BackgroundAdverse childhood experiences (ACEs) predict obesity onset; however, the relationship between ACEs and history of weight cycling has not been adequately explored. This gap is problematic given the difficulty in weight loss maintenance and the impact of ACEs on obesity development, chronicity, and associated weight stigma. The objective of this study was to examine associations between self-reported history of ACEs and weight cycling in a sample of weight loss treatment-seeking adults with overweight/obesity.MethodsThe number of participants in the analyzed sample was 78, mostly white educated adult women (80% female, 81% Caucasian, 75% >= bachelor's degree) with excess adiposity enrolled in the Cognitive and Self-regulatory Mechanisms of Obesity Study. ACEs were measured at baseline using the ACEs Scale. History of weight cycling was measured using the Weight and Lifestyle Inventory that documented weight loss(es) of 10 or more pounds.ResultsHigher ACE scores were associated with a greater likelihood of reporting a history of weight cycling. Participants with four or more ACEs had 8 times higher odds (OR = 8.301, 95% CI = 2.271-54.209, p = 0.027) of reporting weight cycling compared with participants with no ACEs. The association of weight cycling for those who endorsed one to three ACEs was not significant (OR = 2.3, 95% CI = 0.771-6.857, p = 0.135) in this sample.ConclusionsThe role of ACEs in health may be related to associations with weight cycling. Results indicated that those who reported four or more ACEs had significantly higher odds of reporting weight cycling compared with those with no ACEs. Further research is needed to further explore how ACEs predict the likelihood of weight cycling, which may be prognostic for sustained weight loss treatment response and weight stigma impacts. Adverse childhood experiences (ACEs) were linked to weight cycling among a treatment-seeking sample of overweight/obesity. Specifically, participants endorsing four or more ACEs were 8 times more likely to report weight cycling. image

ABSTRACT Introduction/Purpose Behaviorally based in-person multidisciplinary programs for weight loss have been studied for decades; however, delivery, scalability, and accessibility remain a challenge. We report pilot findings from a new asynchronous protocol-based telehealth weight loss program. Methods This 12-wk single-arm pilot study included adults (18–65 yr old) with body mass index (BMI) of 25–40 kg·m−2. The Home Weight Loss (HWL) program consisted of weekly app- and e-mail-delivered lesson modules covering traditional diet, exercise, and behavioral topics for weight loss. Daily weight and activity level were monitored automatically via a wireless scale and an activity tracker, and participants logged their caloric intake into the system. Monitoring data were reviewed weekly by clinicians who provided brief video-recorded feedback for participants to view at their convenience. Weight and height were measured in person at baseline and postintervention. Postintervention participants completed a satisfaction survey. Results Thirty participants (70% female; 80% White; mean age = 41 yr, standard deviation (SD) = 13.7 yr; mean BMI = 32.4 kg·m−2, SD = 4.3 kg·m−2) were enrolled, and 27 provided posttreatment data. Percent weight loss was 4.12% (SD = 4.22%). Overall, 93% of participants reported being satisfied with their overall experience in the program, and 59% cited individualized feedback as a benefit of the program. Conclusions The HWL program produced modest weight loss and demonstrated feasibility and participant acceptability. This model appears to be generally scalable for broader use and can be used to extend weight loss services for those not residing near medical centers and those in need of asynchronous and virtual feedback.

Machine translation has seen rapid progress with the advent of Transformer-based models. These models have no explicit linguistic structure built into them, yet they may still implicitly learn structured relationships by attending to relevant tokens. We hypothesize that this structural learning could be made more robust by explicitly endowing Transformers with a structural bias, and we investigate two methods for building in such a bias. One method, the TP-Transformer, augments the traditional Transformer architecture to include an additional component to represent structure. The second method imbues structure at the data level by segmenting the data with morphological tokenization. We test these methods on translating from English into morphologically rich languages, Turkish and Inuktitut, and consider both automatic metrics and human evaluations. We find that each of these two approaches allows the network to achieve better performance, but this improvement is dependent on the size of the dataset. In sum, structural encoding methods make Transformers more sample-efficient, enabling them to perform better from smaller amounts of data.

In this paper, we examine the learnability of two apparently derivationally opaque vowel harmony patterns: attested stepwise height harmony and unattested saltatory height harmony. We analyze these patterns within the Gestural Harmony Model (Smith, 2018) and introduce a learning algorithm for setting the gestural parameters that generate these harmony patterns. Results of the learning model indicate a learning bias in favor of the attested stepwise pattern and against the unattested saltation pattern, providing a potential explanation for the differences in attestation between these two derivationally opaque patterns.

Abstractive summarization, the task of generating a concise summary of input documents, requires: (1) reasoning over the source document to determine the salient pieces of information scattered across the long document, and (2) composing a cohesive text by reconstructing these salient facts into a shorter summary that faithfully reflects the complex relations connecting these facts. In this paper, we adapt TP-Transformer (Schlag et al., 2019), an architecture that enriches the original Transformer (Vaswani et al., 2017) with the explicitly compositional Tensor Product Representation (TPR), for the task of abstractive summarization. The key feature of our model is a structural bias that we introduce by encoding two separate representations for each token to represent the syntactic structure (with role vectors) and semantic content (with filler vectors) separately. The model then binds the role and filler vectors into the TPR as the layer output. We argue that the structured intermediate representations enable the model to take better control of the contents (salient facts) and structures (the syntax that connects the facts) when generating the summary. Empirically, we show that our TP-Transformer outperforms the Transformer and the original TP-Transformer significantly on several abstractive summarization datasets based on both automatic and human evaluations. On several syntactic and semantic probing tasks, we demonstrate the emergent structural information in the role vectors and the performance gain by information specificity of the role vectors and improved syntactic interpretability in the TPR layer outputs.(Code and models are available at https://github.com/jiangycTarheel/TPT-Summ)

In this paper, we present the results of neural network modeling of speech production. We introduce GestNet, a sequence-to-sequence, encoder-decoder neural network architecture in which a string of input symbols is translated into sequences of vocal tract articulator movements. We train our models to produce movements of lip and tongue body articulators consistent with a pattern of stepwise vowel height harmony. Though we provide our models with no linguistic structure, they reliably learn this harmony pattern. In addition, by probing these models we find evidence of emergent linguistic structure. Specifically, we examine patterns of encoder-decoder attention (degree of influence of specific input segments on model outputs) and find that they resemble the patterns of gestural activation assumed within the Gestural Harmony Model, a model of harmony built upon the representations of Articulatory Phonology. This result is significant as it lends support to one of the central claims of the Gestural Harmony Model: that harmony is the result of the harmony-triggering gestures extending to overlap the gestures of surrounding segments.

Food susceptibility refers to an individual’s thoughts, feelings, and motivations when highly palatable foods are available. Mindfulness, or the practice of paying attention, non-judgmentally, in the present moment, is a key element in acceptance-based programs, which have been shown to benefit those with high food susceptibility. This study examined the relationship between food susceptibility and (1) trait mindfulness and (2) mindfulness facets (i.e., awareness, acceptance) in daily life. Participants were 108 adults with overweight/obesity (45.56 ± 11.41 years old, 75.9% white, 72.2% female) enrolled in a weight loss trial (Clinical Trials.gov Identifier: NCT02786238). Food susceptibility was measured with the Power of Food Scale (PFS). Mindfulness was assessed using the Philadelphia Mindfulness Scale (PHMS) and its two subscales: PHMS-Awareness and PHMS-Acceptance. Two regressions examined the associations of (1) total PHMS on PFS, and (2) simultaneous PHMS subscales on PFS. Covariates were age, sex, race, and education. Regression results revealed, after adjustment for covariates, that Total PHMS was significantly negatively associated with PFS scores (β = − 0.258, p = 0.001), but only one of the PHMS subscales, Acceptance, was significantly associated with PFS scores (β = − 0.328, p < 0.001). PHMS-Awareness was not related to PFS scores. Greater levels of mindfulness were associated with lower food susceptibility in treatment-seeking adults with overweight/obesity. Mindful acceptance may be the driving factor in this relationship, suggesting that awareness alone is not sufficient for promoting healthier appetite regulation. Interventions aimed to reduce food susceptibility and improve coping with cravings may benefit from an enhanced focus on teaching mindful-acceptance skills. Level III, observational cohort study.

Real-time magnetic resonance imaging (RT-MRI) of human speech production is enabling significant advances in speech science, linguistics, bio-inspired speech technology development, and clinical applications. Easy access to RT-MRI is however limited, and comprehensive datasets with broad access are needed to catalyze research across numerous domains. The imaging of the rapidly moving articulators and dynamic airway shaping during speech demands high spatio-temporal resolution and robust reconstruction methods. Further, while reconstructed images have been published, to-date there is no open dataset providing raw multi-coil RT-MRI data from an optimized speech production experimental setup. Such datasets could enable new and improved methods for dynamic image reconstruction, artifact correction, feature extraction, and direct extraction of linguistically-relevant biomarkers. The present dataset offers a unique corpus of 2D sagittal-view RT-MRI videos along with synchronized audio for 75 participants performing linguistically motivated speech tasks, alongside the corresponding public domain raw RT-MRI data. The dataset also includes 3D volumetric vocal tract MRI during sustained speech sounds and high-resolution static anatomical T2-weighted upper airway MRI for each participant.

Harmony is defined broadly as the spread of some phonological property from a trigger segment to one or more undergoer segments. Transparency to harmony refers to a situation in which some segments do not take on a harmonizing property, but instead have apparently been skipped over. There are also cases in which some segments appear to have only partially undergone harmony, assimilating to a trigger segment with respect to a harmonizing property without taking on that property completely. Partial harmony is most commonly exemplified by cases of height harmony in which an undergoer vowel approaches the height of a trigger vowel without necessarily reaching it. In this paper, I propose an analysis of the partial height harmony of Servigliano Italian that is situated within the Gestural Harmony Model. In this model, harmony is the result of a subsegmental gesture extending to overlap the gestures of other segments in a word. Transparency arises due to overlap between a harmonizing gesture and a gesture with a conflicting articulatory target. In this model of harmony and transparency, I propose that cases in which segments seem to partially undergo harmony, as in the height harmony of Servigliano Italian, be analyzed as cases of partial transparency.

The ‘superclose’ vowels *i̧ and *u̧ have phonetically merged with the high vowels *i and *u in the development of modern Bemba from Proto-Bantu. However, the two series of high vowels still exhibit distinct phonological patterning. Forms containing /u/ < *u̧ exhibit only static distributional patterns as opposed to active alternations, and often involve morphologically frozen forms. However, the distinction between /i/ < *i and /i/ < *i̧ is still synchronically active and involves alternating forms. I focus here on two phonological processes in Bemba that illustrate this: vowel height harmony and consonant mutation. Bemba exhibits vowel height harmony (common throughout the Bantu language family), in which high suffix vowels lower to mid following mid root vowels (though note that /u/ only lowers to [o] after [o]).

Acceptance-based behavioral therapies (ABTs) for obesity may be superior to standard behavioral therapies but have not been adequately tested with American Indians (AIs). Neurocognitive function is also unexamined in relation to behavioral weight loss among AIs despite findings that neurocognition predicts outcomes in general samples, may help explain some of the benefits of ABTs, and may be relevant to marginalized groups. The primary objective of this pilot was to examine the feasibility/acceptability of ABT in an AI sample. Exploratory analyses examined the relationship between neurocognition and weight loss. Forty-eight AI adults with overweight/obesity (ages 43.3 ± 10.3 years, 85% female; baseline body mass index = 36.8 ± 4.4 kg/m2) enrolled in a 6-month open ABT weight loss trial. Feasibility indices, including screening/enrollment, session attendance, retention rates for posttreatment assessments, and program acceptability were examined. Percent weight loss (%WL) was assessed as well as fluid and crystalized neurocognition (National Institutes of Health Toolbox Cognition Battery [NIHTB-CB]). We enrolled 79% of the eligible sample and retained 75% (N = 36) at posttreatment assessments. Program completers lost an average of 5.2 ± 4.9% of initial body weight (dz = 1.14), whereas intent-to-treat analyses show a mean loss of 4.1 ± 4.7%. Participants reported high satisfaction, effectiveness, and cultural appropriateness. Exploratory analyses of neurocognitive domains suggested that crystalized cognition was higher among completers, and higher baseline cognitive flexibility predicted greater %WL (β = .34, p = .05). ABT resulted in clinically significant weight loss in an AI sample. A controlled trial of ABT in a larger, more diverse sample is warranted to determine whether (a) the findings are robust, generalizable, and/or superior to other treatments and (b) neurocognitive factors moderate outcomes.

Articulation of liquid consonants in onsets and codas by four speakers of General American English was examined using real-time MRI. Midsagittal tongue posture was compared for laterals and rhotics produced in each syllable margin, adjacent to 13 different vowels and diphthongs. Vowel articulation was examined in words without liquids, before each liquid, and after each liquid, to assess the coarticulatory influence of each segment on the others. Overall, nuclear vocalic postures were more influenced by coda rhotics than onset rhotics or laterals in either syllable margin. Laterals exhibited greater temporal and spatial independence between coronal and dorsal gestures. Rhotics were produced with a variety of speaker-specific postures, but were united by a greater degree of coarticulatory resistance to vowel context, patterns consistent with greater coarticulatory influence on adjacent vowels, and less allophonic variation across syllable positions than laterals. (C) 2019 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Whether phonological transformations in general are subregular is an open question. This is the case for most transformations, which have been shown to be subsequential, but it is not known whether weakly deterministic mappings form a proper subset of the regular functions. This paper demonstrates that there are regular functions that are not weakly deterministic, and, because all attested processes are weakly deterministic, supports the subregular hypothesis.

BACKGROUND:Exclusive breastfeeding for 6 months is recommended; however, women with obesity have lower exclusive breastfeeding rates than their normal weight peers. The impact of the timing of maternal excess adiposity onset is unknown.RESEARCH AIM:We examined whether the timing of onset of excess weight was related to exclusive breastfeeding duration.METHODS:Snowball sampling was used for the cross-sectional Breastfeeding Opinions, Outcomes, Behaviors, and Services online survey. The sample was 1,570 mothers who reported their breastfeeding and weight history. Exclusive breastfeeding duration (for first biological child only) was calculated in months and dichotomously (0=< 6 months exclusive breastfeeding; 1=⩾ 6 months exclusive breastfeeding). Participants self-reported their excess weight onset (0=before/during puberty or 1=after puberty).RESULTS:Analysis of covariance results indicated that earlier onset of excess weight was associated with shorter exclusive breastfeeding ( F (1, 1518) = 11.29, p<.001, η2=.01). Those with excess adiposity onset before or during puberty were 1.6 times more likely to experience exclusive breastfeeding failure (< 6 months exclusive breastfeeding) than those with onset after puberty ( OR = 1.57, β = .46, Wald = 11.81, p = .001).CONCLUSION:Earlier onset of excess adiposity had an adverse influence on exclusive breastfeeding duration. Women with a history of excess adiposity before or during puberty who want to breastfeed may require additional intervention to promote their breastfeeding success.

Harmony refers broadly to the spread of a phonological property from a trigger segment to one or more undergoer segments within some domain. Transparency to harmony refers to a situation in which some segments in a domain do not take on a harmonizing property but rather have apparently been skipped over by a harmony process. There are also cases in which segments in a harmony domain appear to have only partially undergone harmony. These partial undergoers assimilate to a trigger segment with respect to a harmonizing property, but do not necessarily take on that property completely. This sort of partial harmony is most commonly exemplified by cases of partial height harmony, in which an undergoer vowel approaches the height of a trigger vowel without necessarily reaching it. Often, such partial height harmony proceeds in a stepwise fashion, with each undergoer taking one step toward the height of the trigger along a scale of vowel height. One such stepwise height harmony is the vowel raising harmony of Nzebi (Bantu; Gabon; Guthrie 1968, Clements 1991, Kirchner 1996, Parkinson 1996). In Nzebi, the suffix /-i-/ occurs immediately after verb stems in some tenses. This high vowel triggers singlestep raising of preceding non-reduced stem vowels.1 As part of this raising process, the high-mid vowels /e/ and /o/ surface faithfully when no high suffix vowel follows, as in (1a‐c). However, they surface as [i] and [u], respectively, before suffix [i], as in (1d-f).

Obesity is a global epidemic, yet successful interventions are rare. Up to 60% of people fail to achieve clinically meaningful, short-term weight loss (5–10% of start weight), whereas up to 72% are unsuccessful at achieving long-term weight loss (5–10% loss for ≥5years). Understanding how biological, cognitive, and self-regulatory factors work together to promote or to impede weight loss is clearly needed to optimize obesity treatment. This paper describes the methodology of the Cognitive and Self-regulatory Mechanisms of Obesity Study (the COSMOS trial). COSMOS is the first randomized controlled trial to investigate how changes in multiple biopsychosocial and cognitive factors relate to weight loss and one another across two weight loss treatments. The specific aims are to: 1) Confirm that baseline obesity-related physiological dysregulation is linked to cognitive deficits and poorer self-regulation, 2) Evaluate pre- to post-treatment change across time to assess individual differences in biomarkers, cognition, and self-regulation, and 3) Evaluate whether the acceptance-based treatment (ABT) group has greater improvements in outcomes (e.g., greater weight loss and less weight regain, improvements in biomarkers, cognition, and self-regulation), than the standard behavioral treatment group (SBT) from pre- to post-treatment and 1-year follow-up. The results of COSMOS will provide critical information about how dysregulation in biomarkers, cognition, and/or self-regulation is related to weight loss and whether weight loss treatments are differentially associated with these factors. This information will be used to identify promising treatment targets that are informed by biological, cognitive, and self-regulatory factors in order to advance obesity treatment.

The current study is a qualitative investigation of how foster caregivers, primarily Latinos, view adherence to pediatric appointments. Our purpose was to identify how the child welfare system, pediatric clinics, and pediatric health providers serving foster children might promote appointment attendance. Participants in the study had a return appointment at an outpatient pediatric clinic that served only children in the child welfare system. Twenty-eight caregivers (13 related and 15 unrelated) participated in telephone interviews after the date of their scheduled pediatric appointment; 32% missed their return appointment. Semistructured interview guides included general questions about what promotes attending the pediatric appointment, what makes it difficult to attend the pediatric appointment, and how pediatric care affects the foster child. Analysis of qualitative data using content analysis identified three themes: (a) Multiple Methods to Attend Appointments, which included caregivers' organizational and problem-solving skills; (b) Positive Health Care Experiences, which consisted of caregivers' personal relationships with providers and staff members and clinic organization; and (c) Necessity of Pediatric Care, which included recognition of the need for health care, especially timely immunizations. All caregivers also reported that appointment reminders would be helpful. Unrelated caregivers said more often than related caregivers that appointment attendance was facilitated by clinic organization. Nonadherent caregivers more than attenders mentioned their need to solve problems to attend appointments or reschedule appointments. In summary, caregivers said they valued regular pediatric health care to treat their children's chronic conditions and prevent illnesses, but they acknowledged that their home lives were hectic and that attending scheduled appointments was sometimes difficult. Foster caregivers in this study identified the ideal pediatric clinic environment that encourages adherence to health care appointments. This environment is an organized clinic with easy access including parking, engaged pediatric health providers, ability to reschedule appointments when necessary, and an individualized and consistent appointment reminder system.

The scientist-practitioner model of clinical psychology promotes integrated training in research and practice. However, many psychologists graduate from their doctoral program with limited exposure to research. Among those who do participate in research during graduate school, psychologists in clinical practice settings often stop conducting scholarly work. Over the past decade, Children’s Hospital Los Angeles (CHLA) developed a scholarly training component as part of a clinically focused postdoctoral psychology fellowship program. This article describes the CHLA approach to promoting the scientist-practitioner model in a hospital and community mental health training setting. The authors examined regularly collected program data from 2004 to 2014 to explore the potential impact of scholarly training on publication success. Results indicated that mentorship may be a particularly important aspect of postdoctoral training in terms of promoting publication success. Over the period since scholarly training has been required and increasingly emphasized, the publication rates for postdoctoral fellows and supervisors have both increased. A description of the program is offered as an example of how other postdoctoral fellowship programs may support trainees in developing complementary clinical and research skills, contribute to the overall vitality of their training programs, and enable their training programs to contribute to the broader scientific community.

In some languages, segments bearing a potential harmonizing feature trigger harmony while other segments bearing that feature do not. This paper examines such a case in Classical Manchu tongue root harmony, in which some advanced tongue root (ATR) vowels idiosyncratically trigger a process of ATR harmony while others do not. I propose that this pattern and others like it are best accounted for by an analysis in which a segment’s status as a trigger of harmony is encoded within its subsegmental representation, and a phonological grammar shapes a language’s inventory to include both harmony-triggering and non-triggering segments. This analysis is implemented within the Gestural Harmony Model, in which the assumed units of phonological representation are dynamically-defined gestures.