Effectiveness of Intense Accent Modification Training With Refugees From Burma.

PURPOSE: This pilot research project sought to determine if an intensive accent modification training program that included See the Sound-Visual Phonics and prosodic gestures improved articulation, prosody, and intelligibility measures in refugees from Burma. PARTICIPANTS: Four individuals (two men, two women) aged 20-67 participated in this study, and they were recruited from a state organization supporting refugees who have resettled in the United States. METHOD: All participants completed the Proficiency in Oral English Communication (POEC) and Assessment of Intelligibility of Dysarthric Speech (AIDS) to measure pre- and posttraining changes. The duration of this study was 6 weeks and consisted of 1 week of pretesting, 4 weeks of accent modification training, and 1 week of posttesting. Participants attended a total of twelve 50-min accent modification training sessions, including eight individual sessions (twice per week) and four group sessions (once per week), which provided a functional way to practice newly acquired skills in a scripted conversational-type format. Trained and untrained articulation and prosody probes were used to establish baselines and measure change. RESULTS: All four participants showed gains across articulation and prosody (in untrained and trained items). On pre- and posttest measures, three of the four participants also made gains on the broad measures of the AIDS and the POEC. CONCLUSION: Findings support that a brief and intensive multimodality accent modification program can be beneficial.

Aberrant expression of S-SCAM causes the loss of GABAergic synapses in hippocampal neurons.

The duplication and deletion mutations of the S-SCAM/MAGI-2 gene are associated with schizophrenia and infantile spasms, respectively. S-SCAM is a unique synaptic scaffolding protein that localizes to both excitatory and GABAergic synapses. However, consequences of aberrant S-SCAM expression on GABAergic synapses is little studied. Here we report the effect of S-SCAM knockdown and overexpression on GABAergic synapses. S-SCAM knockdown in cultured hippocampal neurons caused a drastic loss of both pre- and post-synaptic components of GABAergic synapses, indicating its essential role in GABAergic synapse formation and maintenance. Surprisingly, S-SCAM overexpression also attenuated GABAergic synapses, but the effect is mediated by the loss of postsynaptic GABAA receptors, gephyrin, and neuroligin 2 and does not involve presynaptic component vesicular GABA transporters. Overexpression studies using S-SCAM mutants with various domain deletions indicated that GABAergic synapse loss correlates with their ability to increase excitatory synaptic function. Consistently, AMPA receptor antagonist CNQX or calcineurin inhibitor FK506 abolished the S-SCAM overexpression-induced loss of GABAA receptors, supporting that GABAergic synapse loss by S-SCAM overexpression is due to the activity-induced dispersal of synaptic GABAA receptors. These results suggest that abnormal S-SCAM protein levels disrupt excitation/inhibition balance in neurons, which may explain the pathogenic nature of S-SCAM copy number variations.

Isolation of Mouse Epidermal Keratinocytes and Their In Vitro Clonogenic Culture.

The protocol described here is a reliable method of harvesting primary keratinocytes from adult female mice (54 ± 2 days old) yielding approximately 30 x 106 viable cells per mouse. Primary adult mouse keratinocytes are harvested from the dorsal skin of female mice. Male mice (~6 weeks old) can be used for keratinocyte harvesting depending on the requirements of the experiment. Euthanized mice are shaved and sterilized with serial washes in povidone iodine and ethanol solutions (70% alcohol). After disinfecting the mice, the dorsal skin is removed and the subcutaneous fat and muscle are removed with a scalpel and discarded. The skins are cut into small pieces and treated with a mild, low temperature trypsinization to detach the lower dermis from the epidermis. The scraped epidermises are stirred at low speed, filtered to remove the hairs, counted, and re-suspended in culture medium. This method provides an excellent single cell suspension of highly culturable cells for many downstream applications.