Global versus phonemic similarity: Evidence in support of multi-level representation.

There is long-standing debate about the extent to which children cognitively represent words in terms of global properties or phonological segments, yet few studies have investigated how children's sensitivity to phonemic versus global similarity changes over time. The current study uses a mispronunciation-reconstruction task to measure both types of sensitivity within a cross-sectional (N = 90, aged 3;2 to 5;7) and longitudinal sample (N = 23, aged 3;2 to 5;1). The results show that children's sensitivity to phonemes increases over the first two years of school but does not reach adult levels.

Story choice matters for caregiver extra-textual talk during shared reading with preschoolers.

This study aimed to examine the influence of the complexity of the story-book on caregiver extra-textual talk (i.e., interactions beyond text reading) during shared reading with preschool-age children.

Memory and language in middle childhood in individuals with a history of specific language impairment.

This study reports on the sensitivity of sentence repetition as a marker of specific language impairment (SLI) in different subgroups of children in middle childhood and examines the role of memory and grammatical knowledge in the performance of children with and without language difficulties on this task. Eleven year old children, 197 with a history of SLI and 75 typically developing (TD) peers were administered sentence repetition, phonological short term memory (PSTM) and grammatical morphology tasks. Children with a history of SLI were divided into four subgroups: specific language impairment, non-specific language impairment, low cognition with resolved language and resolved.

Effectiveness of enhanced communication therapy in the first four months after stroke for aphasia and dysarthria: a randomised controlled trial.

Objective: To assess the effectiveness of enhanced communication therapy in the first four months after stroke compared with an attention control (unstructured social contact).

Design: Externally randomised, pragmatic, parallel, superiority trial with blinded outcome assessment.

Setting: Twelve UK hospital and community stroke services.

Asking the right questions and getting meaningful responses: 12 tips on developing and administering a questionnaire survey for healthcare professionals.

Questionnaires provide a useful and versatile tool for new and occasional researchers, and can be applied to a wide range of topics. This paper provides simple guidance on some of the potential pitfalls in developing and running a questionnaire study, and how to avoid them. Each tip is illustrated with a real-life example from the development of a UK-wide questionnaire survey of trainee doctors and their educational supervisors.

Communication outcome after stroke: a new measure of the carer's perspective.

Objective: To validate a measure of the carer's perspective of a stroke survivor's communication in everyday life.

Design: Cross-sectional, interview-based, psychometric study.

Setting: A community sample from the northwest of England, UK.

Developmental complexity of the stimuli included in mispronunciation detection tasks.

Background: Phonological representations are important for speech and literacy development. Mispronunciation detection tasks have been proposed as an appropriate measure of phonological representations for children with speech disorder. There has been limited analysis, however, of the developmental complexity of task stimuli.

The effectiveness of portfolios for post-graduate assessment and education: BEME Guide No 12.

Background: Portfolios in post-graduate healthcare education are used to support reflective practice, deliver summative assessment, aid knowledge management processes and are seen as a key connection between learning at organisational and individual levels. This systematic review draws together the evidence on the effectiveness of portfolios across postgraduate healthcare and examines the implications of portfolios migrating from paper to an electronic medium across all professional settings.

Methods: A literature search was conducted for articles describing the use of a portfolio for learning in a work or professional study environment.

Apraxia of speech: how reliable are speech and language therapists' diagnoses?

Objective: To discover how reliably speech and language therapists could diagnose apraxia of speech using their clinical judgement, by measuring whether they were consistent (intra-rater reliability), and whether their diagnoses agreed (inter-rater reliability).

Design: Video clips of people with communication difficulties following stroke were rated by four speech and language therapists who were given no definition of apraxia of speech, no training, and no opportunity for conferring.

Settings: Videos were made of people following stroke in their homes.

Teaching phoneme awareness to pre-literate children with speech disorder: a randomized controlled trial.

Background: Awareness of individual phonemes in words is a late-acquired level of phonological awareness that usually develops in the early school years. It is generally agreed to have a close relationship with early literacy development, but its role in speech change is less well understood. Speech and language therapy for children with speech disorder involves tasks that appear, either implicitly or explicitly, to require a phonemic level of awareness.

The use of relative clauses by children with language impairment.

Recently, there has been increased attention to the development of complex syntax by children with language disorder. An example is the work of Schuele and Nicholls and Schuele and Tolbert who describe the acquisition of relative clauses by a group of children with SLI. The current paper presents data from 66 children with language impairment, aged 6 to 11 years.

On-the-job assessment of practical skills performance: experiences from a feasibility study.

A pilot exercise throughout one deanery during a whole training year has shown that the on-the-job assessment of practical skills is both feasible and acceptable to the wider health-care team. There was, however, a lack of exposure by trainees to a small number of specific procedural skills.

Can a ward simulation exercise achieve the realism that reflects the complexity of everyday practice junior doctors encounter?

Recent changes in medical education have resulted in an increased focus on patient safety. It is vital that new doctors can recognize and manage acutely-ill patients, as well as work safely and effectively as a member of a multi-professional team. A ward simulation exercise has been developed to provide a safe, but authentic setting to support junior doctors with further practice and feedback.

Using errorless learning to treat letter-by-letter reading: contrasting word versus letter-based therapy.

Some pure alexic readers have been shown to activate lexical and semantic knowledge under brief presentation conditions. This ability is not seen when letter-by-letter reading accuracy is high or the reading impairment is very severe. It is also unlikely to occur under normal untimed presentation because the pure alexic will make deliberate use of their letter-by-letter strategy.

PRHO views on the usefulness of a pilot ward simulation exercise.

There are concerns that pre-registration house officers (PRHOs) lack the expertise to initially manage acutely-ill patients. Simulation can support them in this role by providing a safe yet authentic setting. This paper shares PRHOs' views of a ward simulation exercise.

Early literacy achievement of children with a history of speech problems.

Background: There are conflicting reports in the research literature of the literacy outcome of children with speech disorder. The link between phonological awareness and literacy in typically developing and literacy delayed children is well established, but there is less research specifically into children with an isolated speech disorder (i.e.

Pre-registration house officer training: a role for nurses in the new Foundation Programme?

Purpose: To explore senior nurses' views of pre-registration house officer (PRHO) training, including the scope for their contribution to the new Foundation Programme.

Design: Data reported here are drawn from a larger, national project, which aimed to identify a curriculum for the PRHO year. The project was based in the Education Development Unit, Scottish Council for Postgraduate Medical and Dental Education (SCPMDE), Dundee.

Grammatical performance of children with language disorder on structured elicitation and narrative tasks.

The primary objective was to compare the grammatical output of children with language disorders on different tasks. Sixty-five children with language disorders, aged six to eleven, completed the syntactic formulation (elicitation) and narrative subtests from the Assessment of Comprehension and Expression 6-11 (Adams et al. 2001).

Implicit recognition in pure alexia: The Saffran effect-a tale of two systems or two procedures?

Some patients with pure alexia or letter-by-letter reading demonstrate the Saffran effect: residual activation of higher order lexical-semantic representations despite poor word recognition. This study investigated the reading of patient FD, a letter-by-letter reader with a clear Saffran effect. Two alternative explanations for this effect were tested in a series of experiments and through the impact of whole-word and letter-based therapies on FD's reading.

Linking appraisal of PRHO professional competence of junior doctors to their education.

In the UK, new medical graduates are known as Pre-registration House Officers (PRHOs). Postgraduate Deans are responsible for the PRHO year and for the final certification of PRHOs to allow them to be fully registered by the GMC as medical practitioners. However, as much as appraisal of professional growth is central to PRHO training, they are in need of a robust assessment mechanism to detect, at an early stage, individuals with significant clinical and professional deficiencies.

Comparison of the effectiveness of the Hanen Parent Programme and traditional clinic therapy.

Background: Both direct (clinician to child) and indirect (clinician to carer) approaches are currently used in the management of children with language delay, but there is as yet little evidence about their relative effects or resource implications.

Aims: This research project compared the Hanen Parent Programme (HPP) in terms of its effectiveness and consequent suitability for an inner-city UK population with clinic-based, direct intervention.

Methods & Procedures: Thirty-seven children aged 2;06-3;06 years with a diagnosis of language impairment and their parents took part in the research project.

Risk markers for SLI: a study of young language-learning children.

Background: Adequate assessment of 'normal variation' versus 'abnormal status' is particularly difficult for clinicians working with young children who are under 5 years of age and who present with slow language development. There is therefore clinical motivation to identify possible key difficulties (or 'risk markers') that may distinguish children who are likely to have specific language impairment (SLI) from the variation observed in younger, normally developing children.

Aims: The issue of 'risk markers' for SLI was explored.

The design of distance-learning programmes and the role of content experts in their production.

This paper describes an effective and efficient approach to the production of distance-learning materials in which content experts, editors and instructional designers collaborate. The approach is based on the development of a clearly defined agreed educational strategy and the use of a template for the programme. This allows the content experts to assemble the first draft of the programme in an appropriate format, with further revisions being carried out by the educationists in collaboration with the content editor.