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Published online: 06 Oct 2021. Purpose: The Australian English Communicative Development Inventory (OZI) is a 558-item parent report tool for assessing language development at 12–30 months. Here, we introduce the short form (OZI-SF), a 100-item, picture-supported, online instrument with substantially lower time and literacy demands. Method: In tool development (Study 1), 95 items were drawn from the OZI to match its item distribution by age of acquisition and semantic categories. Five items were added from four other semantic categories, plus 12 gestures and six games/routines. Simulations computed OZI-SF scores from existing long-form OZI norm data, and OZI and projected OZI-SF scores were correlated. In an independent norming sample (Study 2), parents (n¼230) completed the OZI-SF for their children aged 12–30 months. Child scores were analysed by age and sex. Result: OZI-SF and OZI scores correlate highly across age and language development levels. Vocabulary scores (receptive, expressive) correlate with age and the median for girls is higher until 24 months. By 24 months, 50% of the sample combine words “often”. The median time to OZI-SF completion was 12 minutes. Conclusion: Fitted percentiles permit working guidelines for typical (median) performance and lower cut-offs for children who may be behind on age-based expectations and/or at risk for a communication difficulty. The OZI-SF is a short-form of the OZI that has promise for research and clinical/educational use with Australian families. This work was supported by the Australian Research Council Centre of Excellence for the Dynamics of Language (ARC CoEDL, CE140100041).

Credited with averting almost 68% of new cases between 2000 and 2015, insecticide-treated bednets (ITNs) are one of the most efficacious malaria-prevention tools. Their effectiveness, however, depends on if and how they are used, making 'compliance' (and the social factors affecting it) a key area of interest for research on malaria transmission. This article situates the notion of compliance with 'bednet use' within everyday practices in an area of south-west Burkina Faso with high malaria transmission. By drawing on ethnographic fieldwork conducted between 2017 and 2018, it critically describes the precarious micro-environments that foreground bednet use-from gender and age to the means of (re)production of social and labour conditions-and assesses the bednets' effectiveness and community uptake. Bednet use stems from concrete, ordinary dynamics that interweave only apparently at the margins of the time individuals most need to be protected by a net. This work conceptualises 'compliance' beyond binary indicators of intervention uptake and locates 'use' as the result of contingent assemblages.

Many Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children are affected by chronic middle ear infection or otitis media from infancy that has a negative impact on development of listening and communicatio...

Denburg and colleagues (2016) present an interesting hypothesis that the existence of clinical trials infrastructure may function as a quality improvement lever for all patients in an institution o...

Acquisition of language concepts by pre-service teachers (PSTs) is likely influenced by university coursework and field experiences, but little research has examined how. Knowledge of phonics and phonological awareness and confidence to teach reading were surveyed among primary PSTs at one New South Wales university, most in second year following completion of language concepts course (N = 150), others (N = 74) in third year following the first major field experience, when literacy-related experiences on field experience were also surveyed. Overall, PSTs' scores for knowledge of phonological constructs were similar to or higher than in previous research, and PSTs performed better on ability-based than on knowledge-based items. Phonological construct scores were positively related to confidence to teach sound–letter relationships. Phonological construct scores were unrelated to experience teaching the first two grades, or having in their supervising teacher a positive model for teaching code-related skills...

On 9 August 2011, hundreds of citizens gathered in the streets of Salford, predominately in the precinct area. Violence escalated as commercial and domestic properties were set on fire and rioters ...

Gurindji Kriol is the home language of children and adults under about 40 years of age in the traditionally Gurindji-speaking communities of northern Australia. Nearly all words in Gurindji Kriol a...

Gurindji Kriol is the home language of children and adults under about 40 years of age in traditionally Gurindji speaking communities of northern Australia. For phonetics and phonology, a significant aspect of the mixed language status of Gurindji Kriol is that, in running speech, approximately two-thirds of word tokens are Kriol-derived, and one-third are Gurindji-derived. In this study, we describe vowel pronunciation in the Kriol-derived words relative to their English cognates, by comparing picture-prompted citation speech from five young Gurindji Kriol speaking women and four young Australian English speaking women from Katherine, the nearest town. The results indicate systematic differences in vowel pronunciation and vowel variability between Gurindji Kriol and Katherine English, in monophthongs and diphthongs. We also consider the vowel variation in these tokens in the context of the likely vowel phoneme inventory in Gurindji Kriol, or the extent of permitted within-category variation in the languages.

Despite the popularity of television captioning among deaf and hard-of-hearing Australians and its utility for other sections of the community (e.g., second language learners of English), there is little systematic research on relevant factors in captioning and patterns of caption use. This paper reports data from the Television Caption Users Survey (conducted October–December, 2000), the largest Australian survey to date of caption users' viewing habits and preferences. The results of this survey have not been previously reported beyond the submission of an industry report, but remain entirely pertinent to the current situation of caption usage in Australia and internationally. Results indicate that caption use is influenced strongly by functional hearing level and experience with captions, as well as by demographic factors. Possible underuse of captions by certain groups warrants further research both by survey and experimental approaches.

In the last few decades, worldwide attention regarding violence against women has progressively increased and gender-based violence towards women has slowly been recognised as a violation of women'...