Football Talk: Sociological Reflections on the Dialectics of Language and Football

The paper examines the relationship between football and language from a sociological point of view. This has often been couched in negative terms but the paper argues that such a view distorts the majority of ‘Football Talk’. The discourse surrounding football within everyday interactions is often positive and integrative. ‘Football Talk’ acts as a lingua franca amongst football supporters. This language code is therefore both inclusive and exclusive.

Variation in pre-PCR processing of FFPE samples leads to discrepancies in BRAF and EGFR mutation detection: a diagnostic RING trial.

AIMS: Mutation detection accuracy has been described extensively; however, it is surprising that pre-PCR processing of formalin-fixed paraffin-embedded (FFPE) samples has not been systematically assessed in clinical context. We designed a RING trial to (i) investigate pre-PCR variability, (ii) correlate pre-PCR variation with EGFR/BRAF mutation testing accuracy and (iii) investigate causes for observed variation. METHODS: 13 molecular pathology laboratories were recruited. 104 blinded FFPE curls including engineered FFPE curls, cell-negative FFPE curls and control FFPE tissue samples were distributed to participants for pre-PCR processing and mutation detection. Follow-up analysis was performed to assess sample purity, DNA integrity and DNA quantitation. RESULTS: Rate of mutation detection failure was 11.9%. Of these failures, 80% were attributed to pre-PCR error. Significant differences in DNA yields across all samples were seen using analysis of variance (p

Perception of Filtered Speech by Children with Developmental Dyslexia and Children with Specific Language Impairments

Here we use two filtered speech tasks to investigate children’s processing of slow (<4 Hz) versus faster (∼33 Hz) temporal modulations in speech. We compare groups of children with either developmental dyslexia (Experiment 1) or speech and language impairments (SLIs, Experiment 2) to groups of typically-developing (TD) children age-matched to each disorder group. Ten nursery rhymes were filtered so that their modulation frequencies were either low-pass filtered (<4 Hz) or band-pass filtered (22 – 40 Hz). Recognition of the filtered nursery rhymes was tested in a picture recognition multiple choice paradigm. Children with dyslexia aged 10 years showed equivalent recognition overall to TD controls for both the low-pass and band-pass filtered stimuli, but showed significantly impaired acoustic learning during the experiment from low-pass filtered targets. Children with oral SLIs aged 9 years showed significantly poorer recognition of band pass filtered targets compared to their TD controls, and showed comparable acoustic learning effects to TD children during the experiment. The SLI samples were also divided into children with and without phonological difficulties. The children with both SLI and phonological difficulties were impaired in recognizing both kinds of filtered speech. These data are suggestive of impaired temporal sampling of the speech signal at different modulation rates by children with different kinds of developmental language disorder. Both SLI and dyslexic samples showed impaired discrimination of amplitude rise times. Implications of these findings for a temporal sampling framework for understanding developmental language disorders are discussed.