Effectiveness of the Immigration Medical Surveillance Program for tuberculosis in Ontario.

Background: Citizenship and Immigration Canada (CIC) screens immigrants for TB and permits those with inactive pulmonary TB to enter Canada conditionally, subject to medical surveillance; we studied this program in Ontario.

Method: This was an administrative database study with linkage of national and provincial data.

Results: In 1994-95, 1,341 cases of foreign-born active TB were diagnosed and a CIC record was found for 1,095.

Relevance theory and pragmatic impairment.

This paper summarizes aspects of relevance theory that are useful for exploring impairment of pragmatic comprehension in children. It explores data from three children with pragmatic language difficulties within this framework. Relevance theory is seen to provide a means of explaining why, in a given context, a particular utterance is problematic.

Evaluation of the promotional materials used during the measles mass immunization campaign in Ontario and British Columbia.

Objective: To evaluate the promotional materials used during measles mass immunization campaign.

Design: A telephone survey was conducted among parents of targeted children in Ontario and British Columbia (BC).

Results: The leaflet distributed at school was considered to be the most useful source of information for 79% and 69% of the parents of school-aged children in Ontario and BC, respectively.

A study of idiom comprehension in children with semantic-pragmatic difficulties. Part II: Between-groups results and discussion.

Using a play-based methodology and a symptom checklist, this study investigated idiom comprehension in 26 children aged between 6-11 who were considered to have semantic-pragmatic difficulties. This group was compared with two groups of mainstream children and a group of children with (other) language disorders not primarily of a semantic or pragmatic nature. The results indicate that the children with semantic-pragmatic difficulties did, as a group, demonstrate significantly fewer appropriate idiomatic interpretations and significantly more inappropriate interpretations than did any of the other three groups.

A study of idiom comprehension in children with semantic-pragmatic difficulties. Part I: Task effects on the assessment of idiom comprehension in children.

In the apparent absence of suitable measures of idiom comprehension in normally developing and clinical populations, this study examined the relationship between a newly developed play task and a more conventional definition task. On the play task, children listened to a 1.5-minute, tape-recorded story into which were embedded 12 common idioms drawn from recordings of classroom teaching and children's television.