Gaps in the Lexicon Restrict Communication.

Across languages, words carve up the world of experience in different ways. For example, English lacks an equivalent to the Chinese superordinate noun which is loosely translated as "ingredients used to season food while cooking." Do such differences matter? A conventional label may offer a uniquely effective way of communicating.

Prognostic Conversations Between Parents and Physicians in the Pediatric Intensive Care Unit.

Background: Up to 80% of pediatric intensive care unit (PICU) patients experience new morbidities upon discharge. Patients and families rely on clear communication to prepare for post-PICU morbidities.

Methods: Surveys were given at PICU discharge to parents and attending physicians of patients who developed multi-organ dysfunction within 24 hours of PICU admission and whose parents completed an initial survey 5 to 10 days after PICU admission.

Universal Constraints on Linguistic Event Categories: A Cross-Cultural Study of Child Homesign.

Languages carve up conceptual space in varying ways-for example, English uses the verb both for cutting with a knife and for cutting with scissors, but other languages use distinct verbs for these events. We asked whether, despite this variability, there are universal constraints on how languages categorize events involving tools (e.g.

Lack of Visual Experience Affects Multimodal Language Production: Evidence From Congenitally Blind and Sighted People.

The human experience is shaped by information from different perceptual channels, but it is still debated whether and how differential experience influences language use. To address this, we compared congenitally blind, blindfolded, and sighted people's descriptions of the same motion events experienced auditorily by all participants (i.e.

Prognostic and Goals-of-Care Communication in the PICU: A Systematic Review.

Objective: Admission to the PICU may result in substantial short- and long-term morbidity for survivors and their families. Engaging caregivers in discussion of prognosis is challenging for PICU clinicians. We sought to summarize the literature on prognostic, goals-of-care conversations (PGOCCs) in the PICU in order to establish current evidence-based practice, highlight knowledge gaps, and identify future directions.

Evidence for a Shared Instrument Prototype from English, Dutch, and German.

At conceptual and linguistic levels of cognition, events are said to be represented in terms of abstract categories, for example, the sentence Jackie cut the bagel with a knife encodes the categories Agent (i.e., Jackie) and Patient (i.

A dissociation between conceptual prominence and explicit category learning: Evidence from agent and patient event roles.

We investigate whether linguistic categories have the same structure as categories used to conceptualize the world outside of language. We focus on the event roles Agent and Patient (in the sentence , Murray is the Agent and the ice cream is the Patient). These categories appear to be tightly linked across language and cognition: they are encoded robustly in the world's languages and have been argued to be highly prominent conceptually, even part of innate core knowledge.

Parent and Physician Report of Discussions About Prognosis for Critically Ill Children.

Objectives: Parents value clear communication with PICU clinicians about possible patient and family outcomes (prognostic conversations). We describe PICU parent and attending physician reports and agreement regarding the occurrence of prognostic conversations. We queried parents and physicians about prognostic conversation content, which healthcare providers had prognostic conversations, and whether parents wanted more prognostic information.

Ethical and legal considerations related to disorders of consciousness.

Purpose Of Review: The purpose of this review is to describe ethical and legal issues that arise in the management of patients with disorders of consciousness ranging from the minimally conscious state to the coma state, as well as brain death.

Recent Findings: The recent literature highlights dilemmas created by diagnostic and prognostic uncertainties in patients with disorders of consciousness. The discussion also reveals the challenges experienced by the disability community, which includes individuals with severe brain injury who are classified as having a disorder of consciousness.

A pilot project: handwashing educational intervention decreases incidence of respiratory and diarrheal illnesses in a rural Malawi orphanage.

Children who live in orphanages represent a population particularly vulnerable to transmissible diseases. Handwashing interventions have proven efficacy for reducing the rate of transmission of common infectious diseases. Few studies have analyzed the delivery of health interventions for children in orphanages in sub-Saharan Africa.

The communicative importance of agent-backgrounding: Evidence from homesign and Nicaraguan Sign Language.

Some concepts are more essential for human communication than others. In this paper, we investigate whether the concept of agent-backgrounding is sufficiently important for communication that linguistic structures for encoding this concept are present in young sign languages. Agent-backgrounding constructions serve to reduce the prominence of the agent - the English passive sentence a book was knocked over is an example.

Thematic roles: Core knowledge or linguistic construct?

The status of thematic roles such as Agent and Patient in cognitive science is highly controversial: To some they are universal components of core knowledge, to others they are scholarly fictions without psychological reality. We address this debate by posing two critical questions: to what extent do humans represent events in terms of abstract role categories, and to what extent are these categories shaped by universal cognitive biases? We review a range of literature that contributes answers to these questions: psycholinguistic and event cognition experiments with adults, children, and infants; typological studies grounded in cross-linguistic data; and studies of emerging sign languages. We pose these questions for a variety of roles and find that the answers depend on the role.

Occluding the face diminishes the conceptual accessibility of an animate agent.

The language that people use to describe events reflects their perspective on the event. This linguistic encoding is influenced by , particularly whether individuals in the event are animate or agentive--animates are more likely than inanimates to appear as Subject of a sentence, and agents are more likely than patients to appear as Subject. We tested whether aspects of a scene can override these two conceptual biases when they are aligned: whether a visually prominent will be selected as Subject when pitted against a visually backgrounded .