students ’ listening comprehension score

Labels direct infants’ attention to commonalities during novel category learning

Recent studies have provided evidence that labeling can influence the outcome of infants’ visual categorization. However, what exactly happens during learning remains unclear. Using eye-tracking, we examined infants’ attention to object parts during learning. Our analysis of looking behaviors during learning provide insights going beyond merely observing the learning outcome. Both labeling and non-labeling phrases facilitated category formation in 12-month-olds but not 8-month-olds (Experiment 1). Non-linguistic sounds did not produce this effect (Experiment 2). Detailed analyses of infants’ looking patterns during learning revealed that only infants who heard labels exhibited a rapid focus on the object part successive exemplars had in common. Although other linguistic stimuli may also be beneficial for learning, it is therefore concluded that labels have a unique impact on categorization