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BackgroundPineoblastoma is a rare brain tumor usually diagnosed in children. Given its rarity, no pineoblastoma-specific trials have been conducted. Studies have included pineoblastoma accruing for other embryonal tumors over the past 30 years. These included only occasional children with pineoblastoma, making clinical features difficult to interpret and determinants of outcome difficult to ascertain.Patients and methodsCentrally or independently reviewed series with treatment and survival data from North American and Australian cases were pooled. To investigate associations between variables, Fisher's exact tests, Wilcoxon-Mann-Whitney tests, and Spearman correlations were used. Kaplan-Meier plots, log-rank tests, and Cox proportional hazards models were used in survival analyses.ResultsWe describe a pooled cohort of 178 pineoblastoma cases from Children's Oncology Group (n = 82) and institutional series (n = 96) over 30 years. Children

In multi-ethnic contexts, it is not uncommon to find that dementia carers or their clients are using, as the medium for communication in care, a language in which they are not comfortable and/or are not fluent. In extreme cases, there could be no shared linguistic code at all. This article asks how feasible it is to provide adequate care with inadequate mutual language knowledge. In particular, it challenges the claims of some care-providers that nonverbal communication is a legitimate substitute for linguistic interaction. With reference to two recent models of aspects of communication, the article offers new insights into the necessary parameters for effective interaction. The conclusions have important implications for future decisions in dementia care. Meanwhile, the account extends the boundaries of "language awareness" by demonstrating the social importance of developing insights into linguistic practices in challenging contexts.

This article combines the insights of an academic and a professional comedian, Paul Merton, in exploring how players attempt to mitigate cognitive overload or 'brain fry' in the popular BBC radio panel game Just a Minute (JaM). JaM requires players to present one minute of entertaining fluent spoken narrative on a specified subject, in front of a live audience. However, they have to navigate three rules: not to hesitate, repeat or deviate. These constraints impede the strategies that speakers customarily use to sustain fluency. They also undermine some of the classic tools of comedy. With reference to the role of fluency in regular speech, and how risks to fluency are usually mitigated by speakers, we show why the game's rules build such a cognitive burden. We explore the various tactics of players for managing that burden so that they avoid brain fry, and we draw in particular on the approach taken by the co-author, a regular and successful player for over 35 years. His solution to the challenge of cognitive overload is to reframe the purpose of the game. This article is the first to offer a theory-based account of the mechanisms of this internationally popular game show. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

People living with a dementia and their family carers are at high risk of being excluded from the contact, activities, information and services that help them remain resilient. Using interview data from family dementia carers, this article explores the sources of enablement and inhibition in accessing these aspects of social inclusion. Carers and those living with a dementia are found to inhibit and enable social inclusion for themselves, each other, and other carers. However, carers attribute most agency to the external environment: what is provided and how easy it is to access, along with the attitudes and beliefs of others. Poor communication surfaces as an impediment to social inclusion, with carers often left trying to bridge communicative gaps despite limited knowledge and self-confidence. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article argues that, across different psychological contexts, the methods of data collection, treatment, and analysis in word association tests have hitherto been inconsistent. We demonstrate that this inconsistency has resulted from inadequate control, in previous studies, of certain important variables including the basis of norm comparisons, and we present a principled method for collecting, scoring, and analysing association responses, to address these issues. The method is evaluated using test and retest data sets from 16-year-old and over-65-year-old twins (n = 636), which enable us to (a) compare samples matched for key environmental variables, (b) assess the transferability of norming information between age cohorts, and (c) evaluate the reliability of the scoring protocols. We find systematic differences in the association behaviour of the two age cohorts, indicating the importance of evaluating data only against norms lists that are matched to the target population. Individual association behaviour is found to be consistent across test times, both in terms of response stereotypy and response type.

Creating a timeline for formulaic language is far from simple, because several partially independent lines of research have contributed to the emerging picture. Each exhibits cycles of innovation and consolidation over time: domains take a leading role in developing new knowledge and then fall back, while another area comes to the fore. Thus, some of the first observations about formulaic language, back in the nineteenth century, were in the clinical domain of aphasia studies. By the early to mid twentieth century it was theories of language structure that had most to say, until eclipsed by the Chomskian model, which saw little significance in lexicalised units larger than the word (an issue discussed by Jackendoff 2002; see table entry). Meanwhile, changes in language teaching methodology in the mid to late twentieth century increasingly urged teachers to ask how adult learners could best master multiword strings to improve fluency and idiomaticity--a question still asked today. By the end of the twentieth century, new technological advances revealed frequency in usage as a probable agent of formulaicity, and these chimed with new models of lexical knowledge based on neural pathways and networks that could be strengthened by repeated exposure. Drawing on these models, we have seen, as we move into the twenty-first century, the development of new approaches to modelling language as a system--emergent grammars, including Construction Grammar--that are more accommodating of large, internally complex units. And finally, as we gradually understand more about how the brain accesses and retrieves linguistic material, we are seeing a resurgence of interest in formulaic language in neurological and clinical contexts.

It is argued that future research capacity building for the social sciences needs to incorporate methods to accelerate the acquisition by researchers of holistic expertise relevant to their roles as researchers and as developers of others. An agenda is presented, based on a model of learning that highlights missing elements of current provision, and two approaches currently under development are described. (Contains 1 note, 2 tables and 1 figure.)

Explores the adoption of aspects of Welsh social identity by members of an American college choir specializing in Welsh repertoire. Drawing on questionnaires, face-to-face and email interviews, and recordings of the choir in performance, a picture is built up of the singers' attitudes towards Welsh people, culture, and language, and their linguistic practices in relation to Welsh songs. (Author/VWL)

Explores how academic linguists have become marginalized from policy-making aimed at reforming English teaching in English schools, and how they are now beginning to contribute again. A pluralistic model is applied to two critical incidents. (Author/VWL)

Attempts to validate a psycholinguistic model of language processing. One experiment designed to provide insight into the model is TALK, is a system developed to promote conversational fluency in non-speaking individuals. TALK, designed primarily for people with cerebral palsy and motor neuron disease. Talk is demonstrated to be a viable tool for the pursuit of language awareness.(Author/VWL)

Examines the assumptions behind three attempts to introduce formulaic language into second language teaching. Contextualizes the discussion by briefly outlining the nature of formulaic language as a phenomenon. (Author/VWL)

Proposes a model to account for the uses to which the individual puts formulaic language, and specifically, what determines the choice for that person of a holistic or analytic processing strategy at any given moment. Formulaic language is used to describe a phenomenon that encompasses various types of wordstrings that appear to be stored and retrieved whole from memory. (Author/VWL)