"It made all the difference": a qualitative study of parental experiences with pediatric obstructive sleep apnea detection.

STUDY OBJECTIVES: To assess parental experience of their child's obstructive sleep apnea (OSA) detection process and inform the development of interventions and health communication strategies to improve OSA detection. METHODS: Semistructured interviews were conducted with 30 parents of children (ages 3-14) who snored and were referred for an overnight polysomnogram (PSG). Parents (60.0% Black race, 93.3% mothers) described how their child was referred for PSG and their perceptions and feelings throughout the detection process. Parents also completed an OSA knowledge measure. Interview data were analyzed using a descriptive approach and thematic analysis was conducted using the NVivo 12 software system. RESULTS: Twenty-one themes were identified across 5 categories (first steps; PSG facilitators and barriers; health information; health care experiences; parent experiences). Respondents experienced multiple pathways to OSA detection, with more than half of referrals initiated by parental concerns (vs. screening efforts). Parents reported a willingness to take any necessary steps to help their child. Both barriers and facilitators to completing a PSG were described. Parents observed both nighttime and daytime symptoms related to OSA in their child but often did not connect the symptoms to each other until later in the process. Participants had varying degrees of OSA knowledge, with a mean knowledge score of 56% correct (range 10%-90% correct). CONCLUSIONS: Parental experiences highlight aspects of the health care system that are both effective and ineffective in detecting children with OSA. Implications include a need for strategies to promote timely detection and to provide parents with accurate information about pediatric OSA. CITATION: Honaker SM, Gopalkrishnan A, Brann M, Wiehe S, Clark AA, Chung A. "It made all the difference": a qualitative study of parental experiences ith pediatric obstructive sleep apnea detection. J Clin Sleep Med. 2022;18(8):1921-1931.

Preschool Children's Processing of Events during Verb Learning: Is the Focus on People (Faces) or Their Actions (Hands)?

Verbs are central to the syntactic structure of sentences, and, thus, important for learning one's native language. This study examined how children visually inspect events as they hear, and do not hear, a new verb. Specifically, there is evidence that children may focus on the agent of the action or may prioritize attention to the action being performed; to date, little evidence is available. This study used an eye tracker to track 2-, 3-, and 4-year-olds' looking to the agent (i.e., face) vs. action (i.e., hands) while viewing events linked to a new verb as well as distractor events. A Tobii X30 eye tracker recorded children's fixations to AOIs (head/face and hands) as they watched three target events and two distractor events in different orders during the learning phase, and pointed to one of two events in two test trials. This was repeated for a second novel verb. Pointing results show that children in all age groups were able to learn and extend the new verbs to new events at test. Additionally, across age groups, when viewing target events, children increased their looking to the hands (where the action is taking place) as those trials progressed and decreased their looking to the agents' face, which is less informative for learning a new verb's meaning. In contrast, when viewing distractor events, children decreased their looking to hands over trials and maintained their attention to the face. In summary, children's visual attention to agents' faces and hands differed depending on whether the events cooccurred with the new verb. These results are important as this is the first study to show this pattern of visual attention during verb learning, and, thus, these results help reveal underlying attentional strategies children may use when learning verbs.