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Abstract: Food allergy can result in considerable morbidity, impairment of quality of life, and healthcare expenditure. There is therefore interest in novel strategies for its treatment, particularly food allergen immunotherapy (FA‐AIT) through the oral (OIT), sublingual (SLIT), or epicutaneous (EPIT) routes. This Guideline, prepared by the European Academy of Allergy and Clinical Immunology (EAACI) Task Force on Allergen Immunotherapy for IgE‐mediated Food Allergy, aims to provide evidence‐based recommendations for active treatment of IgE‐mediated food allergy with FA‐AIT. Immunotherapy relies on the delivery of gradually increasing doses of specific allergen to increase the threshold of reaction while on therapy (also known as desensitization) and ultimately to achieve post‐discontinuation effectiveness (also known as tolerance or sustained unresponsiveness). Oral FA‐AIT has most frequently been assessed: here, the allergen is either immediately swallowed (OIT) or held under the tongue for a period of time (SLIT). Overall, trials have found substantial benefit for patients undergoing either OIT or SLIT with respect to efficacy during treatment, particularly for cow's milk, hen's egg, and peanut allergies. A benefit post‐discontinuation is also suggested, but not confirmed. Adverse events during FA‐AIT have been frequently reported, but few subjects discontinue FA‐AIT as a result of these. Taking into account the current evidence, FA‐AIT should only be performed in research centers or in clinical centers with an extensive experience in FA‐AIT. Patients and their families should be provided with information about the use of FA‐AIT for IgE‐mediated food allergy to allow them to make an informed decision about the therapy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article reports grammatical judgment data from eighteen French Williams syndrome (WS) (mean CA = 21.10; Mean MA = 11.2). Participants had to detect ungrammatical sentences (13 amongst a set of 26 sentences) in telling whether a given sentence was well said or not. Agrammaticality could be due to errors in tense, person agreement, gender agreement, derivational or inflectional morphology, word order and so on. As a group, WS participants scored as seven-year-olds did, far below CA-controls and MA-controls. Scores did not improve with chronological age or mental age but they were related to total IQ and verbal IQ. They showed an important variability, one similar to what was observed in four-year-olds. Although a few WS individuals had good metasyntactic abilities, these abilities generally plateau in our WS group. They were not deviant, however, as the WS's profile of difficulties across items was qualitatively very similar to the one seen in seven-year-olds., (Copyright © 2014 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.)

This article reports grammatical gender attribution scores in French Williams participants (N=28, mean chronological age=15.1) in an experiment similar to the classic one from Karmiloff-Smith (1979) where grammatical gender was pitted against natural gender. WS participants massively opted for the masculine gender as the default one, just as MA-controls did. They differed from CA-controls, however, in that they provided fewer sex-based responses. Splitting the WS group into two subgroups did not reveal a shift to sex-based responses similar to the one found in controls. It is argued that this latter difference could plausibly be related to differences in cognitive, lexical or meta-linguistic abilities., (Copyright © 2010 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.)

Previous studies on grammatical gender in French individuals with Williams syndrome (WS) have led to conflicting findings and interpretations regarding keys abilities--gender attribution and gender agreement. New production data from a larger WS sample (N=24) showed that gender attribution scores in WS participants exactly mirrored those of controls: all groups overwhelmingly relied on the masculine as the default gender. WS participants' agreement scores were far lower than those of CA-controls though not significantly below those of MA-controls. They also did not improve with age, which might suggest a permanent disability in this area.

As shown by Bowerman (1986), it has proved remarkably difficult to find clear-cut interpretations of why children face problems with conditionals. The present study reassesses a part of this puzzle by analysing four- to eight-year-old French children's acquisition of conditional verb forms. Relevant data in the literature and results of an experiment designed to gain information on the temporal meaning of young children's past conditional verb forms are presented and discussed. Among others, they are shown to provide weak support for interpretations stressing the role of conceptual problems and related mapping problems. Meeting one of Slobin's (1985) proposals, an interpretation is suggested that views the lateness of the past conditional verb form as due to an unexpected juxtaposition of 'possibility' and 'non-possibility' in its semantic representation. It is argued that such a juxtaposition cannot be achieved on the sole basis of cognitive development and that it requires the preliminary mastery of the conditional verb form.