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This investigation examined the existence of interconnectedness between developing linguistic subsystems. Spontaneous speech samples were collected from 31 typically-developing Greek-speaking toddlers across two age levels, at 28 and 36 months. Correlational analyses were performed synchronically and predictively, revealing significant positive relationships among all language skills within ages. Phonetic and grammatical skills also showed predictive value for later skills. In addition, a cluster analysis on the basis of performance on each individual skill revealed variable linguistic profiles: Low performers showed multiple interactions within and across ages, while High performers showed minimal such interactions. The current results revealed complex interdependencies among the different language skills with children exhibiting variable linguistic profiles, as supported by dynamic systems theory approaches to language acquisition.

The current study aimed to examine (a) whether the dominant leg (DL) was associated with the contralateral side of functional scoliosis and (b) if any of the postural asymmetries' evaluation variables may be a reliable predictor of the functional scoliosis development in young male soccer players. Six hundred-nine (n = 609) male soccer players (age: 10.8 ± 2.7 years; height: 147 ± 17 cm; weight: 43.4 ± 14.6 kg; DL: Right 81.6%, Left 14%, Both 4.4%) participated in this study. The spinal asymmetries evaluation included thoracic kyphosis, lumbar lordosis, truncal rotation, shoulders alignment from posterior view, anterior and posterior pelvic tilt, anterior superior iliac spine (ASIS), hamstring tightness, and lower extremities discrepancy. A significant association was observed between the DL and the truncal rotation side: χ2(4) = 30.84, p = 0.001, V = 0.16. Participants with longer left legs were likelier to present a spinal asymmetry (OR = 1.18). The participants with higher left shoulders were 2.13 times more likely to have spinal asymmetry than the participants with normal shoulders level. Participants with left ASIS higher were 3.08 times more likely to present asymmetry than those with normally aligned ASIS levels. There was also a significant association between the DL and the side of truncal rotation: χ2(2) = 13.30, p = 0.001, V = 0.449. Logistic regression analysis for the functional scoliotic group and truncal rotation side demonstrated that the taller participants and participants with shorter right legs were more likely to have asymmetry on the left side (OR = 1.29, OR = 0.32). Participants with greater right hamstring stiffness were likelier to have a truncal rotation on the right side (OR = 0.93). Participants with higher left shoulders were 0.20 times less likely to have a truncal rotation on the left side than the participants with normal shoulders level. In conclusion, leg dominance in children and in youth soccer players may be a factor causing truncal rotation on the contralateral side. Additional causes, such as leg length discrepancy and pelvic tilt, may progressively lead to functional scoliosis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Research has shown that consistent family support improves higher education (HE) students' chances for adjustment and graduation but family over-involvement negatively affects students' well-being. We theoretically bridge three largely disjointed bodies of literature (namely, family 'support', 'involvement' and 'over-involvement') and show that families of undergraduate students very often engage in roles traditionally reserved for lower levels of education. Through a large-scale, quantitative university student survey in two universities in Cyprus, we empirically show that the three bodies of literature should be unified, because family involvement in HE is better conceptualised and operationalised as a continuum. We further suggest that family involvement in HE can be split into two qualitatively different and empirically not significantly related constructs: rearguard and front line family involvement. In addition, the students seem not only to approve, but also encourage more family involvement (even 'over-involvement'), and state that they would like their families to provide them not just with more financial help, but with more emotional support as well. The discussion extends to include an analysis of students' perceptions of university actors' attitudes towards family involvement.

Whilst augmentative and alternative communication has been used for over sixty years across many countries, in Cyprus it remains underdeveloped. The current study seeks to investigate the current AAC practices in Cyprus. Data were collected through electronically distributed questionnaires to all registered speech and language therapists (n = 330), contacted by the Cyprus Speech Therapy Association. The questionnaire comprised 12 questions, which were categorized into three sections: background information (educational level and clinical experience), training undergone (during or after completion of tertiary education) and participants' AAC practices (caseload, assessment and intervention). The findings from the analysis of the returned data (n = 59) reveal that training provision on augmentative and alternative communication has positively influenced practice. Most of the participants received training in the specific field during their bachelor's degree, rather than during later education. Life-long training on different language systems (including different assistive technology tools, such as symbols and talking products as well as methods such as the Picture Exchange Communication System) also played a pivotal role in their work. Regarding the assessment process, the findings show that whilst there are a number of standardized language assessment tools, the participants relied heavily on non-standardized tools and/or their clinical judgment. Regarding intervention, they reported using different language systems and a variety of Assistive Technology equipment. Several recommendations are made aimed at raising the profile of AAC services in Cyprus, especially with regards to training and assessment, as the findings show that these areas have not been addressed systemically thus far.

Families have been getting more and more involved in their children's education. This paper presents findings of a study investigating family involvement in their members' undergraduate studies attending a state (non-fee-paying) and a private (fee-paying) university in Cyprus. The data presented in the paper were collected via online logs completed by administrative personnel in the two universities documenting incidents of family involvement. The data analysis demonstrates how similarly the phenomenon manifests in both universities and suggests that where the two universities differ is more in the intensity of the various modes of family involvement. It also projects students' desires and encouragement of their family's involvement and their families' intervention to protect or guide them. The findings of the study are discussed in view of cultural and societal norms and changes about parenthood and the relationship between families and their university age members in a marketized higher education context.

In this paper, two case studies of elementary school teachers in the Republic of Cyprus are constructed to discuss how curriculum making relates to teacher biographies and sense of professionalism, as those are shaped at the intersection of their professional history and projections for the future, informed by and informing their constitution as professionals in local institutional and broader social contexts. Drawing on the ecological model of teacher agency, the two cases are utilised to examine how teachers' narrated professional experiences in past and current schools were at interplay with their general sense of professional role and purpose as teachers. This complex interplay is simultaneously connected to the ways they perceived and constituted their pupils as well as to the ways they themselves were constituted by others as professionals. The examination of the two cases foregrounds the notions of teacher agency and of curriculum making as contingent, negotiated and negotiable, and opens up the space to consider the politics of both as those are permeated by micro-processes of subjection and subjectivation.

This paper examines the visual representation of the refugee child in digital news media in Cyprus at two historical moments of significant immigration rise in Europe as a result of violent conflict: the period of May 2015-2016 and February 2022-2023. The analysis showed that refugee children were portrayed in ways which led to their de/humanization. However, differences in the language, themes, and visual grammar applied gave way to the emergence of a hierarchy of refugee child subjects. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Parent training has been shown to be an important means of supporting families living with autism--but such services are not universally accessible. A multinational project funded by the European Commission has been developed in order to establish such parent training in three south-eastern European countries. To ensure that the training was relevant and appropriate, a survey was carried out in autumn 2015 to ascertain the attitudes of parents of children with autism in Croatia, Cyprus and the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia regarding this issue, and to identify the areas of training that they felt most important. Two hundred and fifty-three surveys were distributed, and 148 were returned, a response rate of 58%. Respondents in the three counties were overwhelmingly positive about parent training, with almost 90% stating that they would like to attend such training. Weekend training sessions were preferred by the majority of respondents. There was wide variation between the three countries with regard to what content was felt important to be included, with parents in the FYR of Macedonia seeking information in the greatest number of areas. Five topics were prioritised by parents across all three countries. These were:(1) Strategies for enhancing my child's communication; (2) Strategies on facilitating my child's interaction with other children; (3) Sensory integration and development: (4) General information on behavioural management strategies; and (5) Identifying and/or developing socialisation opportunities.

Against the background of a curriculum change in the Republic of Cyprus, this study focuses on teachers who volunteered to work along with academics and ministry officials in subject-area curriculum review committees to develop official curriculum texts. Teachers' participation in these committees was construed in official rhetoric as a means to acknowledge teacher/classroom expertise, and, by extension, to democratize the curriculum change process. Analysis of teacher interviews indicates, however, that this process was replete with negotiations among people with differentially valued knowledge and expertise: academic expertise, classroom experience and expertise, and a combination of those that produced a hybrid expert-subject. To unpack these negotiations and thus discuss the politics of teacher participation in collaborative partnerships, we utilize the Foucauldian notions of subjectivation, subjection, and resistance, and suggest that (1) teachers were constituted as subjects and were subjected to institutional(ized) power relations that produced and were produced by particular constructions of knowledge/expertise, and (2) teacher participation was further complicated by possibilities for resistance and openings for the destabilization of those institutionalized hierarchical relations. The latter points towards the ongoing politics of teacher participation in curriculum change and of professionalism as a "permanent provocation."

The accession of the Republic of Cyprus to the European Union in 2004 was anticipated to be a "catalytic" factor in developments towards a solution of the Cyprus problem at the political level. Within education, it was also seen as an opportunity for addressing diversity in a historically ethnocentric educational system through the introduction of a European dimension. Against this background, this article explores Greek-Cypriot children's discourses about national others by drawing upon two sets of data collected in two studies of roughly seven years apart. Despite the different theoretical and methodological approaches of the two studies, and despite the temporal distance between them (almost three and a half years before and after Cyprus's EU accession respectively), the concept of "Europe" was mobilised by children in highly similar ways to distinguish, evaluate and hierarchise various others and to re-produce ethnic, racial, and Eurocentric stereotypes against national outgroups and their immigrant classmates from diverse ethnic and cultural backgrounds.

For the past few years, the Republic of Cyprus has been pursuing a major educational reform across all levels of mandatory education, focusing especially on curriculum change, for the implementation of which in-service teachers have undergone a series of professional development seminars. Individual and focus group interviews with in-service elementary teachers, regarding their sense of professionalism within this curriculum change process, revealed that teachers positioned themselves largely onto different points on a continuum. These are conceptualized as positions veering between teachers' sense of minimum and maximum autonomy over their participation in the development and introduction of the new official curriculum. Framed by a traditionally centralized context, these positions were discursively negotiated in contradictory ways which allowed multiple positionings by each teacher. The paper concludes with the implications of these findings for understanding teacher professionalism and positioning, as well as for considering how this might relate to curriculum change and implementation processes.

We report on object and action picture-naming accuracy in two groups of bilectal speakers in Cyprus, children with typical language development (TLD) and children with specific language impairment (SLI). Object names were overall better retrieved than action names by both groups. Given that comprehension for action names was relatively intact for all children, this finding is taken to be the result of a breakdown at the interface of the semantic lexicon and phonological representations, or access to them. The results complement similar research on English, a minimally inflected language in contrast to Greek. Overall, cross-linguistic word class effects provide strong evidence for the hypothesis that grammatical category is an organizing principle shared across languages. Finally, our results suggest that bilectal children with SLI present with general lexical delay rather than a deficit in verb naming per se.

This paper examines the experiences of minority students from two different cultural groups, immigrant children of Pontian background and indigenous minority children of Roma descent, in the Greek-Cypriot educational system. Through a joint re-examination of results from two different qualitative studies, this paper delineates similarities and differences of how life at school is experienced through the eyes of children who are not part of the mainstream, in an effort to gain insight into the nuances of being a minority child in the specific educational system. Comparisons across the two groups of children suggest that although both groups shared a minority status, they nonetheless experienced marginalisation across different dimensions that were linked to their dual multilayered position as both insiders and outsiders. Attention to such complexities enables us to gain deeper understandings of children's lives, as too often the category of "minority child" seems to be treated as a monolithic and homogeneous one. (Contains 5 notes.)

Drawing on data from a larger ethnographic study, this article explores processes of othering among immigrant children of different ethnic and racial backgrounds at a public elementary school in Cyprus. Immigrant children of Pontian background internalized and reproduced racial and Eurocentric stereotypes against their non-European immigrant classmates, despite the shared experience of marginalization by the Greek-Cypriot majority. Such examinations of children's negotiations of selfing and othering widen our understandings of how children make meaning of, are influenced by but also shape their worlds, and carry implications for the anthropology of childhood and intercultural education. (Contains 2 tables, 2 figures, and 8 notes.)

This article explores the ways in which immigrant children in Cyprus negotiated and perceived their class positions amidst the transnational activities of their parents. As findings indicate, children develop acute understandings of the impact money has on their lives. Drawing on resources physically or imaginarily available to them, children navigated their class positions, hence blurring their boundaries and conceptualizations. (Contains 3 notes.)

Increasingly social scientists, including education theorists, find themselves having to fight an almost invisible racism that is masked by the racist undertones of the dominant discourse and practice of colorblindness. A continuous emphasis on colorblindness gives precedence to the role of race, diverting attention away from other forms of discrimination which can become the basis for exclusion. I would argue that for such acts of marginalization, difference-blindness may have more explanatory power. This paper discusses Greek-Cypriot teachers' perceptions of the integration of immigrant children in a Greek-Cypriot public primary school through the framework of difference-blindness. The discussion shows that despite their good intentions, teachers utilized a difference-blind ideology to rationalize practices of social exclusion of non-Cypriot students in what was considered an "integrated" school environment. (Contains 11 notes.)

This article focuses on how consumerism, as a social ideology, and consumption, as an individual activity, are used by adolescents to mark and mask differences in the process of identity construction. Data are drawn from an ethnographic study of urban youth. The act of consuming for the adolescents in this study forms an integral part of their identity performance across the intersectionality of the self 's experience of gender, race, and class. For females in this study, consumption is linked to gender performances based on the maintenance of an attractive and fashionable appearance as dictated by social perceptions of femininity. Girls' future aspirations are indirectly associated to consumptive acts through the ambition for financial emancipation. Consuming, or "aspiring" to consuming, for males in this study facilitates the achievement of a morality realized through the fulfillment of male responsibility toward the traditionally perceived "dependent" members of the family: mother, wife, and children. (Contains 7 notes.)

The current investigation examined the development of voice onset time (VOT) in Standard-Greek (SG) and Cypriot-Greek (CG)-speaking children at age levels 2;0-2;5, 2;6-2;11, 3;0-3;5, and 3;6-4;0 years. SG presents with a two-way voicing contrast (voiced and voiceless unaspirated stops) whereas CG is a three-way contrast dialect containing voiceless unaspirated, voiceless aspirated, and pre-voiced stops. A cross-sectional design was used. The main goals were: (1) to determine the age at which Greek and Cypriot Greek children acquire voicing contrasts, and (2) to examine the mechanism used during the process of acquisition. Stimuli included pseudo words in minimal pair contrasts differing in stop voicing (e.g. ['gaga] vs ['kaka]). Children were taught the target words using fast mapping procedures. Each member within a word pair referred to an unfamiliar object. Audio-recorded samples were analysed from wide-band spectrograms. Results indicated a greater overall variation of voicing patterns for children than adults, in both Greek and Cypriot VOT contrasts. Greek children acquired consistent pre-voicing and short lag aspiration patterns very early on, achieving adult values for VOT contrasts for alveolar and for velar places of articulation as early as 2;0-2;5 years old. On the contrary, a developmental lag in the acquisition of voicing contrasts was noted for Cypriot children as compared to the Greek counterparts. Accounts about the developmental differences among Greek and Cypriot children with respect to the adult VOT contrasts are discussed. (Contains 4 tables and 1 figure.)

Parental involvement has been increasingly gaining support among education theorists and policymakers across many countries (Kelley-Laine 1998) as an effective way to improve student academic performance. However, the cultural assumptions underlying calls for parental involvement have received little attention (De Carvalho 2001; Lareau 1987). Drawing on ethnographic data, this paper attempts to explore the culturally specific nature of current practices and ideologies of parental involvement in Cyprus and their effect on the marginalisation of potentially socially vulnerable groups. This endeavour is undertaken through the examination of elementary school teachers' perceptions of the involvement of immigrant parents in their children's education. In adhering to narrowly conceptualised notions of parental involvement and subsequently perceiving the immigrant parents as "disinterested", teachers at a Cypriot public elementary school perpetuated and furthered the social marginalisation of immigrant families. (Contains 3 notes.)

Pandemic conditions have affected social movement activity in various ways. In this article, we explore how young Cypriot climate activists, associated with the global Fridays for Future movement, attempt to integrate pandemic conditions in their mobilizing tactics, as well as how such conditions affect their collective youth agency. We first look into the strategic antagonistic framings they develop to counter dominant discourses of the pandemic as an unprecedented crisis and explore how these are informed by their understandings of, and emotions on, climate change as an effect of capitalism and overconsumption and as a type of 'slow pandemic'. We argue that by extending climate change crisis discourse to encompass the cause of the pandemic, young activists assert temporality as continuity, rather than rupture, and challenge the distinction between the exceptional and the everyday on which Emergency governance is based on. By doing this, they unsettle adult hegemonic discourses on temporality, emergency and crisis that lead to an uneven world. Secondly, we reflect on the impact of Covid-19 on non-institutional youth activism by exploring the challenges these activists face to their sustenance and reproduction, given that access to public space, as we claim, is crucial for teenagers in developing the necessary relationality that is key for the maintenance of their social movement activity. We argue that youth movements emerge and operate within particular conditions which are currently under threat given the distinct mechanisms of governing populations engineered during Covid-19. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article is based on research conducted in a small fishing community in Cyprus. It seeks to explore through an intergenerational and biographical approach how three generations of Greek Cypriot males belonging to fishing families create a meaningful sense of identity through their attachment to place and the fishing profession. The article analyses these three generations' childhood experiences, their social relationships and the processes of learning and knowledge transmission at work, to trace inter- and intra-generational changes and continuities and to offer a more nuanced understanding of the younger generation's sense of identity and belonging in light of ongoing structural changes. Findings pinpoint the centrality of place – land and sea – in all generations' sense of belonging and a strong sense of attachment to fishing which is, however, impacting the younger generation's professional orientations at an emotional level, given that fishing is no longer viable as a profession. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]