Speech Codes

A stroke is like a cerebral earthquake. In some cases, the labels that we mentally affix to objects and ideas are jolted out of place and the connection to language breaks.

Now, stroke victims with aphasia, or speech loss, are communicating and regaining their language skills, thanks to the efforts of U.Va.neurolinguist Filip Loncke and B.A. Bar, a talking barcode reader named after the French children’s book character. Loncke is conducting a series of experiments to document its value as a teaching tool for people with aphasia as well as those with Down syndrome.

Developed by the Swiss Foundation of Rehabilitation Technology, B.A. Bar weighs less than a pound and can recognize up to 1,850 different barcodes and store up to four hours of speech. "The beauty of B.A. Bar is its versatility," Loncke says. "You can record anything from a simple ‘yes’ or ‘no’ or an entire chapter of a book and associate that sound with a single barcode." Barcodes can be placed anywhere, added to books, photo albums and picture cards or placed on actual objects. As Loncke points out, this last feature is very useful for people who have lost their symbolic awareness.

Loncke has found that B.A. Bar offers a number of distinct advantages for language learning and relearning. Because it uses recorded words and phrases, it always provides consistent auditory feedback. People seem to gravitate to it because it’s an extension of the pointing that people naturally use when they want to learn something new. "Both people with aphasia and Down syndrome seem to incorporate it readily in their learning routines," Loncke says. "We have also found that people with aphasia were able to recover and pronounce significantly more words from listening to a bar-coded list than from a written list."

Loncke is conducting further tests of the therapeutic value of B.A. Bar. He is also interested in using these findings as a starting point for addressing questions about how humans process language. "By identifying the circumstances in which B.A. Bar is effective, we gain clues to how the brain works," he says.

Model Marriage

Professor Steven Nock knows how to make a woman happy. At least he knows what more than 5,000 married women say makes them happy.

Nock and fellow U.Va. sociologist Bradford Wilcox plumbed the National Survey of Families and Households to produce their study, "What’s Love Got to Do With It? Equality, Equity, Commitment and Women’s Marital Quality." Among its findings: The number one way to a woman’s heart is emotional engagement—meaning affection, understanding and quality time. Commitment is big, too. Wives want husbands who are committed to lifelong marriage. Sharing housework is another plus; women are happier when household chores are divided fairly.

The study appeared in the March issue of the journal Social Forces and has drawn contradictory praise from both conservatives and feminists. Women in traditional marriages—those who stay at home and whose husbands earn the majority of the family income—report higher levels of satisfaction. To conservatives, this is proof that traditional gender roles are healthy. To feminists, it’s evidence that women who step outside of convention pay an unfair price.

Nock agrees with both sides. A self-described "conservative feminist," he does his share of the cleaning, most of the cooking and earns less than his wife of 30 years. "Anyone who chooses to do things a little differently," he explains, "pays a little price for that." While being one of those "pioneers," he also considers himself a social conservative, someone who embraces the good in tradition and believes deeply in the personal and social importance of marriage.

The study, Nock explains, is simply "a snapshot of the American family at a particular moment in time.

Getting Under Your Skin

A mockup of the Sonic Window

It’s probably happened to you. You’re about to have blood drawn or an IV line inserted, and the nurse can’t quite find a vein. It’s an uncomfortable experience that is repeated millions of times annually. "Nurses place approximately 200 million IV lines every year," reports U.Va. biomedical engineer William Walker. "In about 20 percent to 25 percent of the cases, their first attempt is unsuccessful. It’s not surprising that people complain about IV sticks more than any other medical procedure."

Helping nurses pinpoint blood vessels quickly and precisely is one of the applications Walker and his colleagues, biomedical engineer John Hossack and electrical engineer Travis Blalock, had in mind when developing a new ultrasound device. The size of a cell phone, it’s called a Sonic Window because it will allow nurses and other medical professionals to see through skin.

The millions of soon-to-be parents who have viewed developing fetuses can attest to the power of ultrasound to produce sharp images of soft tissue. These machines, however, can be costly, complicated and cumbersome to use. The U.Va. engineers, part of the University’s research group in medical imaging, wanted to create an ultrasound imaging system that would be inexpensive and intuitive, with the transducer and display integrated in a single compact device that could be held in one hand.

Each engineer contributed his own expertise as part of a group effort to rethink the way ultrasound devices are designed and built. Walker wrote a series of elegant new algorithms for image formation that reduced the processing power required by the system and enabled the team to use a $25 digital signal processing chip. Blalock reduced the circuitry needed to interface analog and digital signals to a single, custom-integrated circuit. And John Hossack developed a new design for the transducer, the device that sends and receives the ultrasound wave, finding the right compromise between image quality and size.

"The great thing about our collaboration was that we all felt we could push back when one of us said something couldn’t be done," says Walker. "We didn’t want to be bound by conventional wisdom." The three researchers are completing their second prototype and have formed a company, PocketSonics, to commercialize their technology.

Fair Game?

There are 10 million deer hunters in the U.S. John Pepper, a U.Va. associate professor of economics, is not one of them. But his research could save many of their lives. Pepper applies economic theory to the sport, but it’s not the $10 billion that hunters spend every year that he cares about. It’s the moral hazards—how reducing one kind of risk can increase another. His research shows that lawmakers, in an attempt to help hunters by reducing regulations, have dramatically increased the number of accidental shootings and deaths.

Pepper and his co-authors studied Pennsylvania, the state with the largest population of deer hunters. Hunters there shoot an average of 446 deer a day. They also sometimes shoot each other. "The Deer Hunter: Moral Hazard of Gaming Regulations," found that when regulations allowed hunters to harvest bucks and does at the same time, accidents more than doubled. But when hunters could target only bucks—especially mature ones with four points to an antler—accidents plunged.

Why? According to economic theory, if the marginal cost of taking a shot at a potential deer goes down (because the law and fine for shooting the wrong kind of deer are eliminated), the probability of mistaking a person for a deer goes up. "The easiest way to misinterpret the findings is to think that hunters are just taking more shots," explained Pepper, "but we factored that out." The problem is that relaxed regulations encourage riskier shots.

This is not news to Stacy Dickert-Conlin, one of Pepper’s co-authors. Her father hunts deer in Pennsylvania, and when the game commission dropped its gender restrictions, he told her the woods would get more dangerous. Pepper plans to stick to fishing—a sport with significantly fewer fatalities.