The Expansion of School Resource Officers in a Florida County: A Mixed Methods Study

In the aftermath of school shootings, policymakers presented the expansion of school resource officers (SROs) in the nation\u27s schools as a method for keeping students safe. Recently, policing in the United States has come under increased scrutiny, and several school districts across the country cancelled their SRO contracts with law enforcement agencies. Notably, these contradictory decisions have been made with limited empirical knowledge surrounding, the roles, preparedness, and impact of SROs. A county in Florida substantially expanded its SRO program in the 2016-17 school year creating a new unit within the local sheriff\u27s office and an opportunity to investigate these topics. A convergent parallel mixed methods design was applied to examine this new unit, consisting of a quantitative strand using interrupted time series analysis to assess the new program\u27s effect on school-based arrests and Baker Act apprehensions, and a qualitative strand collecting and analyzing participant observations of training requirements and in-depth interviews with the SROs to explore their responsibilities, roles, and preparation for the position. Qualitative findings demonstrate that the primary role of the SROs is safety and security, while some also engage in a secondary role of engaging in positive interactions with the school community. Ambiguity exists surrounding execution of these roles, with the SROs relying a great deal on other relevant actors during decision-making. SROs identified the importance of careful selection for the position, training requirements are described, and problems with the training are identified. Contrary to this study\u27s hypotheses, quantitative results show that the new unit did not have a statistically significant impact on overall school-based arrests, but disaggregating the data showed a significant impact on felony arrests. Similarly, there was no statistically significant impact on overall Baker Act apprehensions of students, however, there is preliminary evidence of an impact on elementary school-aged students

Developing a cross-cultural annotation system and metacorpus for studying infants' real world language experience

Recent issues around reproducibility, best practices, and cultural bias impact naturalistic observational approaches as much as experimental approaches, but there has been less focus onthis area. Here, we present a new approach that leverages cross-laboratory collaborative, interdisciplinary efforts to examine important psychological questions. We illustrate this approach with a particular project that examines similarities and differences in children's early experiences with language. This project develops a comprehensive start-to-finish analysis pipeline by developing a flexible and systematic annotation system, and implementing this system across a sampling from a metacorpus of audiorecordings of diverse language communities. This resource is publicly available for use, sensitive to cultural differences, and flexible to address a variety of research questions. It is also uniquely suited for use in the development of tools for automated analysis.Fil: Soderstrom, Melanie. University of Manitoba; CanadáFil: Casillas, Marisa. University of Chicago; Estados UnidosFil: Bergelson, Elika. University of Duke; Estados UnidosFil: Rosemberg, Celia Renata. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas. Oficina de Coordinación Administrativa Saavedra 15. Centro Interdisciplinario de Investigaciones en Psicología Matemática y Experimental Dr. Horacio J. A. Rimoldi; ArgentinaFil: Alam, Florencia. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas. Oficina de Coordinación Administrativa Saavedra 15. Centro Interdisciplinario de Investigaciones en Psicología Matemática y Experimental Dr. Horacio J. A. Rimoldi; ArgentinaFil: Warlaumont, Anne S.. University of California at Los Angeles; Estados UnidosFil: Bunce, John. California State University; Estados Unido

A cross-linguistic examination of young children’s everyday language experiences

We present an exploratory cross-linguistic analysis of the quantity of target-child-directed speech and adult-directed speech in North American English (US & Canadian), United Kingdom English, Argentinian Spanish, Tseltal (Tenejapa, Mayan), and Yélî Dnye (Rossel Island, Papuan), using annotations from 69 children aged 2–36 months. Using a novel methodological approach, our cross-linguistic and cross-cultural findings support prior work suggesting that target-child-directed speech quantities are stable across early development, while adult-directed speech decreases. A preponderance of speech from women was found to a similar degree across groups, with less target-child-directed speech from men and children in the North American samples than elsewhere. Consistently across groups, children also heard more adult-directed than target-child-directed speech. Finally, the numbers of talkers present in any given clip strongly impacted children’s moment-to-moment input quantities. These findings illustrate how the structure of home life impacts patterns of early language exposure across diverse developmental contexts

Quantifying child directed speech cross-culturally across development

Child-directed speech (CDS) influences language development (e.g., Golinkoff et al., 2015), but varies across cultural and demographic groups (Hoff, 2006). Recent work examining speech heard by North American English (NAE) infants found an increased proportion of CDS with age (Bergelson et al., 2018). Quantity of CDS remained relatively constant across age, while quantity of adult-directed speech (ADS) decreased. We replicate these findings using a different methodology, and expand them to include other language communities. Our data come from daylong audio recordings of 58 children ages 2?36 months from the ACLEW dataset (Bergelson et al., 2017; 30 children acquiring NAE, 10 UK English, 8 Argentinian Spanish, and 10 Tseltal/Mayan). Ten randomly selected 2-min segments (Tseltal: nine 5-min segments) from each child were annotated for speaker gender, age (child or adult), and addressee for each utterance. We calculated the minutes per hour of CDS, ADS, and all speech. Preliminary analyses find high variability in overall language input across individuals, age, and culture, and partially replicate the Bergelson et al. (2018) pattern of results. Ongoing annotation will permit finer-grained analyses of sub-group differences. Further analyses will examine the influence of factors such as speaker gender, number of speakers, and maternal education.Fil: Bunce, John. University of Manitoba; CanadáFil: Casillas, Marisa. Max Planck Institute For Psycholinguistics; Países BajosFil: Bergelson, Elika. University of Duke; Estados UnidosFil: Stein, Alejandra. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas. Oficina de Coordinación Administrativa Saavedra 15. Centro Interdisciplinario de Investigaciones en Psicología Matemática y Experimental Dr. Horacio J. A. Rimoldi; ArgentinaFil: Waurlamont, Anne. University of California at Los Angeles; Estados UnidosFil: Rosemberg, Celia Renata. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas. Oficina de Coordinación Administrativa Saavedra 15. Centro Interdisciplinario de Investigaciones en Psicología Matemática y Experimental Dr. Horacio J. A. Rimoldi; ArgentinaFil: Kirby, Jessica. University of Manitoba; CanadáFil: Soderstrom, Melanie. University of Manitoba; Canadá177 Meeting of the Acoustic Society of AmericaLouisvilleEstados UnidosAcoustical Society of Americ

The INTERSPEECH 2017 Computational Paralinguistics Challenge : Addressee, Cold & Snoring

AbstractThe INTERSPEECH 2017 Computational Paralinguistics Challenge addresses three different problems for the first time in research competition under well-defined conditions: In the Addressee sub-challenge, it has to be determined whether speech produced by an adult is directed towards another adult or towards a child; in the Cold sub-challenge, speech under cold has to be told apart from ‘healthy’ speech; and in the Snoring sub-challenge, four different types of snoring have to be classified. In this paper, we describe these sub-challenges, their conditions, and the baseline feature extraction and classifiers, which include data-learnt feature representations by end-to-end learning with convolutional and recurrent neural networks, and bag-of-audio-words for the first time in the challenge series.Abstract The INTERSPEECH 2017 Computational Paralinguistics Challenge addresses three different problems for the first time in research competition under well-defined conditions: In the Addressee sub-challenge, it has to be determined whether speech produced by an adult is directed towards another adult or towards a child; in the Cold sub-challenge, speech under cold has to be told apart from ‘healthy’ speech; and in the Snoring sub-challenge, four different types of snoring have to be classified. In this paper, we describe these sub-challenges, their conditions, and the baseline feature extraction and classifiers, which include data-learnt feature representations by end-to-end learning with convolutional and recurrent neural networks, and bag-of-audio-words for the first time in the challenge series

Tools of the Trade : A guide to sociodemographic reporting for researchers, reviewers, and editors

In recent years, psychological researchers have been heavily criticized for generalizing broadly from narrow samples, a concern that intersects with questions about the validity, reproducibility, replicability, and generalizability of the psychological literature. One issue is the limited reporting of participants’ identities, backgrounds, and lived experiences. To address this issue, several journals have begun to require greater reporting of participants’ sociodemographic information. In this article, we address both challenges and considerations with respect to sociodemographic reporting for researchers, reviewers, and journal editors. We provide guidance for recording, evaluating, protecting, and interpreting sociodemographic data

A Unified Approach to Demographic Data Collection for Research with Young Children Across Diverse Cultures

Culture is a key determinant of children’s development both in its own right and as a measure of generalizability of developmental phenomena. Studying the role of culture in development requires information about participants’ demographic backgrounds. However, both reporting and treatment of demographic data are limited and inconsistent in child development research. A barrier to reporting demographic data in a consistent fashion is that no standardized tool currently exists to collect these data. Variation in cultural expectations, family structures, and life circumstances across communities make the creation of a unifying instrument challenging. Here, we present a framework to standardize demographic reporting for early child development (birth to 3 years of age), focusing on six core sociodemographic construct categories: biological information, gestational status, health status, community of descent, caregiving environment, and socioeconomic status. For each category, we discuss potential constructs and measurement items and provide guidance for their use and adaptation to diverse contexts. These items are stored in an open repository of context-adapted questionnaires that provide a consistent approach to obtaining and reporting demographic information so that these data can be archived and shared in a more standardized format

A multilab study of bilingual infants: Exploring the preference for infant-directed speech

From the earliest months of life, infants prefer listening to and learn better from infant-directed speech (IDS) compared with adult-directed speech (ADS). Yet IDS differs within communities, across languages, and across cultures, both in form and in prevalence. This large-scale, multisite study used the diversity of bilingual infant experiences to explore the impact of different types of linguistic experience on infants’ IDS preference. As part of the multilab ManyBabies 1 project, we compared preference for North American English (NAE) IDS in lab-matched samples of 333 bilingual and 384 monolingual infants tested in 17 labs in seven countries. The tested infants were in two age groups: 6 to 9 months and 12 to 15 months. We found that bilingual and monolingual infants both preferred IDS to ADS, and the two groups did not differ in terms of the overall magnitude of this preference. However, among bilingual infants who were acquiring NAE as a native language, greater exposure to NAE was associated with a stronger IDS preference. These findings extend the previous finding from ManyBabies 1 that monolinguals learning NAE as a native language showed a stronger IDS preference than infants unexposed to NAE. Together, our findings indicate that IDS preference likely makes similar contributions to monolingual and bilingual development, and that infants are exquisitely sensitive to the nature and frequency of different types of language input in their early environments

Quantifying Sources of Variability in Infancy Research Using the Infant-Directed-Speech Preference

Psychological scientists have become increasingly concerned with issues related to methodology and replicability, and infancy researchers in particular face specific challenges related to replicability: For example, high-powered studies are difficult to conduct, testing conditions vary across labs, and different labs have access to different infant populations. Addressing these concerns, we report on a large-scale, multisite study aimed at (a) assessing the overall replicability of a single theoretically important phenomenon and (b) examining methodological, cultural, and developmental moderators. We focus on infants’ preference for infant-directed speech (IDS) over adult-directed speech (ADS). Stimuli of mothers speaking to their infants and to an adult in North American English were created using seminaturalistic laboratory-based audio recordings. Infants’ relative preference for IDS and ADS was assessed across 67 laboratories in North America, Europe, Australia, and Asia using the three common methods for measuring infants’ discrimination (head-turn preference, central fixation, and eye tracking). The overall meta-analytic effect size (Cohen’s d) was 0.35, 95% confidence interval = [0.29, 0.42], which was reliably above zero but smaller than the meta-analytic mean computed from previous literature (0.67). The IDS preference was significantly stronger in older children, in those children for whom the stimuli matched their native language and dialect, and in data from labs using the head-turn preference procedure. Together, these findings replicate the IDS preference but suggest that its magnitude is modulated by development, native-language experience, and testing procedure