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Biomedical subjects

R B Monsen

Publications and source records attributed to R B Monsen.

At least 37 records · Page 2Linked to original sources
PubMed1999

State of the art: interdisciplinary collaboration for health professional education in genetics.

Nursing has a long and productive history of interdisciplinary cooperation in providing education to nurses as well as other professionals. Interdisciplinary education is effective in socializing students and practicing clinicians for practice incorporating new discoveries, in areas such as genetics, for continuing relevance in health care delivery. The National Coalition for Health Professional Education in Genetics (NCHPEG), established in 1996 with the cooperation of the American Nurses Association, the American Medical Association, and the National Human Genome Research Institute at the National Institutes of Health, has provided leadership in bringing advances in genetics to the nation's care providers in nearly all health-related disciplines. Nursing plays a key role in this model initiative aimed at new genetic discoveries to improve the health care of all Americans.

American Medical Association↗
PubMed1998

A multiplicity of roles for genetic nursing: building toward holistic practice.

Nursing's unique contribution to human genetics is holism. There are many roles for basic and advanced practice nurses involved in genetics. Describing these roles makes it easy for nurses to learn more about genetic nursing and helps promote collaboration among professionals. Education for nurses about genetics helps foster greater nursing participation in human genetics. The goal is for nurses to be informed about genetics so that they can better understand people as whole persons whose growth and development, human response patterns, and biopsychosocial processes are affected by and have an effect on human DNA.

Genetic Diseases, Inborn↗
PubMed1996

Having a future: sexual decision making in early adolescence.

There is meager information about how adolescents decide to become sexually active and use protection against pregnancy and disease. The purpose of this project was to explore the thinking of adolescents, ages 12 to 14, about becoming sexually active and using protection during sexual encounters. In a health class, 45 adolescents responded to questions about influences on having sex and using protection. Short-answer, written responses were analyzed using Heideggerian hermeneutic interpretation. The reflections of youth faced with sexual decision-making focused on self-protection against pregnancy and disease. Postponing sexuality or using protection meant having a future, one that could hold the promise of love, marriage, and desired children.

Adolescent↗
PubMed1992

Autonomy, coping, and self-care agency in healthy adolescents and in adolescents with spina bifida.

This study compared the behaviors of autonomy, coping, and self-care agency among 22 adolescents with spina bifida with those of healthy adolescents matched for age, gender, grade in school, and socioeconomic status. Responses on the Adjective Checklist (Autonomy scale), the Ways of Coping Check List (Problem-Focused Coping scale), and the Denyes Self-Care Agency Instrument were analyzed. Adolescents with spina bifida demonstrated significantly lower scores on autonomy when compared with healthy controls. The absence of differences in coping and self-care agency suggests that similar therapeutic approaches may be appropriate for adolescents with and without spina bifida.

Adaptation, Psychological↗
PubMed1983

The oral speech intelligibility of hearing-impaired talkers.

Recordings were made of 10 hearing-impaired adolescents speaking sentences of systematically different phonologic and syntactic structure. Tapes containing these sentences were played to both experienced and inexperienced listeners in different conditions: in the absence versus in the presence of a verbal context; by auditory versus audio-visual presentation; with one versus two presentations of each sentence token. The responses of the listeners were scored and averaged for each subject, condition, and type of sentence. Significant differences were observed between (1) simple sentences and those which are complicated either by consonant clusters, polysyllabic words, or complex syntax; (2) experienced and inexperienced listeners; (3) sentences in and out of context, and (4) sentences heard and seen as opposed to merely heard. The results are discussed with reference to measurement of the intelligibility of the speech of hearing-impaired individuals.

Adolescent↗
PubMed1983

The accuracy of formant frequency measurements: a comparison of spectrographic analysis and linear prediction.

The accuracy of spectrographic techniques and of linear prediction analysis in measuring formant frequencies is compared. The first three formant frequencies of 90 synthetic speech tokens were measured by three experienced spectrographic readers and by linear prediction analysis. For fundamental frequencies between 100 and 300 Hz, both methods are accurate to within approximately +/- 60 Hz for both first and second formants. The third formant can be measured with the same degree of accuracy by linear prediction, but only to within +/- 110 Hz by spectrographic means. The accuracy of both methods decreases greatly when fundamental frequency is 350 Hz or greater. These limits of measurement appear to be within the range of the difference limens for formant frequencies.

Communication Devices for People with Disabilities↗
PubMed1982

Long-term average speech spectra for normal and hearing-imparied adolescents.

Acoustical aspects of the speech of hearing-imparied persons have usually been examined over brief periods of time for simple utterances. Of interest in this study was whether abnormal acoustical patterns would be observed when speech was examined over longer periods of time. Spectra were averaged for 20 hearing-impaired adolescents, for whom we had audiometric profiles and an assessment of speaker intelligibility, and also for ten normal-hearing adolescents. An analyzer having constant-frequency bandwidths of 60 Hz, with the center frequencies of the filters spaced at 40-Hz intervals across a 10-kHz range, was used in the measurements (averaging time 27 s). The normal spectra are characterized by a regular pattern of peaks occurring at multiples of the talkers' fundamental frequencies and by slopes declining at rates of -5 to -6 dB/octave. After correction for lip-radiation impedance, these slopes are similar to that reported for the normal glottal source ( - 12 dB/octave). The hearing-impaired adolescents produced spectra for which the harmonic structure ranged from the very well defined to the irregular and poorly defined; spectral slopes declined at rates equal to or greater than the normal rate, in some cases declining at twice the normal rate.

Adolescent↗
PubMed1979

Acoustic qualities of phonation in young hearing-impaired children.

Monosyllables were recorded from a group of 24 hearing-impaired and 6 normal-hearing children between three to six years of age. Tokens of the syllables /ba/ and /bo/ were placed on listening tapes and a panel of 10 experienced listeners made ratings of relative voice quality. The phonation samples were subjected to both a gross (spectrographic) and a fine (computer-aided) acoustic analysis. The following acoustic characteristics were examined: (1) mean fundamental frequency, (2) duration, (3) mean period-to-period changes in intensity and in fundamental frequency, (4) spectral energy ratio above and below 1000 Hz, and (5) intonation contour. The type of intonation contour appeared to be the most important characteristic separating the better from the poorer deaf speakers. The hearing-impaired subjects produced four different types of deviant intonation contours. In addition, two abnormalities of phonation, diplophonia and breathiness, are described.

Child↗
PubMed1979

Some effects of deafness on the generation of voice.

Glottal volume-velocity waveform data were collected from twenty male and female hearing-impaired adolescents by means of a reflectionless tube. The subjects each provided samples of phonation in normal- and soft-voice modes and in a three-syllable word with primary stress on the medial syllable. Analysis of the data, in comparison with characteristics of phonation produced by normally hearing subjects, indicates that deafness affects primarily the time-varying characteristics of the glottal source. Among the hearing-impaired subjects, the following abnormalities were noted; diplophonia and creaky-voice episodes at the onset or middle of phonation, and irregular patterns of change in the frequency and intensity of the glottal waveform. For some subjects, the period-to-period changes of frequency and intensity may be greater than normal. For the hearing-impaired subjects, the shape of the isolated glottal pulse and its spectrum are similar or identical to normal, while striking abnormalities may be seen in the way the glottal pulse changes over time. The effect of deafness is thus that it may prevent a speaker from learning the phonatory consequences of the muscular gestures which maintain and alter vocal-fold tension and subglottal air pressure dynamically in the production of voice.

Adolescent↗
PubMed1978

Improvement in vowel articulation of deaf children.

Three deaf adolescents who had poorly developed skills in oral communication were given specialized instruction designed to improve their ability to articulate vowels. This instruction was given for 1 hour weekly over a 5-month period, and it led to an improvement in vowel articulation that was substantial enough to be measured acoustically. The instruction emphasized articulatory relations between vowel sounds that are particularly difficult for the deaf to perceive visually or vibrotactually. The formant frequencies of five vowels were measured spectrographically before and after training. The measurements showed that all three children improved in their ability to articulate vowels as indicated by an increased frequency range of the second formant, a reduced amount of overlap in the frequency plots of adjacent vowels, and in more appropriate formant frequency values for individual vowels.

Acoustics↗
PubMed1978

Toward measuring how well hearing-impaired children speak.

Average intelligibility scores for a group of 37 hearing-impaired and two normally hearing adolescents were determined by 50 normal listeners and were compared with nine acoustically measured speech variables. These nine variables included measurements of consonant production, vowel production, and prosody. Regression analysis of the variables showed that three of the speech variables bore a multiple correlation of 0.85 with measured intelligibility scores. Two variables alone, the mean voice-onset-time difference between /t/ and /d/ and the mean second-formant difference between /i/ and /c/, accounted for about 70% of the variance in the intelligibility scores. To cross-validate the reliability of these correlations, intelligibility scores were subsequently predicted for another group of 30 hearing-impaired adolescents and then compared with intelligibility scores as determined by another group of normal listeners. For this second group, the correlation between measured intelligibility scores and predicted scores was 0.86, which indicates that the reliability of the predicting variables is high. Five of the nine variables correlated more highly with measured speech intelligibility than did pure-tone audiometric thresholds. The average speech intelligibility of all 67 hearing-impaired subjects was 76%.

Acoustics↗
PubMed1978

Indirect assessment of the contribution of subglottal air pressure and vocal-fold tension to changes of fundamental frequency in English.

The contributions of vocal-fold tension and of subglottal air pressure to changing fundamental frequency F0 are indirectly assessed by comparing human glottal-source data with synthetic glottal waveforms generated by the Ishizaka-Flanagan two-mass model of vocal-fold vibration. In this model, synthetic male and female glottal waves may be generated with known values of subglottal air pressure and vocal-fold tension. Human glottal waves were recorded with a reflectionless tube into which ten male and female adults phonated. The subjects produced interrogative (rising F0) and declarative (falling F0) glides and trisyllabic words with primary stress on the initial, medial, or final syllable. Two types of change in the glottal wave over time are possible, depending on whether F0 is changed primarily by vocal-fold tension or by subglottal air pressure. Comparison of the natural and synthetic glottal waves indicates that (1) the rise of frequency in interrogative words is due principally to increasing vocal-fold tension, while (2) the fall of frequency in declarative words is due principally to decreasing subglottal air pressure; (3) in the polysyllabic words, the change of frequency within syllables resembles that of the declarative monosyllables and appears due primarily to changes of subglottal air pressure; and (4) the heightened f0 of the stressed syllable is due to an increase in the vocal-fold tension, typically accompanied by increased subglottal air pressure.

Acoustics↗