Varying Syntax to Enhance Verb-Focused Intervention for 30-Month-Olds With Language Delay: A Concurrent Multiple Baseline Design.

PURPOSE: The purpose of this study is to determine if 2.5-year-olds with language delay would learn verbs (spill) when presented with varying syntactic structure ("The woman is spilling the milk"/"The milk is spilling"; milk = patient or theme) in a therapeutic context. Children with language delay have proportionally small inventories of verbs, which limits expressive language development. Children who have typical language development learn verbs more robustly when presented with alternating arguments than with a single argument structure. METHOD: Three toddlers with expressive language delay (29-30 months of age) participated in a verb-focused treatment study using a concurrent multiple baseline design. Participants were shown action videos accompanied by sentences with varied argument structure for each target verb. To assess learning pre- and posttreatment, participants were asked to demonstrate actions corresponding to each verb. RESULTS: Visual inspection and tau analyses reveal significant posttreatment gains of target verbs taught with varying argument structures. CONCLUSIONS: Our results indicate that learning verbs with high variability of argument roles may facilitate a strong link between lexical representations of verbs and their syntactic structures. Using argument structure variability to teach verbs as an intervention strategy has great potential and should be tested further in larger group studies.

Effect of highly active antiretroviral therapy on vaginal Candida spp. isolation in HIV-infected compared to HIV-uninfected women.

Vulvovaginal candidiasis (VVC) in HIV-infected women contributed to the impairment of their quality of life. The aim of this study was to evaluate the effect of highly active antiretroviral therapy (HAART) use on the vaginal Candida spp. isolation in HIV-infected compared to HIV-uninfected women. This cross-sectional study included 178 HIV-infected (HIV group) and 200 HIV-uninfected women (control) that were studied at the Specialized Assistance Service (SAE) for sexually transmitted diseases (STD)/AIDS of the city of Maringá, Brazil, from April 1 to October 30, 2011. The yeasts were isolated and identified by phenotypic and molecular methods. The in vitro antifungal susceptibility to fluconazole, itraconazole, nystatin and amphotericin B was tested by the reference microdilution method. Higher frequencies of total vaginal Candida spp. isolation were found in the HIV-infected group than in the control group. However, both groups showed a similar frequency of colonization and VVC. Although C. albicans was the most frequent and sensitive to azolics and polyenes in both HIV-infected and uninfected women, the emerging resistance of C. glabrata to amphotericin B in the HIV-infected women was observed. Although higher frequency of vaginal Candida spp. isolation had been observed in the HIV-infected than in HIV-uninfected women, colonization and VVC showed similar frequency in both groups, indicating that HAART appears to protect against vaginal colonization and VVC.