Parents play an important role in creating home language environments that promote language development. A nonequivalent group design was used to evaluate the effectiveness of a community-based implementation of LENA Start™, a parent-training program aimed at increasing the quantity of adult words (AWC) and conversational turns (CT). Parent-child dyads participated in LENA Start™ (n = 39) or a generic parent education program (n = 17). Overall, attendance and engagement in the LENA StartTM program were high: 72% of participants met criteria to graduate from the program. Within-subject gains were positive for LENA Start™ families. Comparison families declined on these measures. However, both effects were non-significant. Between-group analyses revealed small to medium-sized effects favoring LENA Start™ and these were significant for child vocalizations (CV) and CT but not AWC. These results provide preliminary evidence that programs like LENA StartTM can be embedded in community-based settings to promote quality parent-child language interactions.

Al-Ubaydli et al. provide a far-reaching, insightful and directly actionable analysis of how social-behavioral research may exert more influence over the development and implementation of public policy. Their paper offers a sophisticated understanding of the ‘scale-up effect’, or factors that influence the extent to which positive experimental effects replicate as an intervention is implemented more broadly. Using economic principles, models and analyses, they offer 12 proposals for improving the process of scaling up effective and policy-relevant interventions. The current paper outlines how their proposals share a number of complementary features with behavioral psychology and applied behavior analysis. This response considers three possible points of intersection: (1) perspectives on the importance and challenges of studying and controlling our own behavior; (2) approaches to determining the social value of intervention outcomes and the procedures for achieving them; and (3) recommendations for deploying meaningful, common measures across phases of research.

This paper evaluates the conjecture that excess stock returns that have been documented around the announcement of corporate spin-offs represent, at least in part, the re-creation of value destroyed at the time of an earlier acquisition. We evaluate this question with a sample of spin-offs that originated as earlier acquisitions. At the time of the original acquisition, on average, announcement period returns to the bidder and the combined bidder and target firm are negative and significant. Additionally, announcement period returns at the time of the spin-off are negatively and significantly correlated with acquisition announcement period returns.