Relations between theory of mind and academic school readiness: the moderating role of child gender

This study investigated the prospective relationship between preschoolers’ theory of mind (ToM) skills and academic school readiness, while exploring the possible moderator role played by child gender. The participants were 75 children who were assessed at two time points: when enrolled in the second preschool year (T1) and again 4 months before school entry (T2). The results showed an association between children's ToM abilities at T1 (but not at T2) and later academic readiness at T2, but only for girls, even after accounting for child IQ and maternal education. These findings support the idea that girls and boys can differ in how they use their ToM abilities in their daily life and highlight the relevance of further exploring gender-specific effects when investigating children's social cognition and school readiness.info:eu-repo/semantics/acceptedVersio

Children's learning of non-adjacent dependencies using a web-based computer game setting

Infants show impressive speech decoding abilities and detect acoustic regularities that highlight the syntactic relations of a language, often coded via non-adjacent dependencies (NADs, e.g., is singing). It has been claimed that infants learn NADs implicitly and associatively through passive listening and that there is a shift from effortless associative learning to a more controlled learning of NADs after the age of 2 years, potentially driven by the maturation of the prefrontal cortex. To investigate if older children are able to learn NADs, Lammertink et al. (2019) recently developed a word-monitoring serial reaction time (SRT) task and could show that 6–11-year-old children learned the NADs, as their reaction times (RTs) increased then they were presented with violated NADs. In the current study we adapted their experimental paradigm and tested NAD learning in a younger group of 52 children between the age of 4–8 years in a remote, web-based, game-like setting (whack-a-mole). Children were exposed to Italian phrases containing NADs and had to monitor the occurrence of a target syllable, which was the second element of the NAD. After exposure, children did a “Stem Completion” task in which they were presented with the first element of the NAD and had to choose the second element of the NAD to complete the stimuli. Our findings show that, despite large variability in the data, children aged 4–8 years are sensitive to NADs; they show the expected differences in r RTs in the SRT task and could transfer the NAD-rule in the Stem Completion task. We discuss these results with respect to the development of NAD dependency learning in childhood and the practical impact and limitations of collecting these data in a web-based setting

Chemical Characterization and Source Apportionment of Household Fine Particulate Matter in Rural, Peri-urban, and Urban West Africa

Household air pollution in sub-Saharan Africa and other developing regions is an important cause of disease burden. Little is known about the chemical composition and sources of household air pollution in sub-Saharan Africa, and how they differ between rural and urban homes. We analyzed the chemical composition and sources of fine particles (PM2.5) in household cooking areas of multiple neighborhoods in Accra, Ghana, and in peri-urban (Banjul) and rural (Basse) areas in The Gambia. In Accra, biomass burning accounted for 39–62% of total PM2.5 mass in the cooking area in different neighborhoods; the absolute contributions were 10–45 μg/m3. Road dust and vehicle emissions comprised 12–33% of PM2.5 mass. Solid waste burning was also a significant contributor to household PM2.5 in a low-income neighborhood but not for those living in better-off areas. In Banjul and Basse, biomass burning was the single dominant source of cooking-area PM2.5, accounting for 74–87% of its total mass; the relative and absolute contributions of biomass smoke to PM2.5 mass were larger in households that used firewood than in those using charcoal, reaching as high as 463 μg/m3 in Basse homes that used firewood for cooking. Our findings demonstrate the need for policies that enhance access to cleaner fuels in both rural and urban areas, and for controlling traffic emissions in cities in sub-Saharan Africa

Estafilococos resistentes à oxacilina isolados em casos de mastite subclínica em ovinos.

Bactérias do gênero Staphylococcus estão entre os principais agentes causadores da mastite ovina. Um dos maiores entraves ao tratamento dos animais doentes são cepas resistentes aos antimicrobianos empregados. A pesquisa do gene mecA nos estafilococos é um instrumento auxiliar para a determinação de aspectos epidemiológicos da doença. Este trabalho teve por objetivo investigar a resistência à oxacilina em estafilococos coagulase-negativos isolados no leite de ovelhas com mastite subclínica. Foram analisadas 448 amostras de leite de dois rebanhos. Os micro-organismos isolados foram submetidos previamente a testes de sensibilidade a antibióticos in vitro a partir da técnica de difusão em disco. Naqueles resistentes à oxacilina nestes testes efetuou-se a pesquisa do gene mecA, com a extração do DNA cromossômico por meio da técnica de extração fenol-clorofórmio. Os estafilococos coagulase-negativos apresentaram resistência à oxacilina e a presença do gene mecA foi detectada em quatro isolados, que também apresentaram características de multirresistência. Tais achados reforçam a importância deste grupo de micro-organismos na etiologia da mastite subclínica em ovinos e abre perspectivas para futuras pesquisas para a investigação da epidemiologia da doença