Impact of congenital heart disease on siblings: A review.

Congenital heart disease (CHD) is the most common birth defect. Little is known of the impact of having a sibling with CHD. Available literature documents negative impact of having a sibling with other chronic conditions. This literature review considers empirical evidence investigating the impact of having a sibling with CHD. Twelve databases were searched, and 202 articles retrieved. Eleven articles met the inclusion criteria and were subject to data extraction, quality appraisal, and narrative synthesis. Three themes emerged: changes in normal life, impact on siblings, and factors affecting the extent of impact on siblings. Only one intervention study was identified, 5 of 10 studies were conducted over 20 years ago, and only 4 studies included children as participants. Evidence suggests siblings of children with CHD experience adverse life changes which lead to negative impacts in several domains. Evidence is inconclusive regarding mitigating factors of these impacts. Further research is needed to understand the experiences of being a sibling of a child with CHD.

Dog owners show experience-based viewing behaviour in judging dog face approachability.

Our prior visual experience plays a critical role in face perception. We show superior perceptual performance for differentiating conspecific (vs non-conspecific), own-race (vs other-race) and familiar (vs unfamiliar) faces. However, it remains unclear whether our experience with faces of other species would influence our gaze allocation for extracting salient facial information. In this eye-tracking study, we asked both dog owners and non-owners to judge the approachability of human, monkey and dog faces, and systematically compared their behavioural performance and gaze pattern associated with the task. Compared to non-owners, dog owners assessed dog faces with shorter time and fewer fixations, but gave higher approachability ratings. The gaze allocation within local facial features was also modulated by the ownership. The averaged proportion of the fixations and viewing time directed at the dog mouth region were significantly less for the dog owners, and more experienced dog owners tended to look more at the dog eyes, suggesting the adoption of a prior experience-based viewing behaviour for assessing dog approachability. No differences in behavioural performance and gaze pattern were observed between dog owners and non-owners when judging human and monkey faces, implying that the dog owner's experience-based gaze strategy for viewing dog faces was not transferable across faces of other species.

The influence of listener experience and academic training on ratings of nasality.

This study assessed listener agreement levels for nasality ratings, and the strength of relationship between nasality ratings and nasalance scores on one hand, and listener clinical experience and formal academic training in cleft palate speech on the other. The listeners were 12 adults who represented four levels of clinical experience and academic training in cleft palate speech. Three listeners were teachers with no clinical experience and no academic training (TR), three were graduate students in speech-language pathology (GS) with academic training but no clinical experience, three were craniofacial surgeons (MD) with extensive experience listening to cleft palate speech but with no academic training in speech disorders, and three were certified speech-language pathologists (SLP) with both extensive academic training and clinical experience. The speech samples were audio recordings from 20 persons representing a range of nasality from normal to severely hypernasal. Nasalance scores were obtained simultaneously with the audio recordings. Results revealed that agreement levels for nasality ratings were highest for the SLPs, followed by the MDs. Thus, the more experienced groups tended to be more reliable. Mean nasality ratings obtained for each of the rater groups revealed an inverse relationship with experience. That is, the two groups with clinical experience (SLP and MD) tended to rate nasality lower than the two groups without experience (GS and TR). Correlation coefficients between nasalance scores and nasality judgments were low to moderate for all groups and did not follow a pattern. EDUCATIONAL OUTCOMES: As a result of this activity, the reader will be able to (1) describe the influence of listener experience and academic training in cleft palate speech on perceptual ratings of nasality. (2) describe the influence of experience and training on the nasality/nasalance relationship and, (3) compare the present findings to previous findings reported in the literature.