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Community-based research (CBR) is an increasingly familiar approach to addressing social challenges. Nonetheless, the role it plays in attaining community impact is unclear and largely unstudied. Here the authors discuss an emerging framework aimed toward fostering community impact through university and community civic engagement. They describe how, through application of this framework to initiatives intended to reduce obesity, CBR might be focused for greater effect. (Contains 1 endnote and 1 figure.)

This article offers responses from various authors to the article "Incarnational immersion-based learning in cultural contexts: A charity model," by Dr. John Trokan (2005.) Mount St. Joseph's program on incarnational immersion-based learning, as described in the article by Dr. John Trokan, will have the participating students' eyes opened to the richness and complexity of spiritual, social, political, and economic issues among peoples of different culture. Civille shares that in his classes, he uses films and case studies to give the students some sense of seeing the world through the eyes of others. But he believes nothing compares to the firsthand experience of living in another culture and experiencing with the people their joys and hopes, their anxieties and fears. Mount St. Joseph College should be commended for its program. As Beckman reads Trokan's essay, she indeed also sees differences between the community-based learning efforts at Mount St. Joseph and her school's own. She attempts to allow Trokan's words to help her rethink what they do. For Green, the Trokan article tells the story of one particular program at one particular school. It shows a willingness that needs to be replicated at other universities and Catholic schools around the country to engage our students' faith formation by creating meaning. It shows that there is an ever increasing awareness to bring students back into relationships and service to others for the common good.

Exposure to lead can be devastating for children, and federal regulations established in 2001 are forcing local governments to mitigate this risk. This essay discusses the creation of the Lead Alliance, a university-community coalition created to address lead hazards facing children from low-income households in South Bend, Indiana. Among the accomplishments of the Lead Alliance are a chemistry course at the University of Notre Dame and a Community Outreach Partnership Centers grant. After reviewing a number of examples of university-community collaborations to mitigate lead poisoning, the article focuses on how each partner in the Lead Alliance came to the table and describes the Alliance's activities. It identifies three key factors in the success of this coalition: the members' complementary community connections and knowledge, the efforts of a facilitator at the start of the process, and the personal commitment of each member.

Purpose: Four measures of children's developing robustness of phonological contrast were compared to see how they correlated with age, vocabulary size, and adult listeners' correctness ratings. Method: Word-initial sibilant fricative productions from eighty-one 2- to 5-year-old children and 20 adults were phonetically transcribed and acoustically analyzed. Four measures of robustness of contrast were calculated for each speaker on the basis of the centroid frequency measured from each fricative token. Productions that were transcribed as correct from different children were then used as stimuli in a perception experiment in which adult listeners rated the goodness of each production. Results: Results showed that the degree of category overlap, quantified as the percentage of a child's productions whose category could be correctly predicted from the output of a mixed-effects logistic regression model, was the measure that correlated best with listeners' goodness judgments. Conclusions: Even when children's productions have been transcribed as correct, adult listeners are sensitive to within-category variation quantified by the child's degree of category overlap. Further research is needed to explore the relationship between the age of a child and adults' sensitivity to different types of within-category variation in children's speech.

An in vitro technique was developed to generate activated rat T cells, with antitumor activity. Splenic mononuclear cells (SMC) from outbred Wistar and inbred Wistar-Munich rats were stimulated with Concanavalin A and recombinant human interleukin-2 (rIL-2) in vitro for 48 h. After 2 days, the nonadherent cells began proliferating and were maintained in rIL-2 for up to 18 days in vitro. FACScan analysis revealed that SMC was a mixture of cell types; however, CD5+ T cells rapidly increased and became the predominant cell type after 5 days in culture. SMC induced cytolysis of YAC-1, but not C6 glioma cells in 4 h 51Cr release assays. In contrast, 5- and 9-day T cells lysed C6 glioma and YAC-1 cells. The C6 cells were admixed with cultured effector cells at various effector-to-target (E:T) ratios and were injected into the right cerebral hemisphere of Wistar and Wistar-Munich rats for a Winn assay. Histopathologic evaluations revealed that a) SMC had no effect; b) 2- and 5-day T cells, injected at E:T ratios greater than 5:1, caused significant reduction in tumor size; and c) 2- or 5-day T cells, at a 40:1 E:T ratio, resulted in little or no histologic evidence of tumor. Eighty-three percent of animals receiving C6 and 5-day mitogen-stimulated lymphokine activated killer cells at an E:T ratio of 40:1 were alive 120 days postinjection (p less than 0.05).

Previous work on children's acquisition of complex sequences points to a tendency for affricates to be acquired before clusters, but there is no clear evidence of a difference in order of acquisition between clusters with /s/ that violate the Sonority Sequencing Principle (SSP), such as /s/ followed by stop in onset position, and other clusters that obey the SSP. One problem with studies that have compared the acquisition of SSP-obeying and SSP-violating clusters is that the component sounds in the two types of sequences were different. This paper examines the acquisition of initial /s/-stop and stop-/s/ sequences by sixty Greek children aged 2 through 5 years. Results showed greater accuracy for the /s/-stop relative to the stop-/s/ sequences, but no difference in accuracy between /ts/, which is usually analyzed as an affricate in Greek, and the other stop-/s/ sequences. Moreover, errors for the /s/-stop sequences and /ts/ primarily involved stop substitutions, whereas errors for /ps/ and /ks/ were more variable and often involved fricative substitutions, a pattern which may have a perceptual explanation. Finally, /ts/ showed a distinct temporal pattern relative to the stop-/s/ clusters /ps/ and /ks/, similar to what has been reported for productions of Greek adults. (Contains 5 figures and 6 tables.)

We applaud Stoel-Gammon's (this issue) call for a more comprehensive account of the relationship between lexicon and phonology, and we strongly endorse her suggestions for future research. However, we think that it will not be enough simply to integrate findings and methods from the adult-centered and child-centered literatures. Both of these literatures suggest that we need to rethink standard assumptions about what phonological representations are and how they emerge to support the very large vocabularies that speakers develop over the course of a lifetime. Our commentary focuses on three themes relevant to this reconceptualization.

This article honours Adele Miccio's life work by reflecting on the utility of phonetic transcription. The first section reviews the literature on cases where children whose speech appears to neutralize a contrast in the adult language are found on closer examination to produce a contrast ("covert contrast"). This study presents evidence from a new series of perception studies that covert contrast may be far more prevalent in children's speech than existing studies would suggest. The second section presents the results of a new study designed to examine whether naive listeners' perception of children's /s/ and /[theta]/ productions can be changed experimentally when they are led to believe that the children who produced the sounds were older or younger. Here, it is shown that, under the right circumstances, adults report more tokens of /[theta]/ to be accurate productions of /s/ when they believe a talker to be an older child than when they believe the talker to be younger. This finding suggests that auditory information alone cannot be the sole basis for judging the accuracy of a sound. The final section presents recommendations for supplementing phonetic transcription with other measures, to gain a fuller picture of children's production abilities. (Contains 2 tables and 3 figures.)

Consonant mastery is one of the most widely used metrics of typical phonological acquisition and of phonological disorder. Two fundamental methodological questions concerning research on consonant acquisition are (1) how to elicit a representative sample of productions and (2) how to analyse this sample once it has been collected. This paper addresses these two questions by reviewing relevant aspects of experience in evaluating word-initial consonant accuracy from transcriptions of isolated-word productions elicited from 2- and 3-year-olds learning four different first languages representing a telling range of consonant systems (English, Cantonese, Greek, Japanese). It is suggested that both researchers and clinicians should consider a number of different item-related factors, such as phonotactic probability and word length, when constructing word lists to elicit consonant productions from young children. This study also proposes that transcription should be supplemented by acoustic analysis and the perceptual judgements of naive listeners. (Contains 4 figures.)

A growing body of research has documented effects of phonotactic probability on young children's nonword repetition. This study extends this research in 2 ways. First, it compares nonword repetitions by 40 young children with phonological disorders with those by 40 same-age peers with typical phonological development on a nonword repetition task in which the frequency of embedded diphone sequences was varied. Second, it examines the relationship between the frequency effect in the nonword repetition task and other measures of linguistic ability in these children. Children in both groups repeated low-frequency sequences less accurately than high-frequency sequences. The children with phonological disorders were less accurate overall but showed no larger disadvantage for the low-frequency sequences than their age peers. Across the group, the size of the frequency effect was correlated with vocabulary size, but it was independent of measures of speech perception and articulatory ability. These results support the hypothesis that the production difficulty associated with low-frequency sequences is related primarily to vocabulary growth rather than to developments in articulatory or perceptual ability. By contrast, production problems experienced by children with phonological disorders do not appear to result from difficulties in making abstractions over known lexical items. Instead, they may be associated with difficulties in building representations in the primary sensory and motor domains.KEY WORDS: nonword repetition, phonological disorder, vocabulary size, speech perception, frequency

This article discusses 4 types of phonological knowledge: knowledge of the acoustic and perceptual characteristics of speech sounds (perceptual knowledge), knowledge of the articulatory characteristics of speech sounds (articulatory knowledge), higher level knowledge of the ways that words can be divided into sounds and related phonotactic constraints on how sounds can be combined into words (higher level phonological knowledge), and knowledge of the ways that variation in pronunciation can be used to convey social identity (social-indexical knowledge). The first section of the article discusses the nature of these types of knowledge in adults. The second describes how they develop in children with typical language development. The third section outlines how different types of knowledge may be compromised in children with functional speech-sound impairments. Together these 5 sections serve as a review for practicing clinicians of the types of phonological knowledge that underlie accurate and fluent speech production.

Adults' performance on a variety of tasks suggests that phonological processing of nonwords is grounded in generalizations about sublexical patterns over all known words. A small body of research suggests that children's phonological acquisition is similarly based on generalizations over the lexicon. To test this account, production accuracy and fluency were examined in nonword repetitions by 104 children and 22 adults. Stimuli were 22 pairs of nonwords, in which one nonword contained a low-frequency or unattested two-phoneme sequence and the other contained a high-frequency sequence. For a subset of these nonword pairs, segment durations were measured. The same sound was produced with a longer duration (less fluently) when it appeared in a low-frequency sequence, as compared to a high-frequency sequence. Low-frequency sequences were also repeated with lower accuracy than high-frequency sequences. Moreover, children with smaller vocabularies showed a larger influence of frequency on accuracy than children with larger vocabularies. Taken together, these results provide support for a model of phonological acquisition in which knowledge of sublexical units emerges from generalizations made over lexical items.KEY WORDS: phonological development, lexical development, phonotactic probability

Evaluates "mean response time" (MRT), a method used in previous studies to relate physiological evidence (recordings of electromyographic activity in the cricothyroid and sternohyoid) to acoustic evidence (fundamental frequency). (Author/VWL)

This study investigated two aspects of non-symbolic phonological knowledge (knowledge of the acoustic/perceptual space and of the articulatory/production space) in six preschool-age children with phonological disorders and six typically developing age peers. Results suggest that phonological knowledge is multifaceted, and that seemingly categorical deficits at one level can be linked to less robust representations at other levels. (Author/DB)

Although collaborative learning has many advantages for today's students, it is not a panacea. The profession needs to examine its collaborative classrooms, teaching methods, and evaluation for unspoken rules and hidden control. Collaboration prepares students in the latest techniques of capitalism, not democracy. (MSE)