Infant Preferences for Structural and Prosodic Properties of Infant‐Directed Speech in the Second Year of Life

While a large literature discusses young infants' preference for an infant‐directed speaking style, few studies have explored preferences after the first year. The present work compares infants' preference for two different properties of IDS speech: prosodic changes (primarily pitch and pitch variability) and structural properties (utterance length; lexical repetition). We found that both 12‐ and 16‐month‐old infants continued to prefer listening to speech with the prosodic properties of IDS, but neither age showed any preference for speech with the lexical repetition and short utterances typical of IDS.     

Recuerdos de Nuestro Pasado

Following is an interview with Erin Segal, group worker and coauthor of Recuerdos de Nuestro Pasado (Memories of our Past), a multivocal memoir about growing up in El Salvador and growing old in Washington DC, which emerged from a storytelling group at Mary’s Center’s Bernice Fonteneau Senior Wellness Center. The group members and coauthors are Angela Celaya, Sergio Guzmán, Jose Lovos, and Gloria Revelo. Using alternating English-language stanzas, the book expresses the life stories of four senior citizens and includes the images of their photographs and objects as well as illustrations by the book designer Julie Cho. Segal and Cho are cofounders of Thick Press. All profit from this book will go to St. Jude Children’s Hospital.     

Dynamic Mechanism Design: A Myersonian Approach

We study mechanism design in dynamic quasilinear environments where private information arrives over time and decisions are made over multiple periods. We make three contributions. First, we provide a necessary condition for incentive compatibility that takes the form of an envelope formula for the derivative of an agent's equilibrium expected payoff with respect to his current type. It combines the familiar marginal effect of types on payoffs with novel marginal effects of the current type on future ones that are captured by “impulse response functions.” The formula yields an expression for dynamic virtual surplus that is instrumental to the design of optimal mechanisms and to the study of distortions under such mechanisms. Second, we characterize the transfers that satisfy the envelope formula and establish a sense in which they are pinned down by the allocation rule (“revenue equivalence”). Third, we characterize perfect Bayesian equilibrium‐implementable allocation rules in Markov environments, which yields tractable sufficient conditions that facilitate novel applications. We illustrate the results by applying them to the design of optimal mechanisms for the sale of experience goods (“bandit auctions”).     

Investing to Protect Our Children: Using Economics to Derive an Evidence‐based Strategy

Child abuse and neglect are global problems that affect over 25 per cent of children and have serious health, social and economic consequences. Government and other agencies are heavily committed to the provision of services to address the consequences of abuse and neglect. In a climate of scarce resources, there is increasing interest in developing cost‐effective strategies to prevent child maltreatment. Economic evaluation in the context of formal ‘priority setting’ can contribute to the development of an efficient child protection strategy and at the same time develop the arguments to support an increased investment in the prevention of child maltreatment. Key challenges arise from incompleteness of the evidence base of effective interventions and the considerable complexity of the cross‐portfolio effects. The latter has resulted in the widespread failure to capture the full range of impacts, most notably intergenerational effects, quality of life and mortality. This means the benefits of investing in effective preventive strategies to address child maltreatment will be underestimated and too few resources allocated to this important task. Adoption of the proposed priority‐setting framework and translation into action are likely to reduce child maltreatment and associated harms for children at risk now and in the future. Copyright © 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Citing Literature

Number of times cited: 7

• Inga Wagenknecht, Uta Meier-Gräwe and Ute Ziegenhain , Kosten und Nutzen Früher Hilfen - aktuelle Erkenntnisse und zukünftiger Forschungsbedarf/ Economic efficiency of early intervention – current findings and future need for research , Kindesmisshandlung und -vernachlässigung , 18 , 1 , (10) , (2015) . Crossref
• Nicole RS Boyer, Kathleen A Boyd, Fiona Turner-Halliday, Nicholas Watson and Helen Minnis , Examining the feasibility of an economic analysis of dyadic developmental psychotherapy for children with maltreatment associated psychiatric problems in the United Kingdom , BMC Psychiatry , 14 , 1 , (2014) . Crossref
• Madeleine Stevens, Lucy Harris, Megan Ellis, Crispin Day and Jennifer Beecham , Investigating changes in use of services by high‐need families following the Helping Families Programme, an innovative parenting intervention for children with severe and persistent conduct problems , Child and Adolescent Mental Health , 19 , 3 , (185-191) , (2013) . Wiley Online Library
• Madeleine Stevens , The cost-effectiveness of UK parenting programmes for preventing children's behaviour problems - a review of the evidence , Child & Family Social Work , 19 , 1 , (109) , (2014) . Crossref
• Sarah Skeen and Mark Tomlinson , A public health approach to preventing child abuse in low- and middle-income countries: A call for action , International Journal of Psychology , 48 , 2 , (108) , (2013) . Crossref
• Peter Sidebotham , Safeguarding in an Age of Austerity , Child Abuse Review , 21 , 5 , (313-317) , (2012) . Wiley Online Library
• , Public Health Approaches to Safeguarding Children , Child Abuse Review , 20 , 4 , (231-237) , (2011) . Wiley Online Library

Volume 20 , Issue 4 July/August 2011

Pages 274-289     

Survival trees with time-dependent covariates: Application to estimating changes in the incubation period of AIDS

Tree-structured methods for exploratory data analysis have previously been extended to right-censored survival data. We further extend these methods to allow for truncation and time-dependent covariates. We apply the new methods to a data set on incubation times of acquired immunodeficiency syndrome (AIDS), using calendar time as a time-dependent covariate. Contrary to expectation, we find that rates of progression to AIDS appear to be faster after August 1989 than before.     

The social construction of peacekeeping in America

Although other nations have participated extensively in international peacekeeping operations, the use of American soldiers as peacekeepers is a recent change in their military role, and is not well understood by American society, the U.S. Army, the soldiers, or their wives. We use a social constructionist perspective, which has rarely been applied to the study of the American military, to analyze the definition of peacekeeping missions and of the nature of the military, by soldiers assigned to peacekeeping duty, their families, and other social institutions such as communications media and churches. We suggest that, because peacekeeping is an inherently ambiguous process, this theoretical perspective may prove useful in understanding the social definition of the emerging military role of peacekeeper.     

The Becker-DeGroot-Marschak mechanism and nonexpected utility: A testable approach

The Becker-DeGroot-Marschak mechanism is widely used to elicit decision makers' selling prices of lotteries. This mechanism leads, however, to the preference reversal phenomenon, which seemed to indicate nontransitive preferences. To solve this puzzle, Karni and Safra (1987) introduced a new interpretation of this mechanism based on two-stage lotteries without the independence axiom. In this article, we suggest a set of empirically testable hypotheses based on their interpretation of the mechanism. One of these tests can be used to find the utility and the probability transformation functions of an anticipated utility maximizer.This article consists of an earlier paper with a similar title (University of Toronto WP #8809) and the paper Elicitation of Certainty Equivalents and the Becker-DeGroot-Marschak Mechanism.     

Therapeutic Process as a Means to Navigate Impasse? Reflections on a Complex Case of Crosscultural Adolescent Family Therapy

This article explores the process of family therapy with a Turkish‐speaking single‐parent family with four children in which suicidal behaviour and family violence have become the norm. The following example describes a pivotal experience early within my career as a family therapist. The universality of first, being a beginner family therapist, and second, receiving a referral of a daunting, difficult case has led me to share my experience here. Central to this article is the focus on therapeutic process as a means to navigate beyond impasse. It is my hope that those who read this article will consider taking the risk to prioritise the therapeutic relationship, even when anxiety about ‘doing something’ to fix the problems is high.