Developing children and young people’s participation in strategic processes: the experience of the Children’s Fund Initiative

The extent of children’s and young people’s participation activities has increased considerably among statutory, voluntary and community sector organisations across the UK in recent years. The Children’s Fund, a major government initiative launched in 2000, represents a systematic drive towards promoting children and young people’s participation in planning, implementing and evaluating preventative services within all 149 local authority areas in England. Based on research carried out by the National Evaluation of the Children’s Fund, this paper explores the experience of Children’s Fund partnerships of engaging children and young people in strategic processes.

Can L2 learners learn new ways to conceptualise events? Evidence from motion event construal among English-speaking learners of French

This study tests Slobin’s (1996) claim that L2 learners struggle with conceptual restructuring in L2 acquisition. We suggest that learners can find themselves in four different reconceptualisation scenarios: the TRANSFER, RESTRUCTURING, CREATIVE/HYBRID and CONVERGENCE SCENARIOS. To test this proposal in the field of event conceptualisation, a comprehensive analysis was made of the frequency distribution of path, manner, caused motion and deictic verbs in narratives elicited from intermediate (N=20) and advanced learners (N=21) of French, as well as native speakers of French (N=23) and English (N=30). The productions of the intermediate level learners were found to correspond to the creative/hybrid scenario because they differed significantly in their motion expressions from English as well as French native speakers, except for path, which was verbalised in target-like ways early on. Advanced learners were found to be able to reconceptualise motion in the L2, as far as manner and path are concerned, but continued to struggle with deictic verbs and caused motion. The clearest evidence for transfer from the L1 was found in verbalisations among intermediate level learners of events which involved a boundary crossing.

Negotiating social identities: the influence of gender, age and ethnicity on young people’s ‘Street Careers’ in Tanzania

This paper explores the diverse ways that children and young people negotiate their social identities and construct their life course trajectories on the street, based on ethnographic research with street children in Tanzania. Drawing on the concept of a ‘street career’, I show how differences of age, gender and ethnicity intersect with the time spent on the street, to influence young people’s livelihood strategies, use of public space, access to services, and adherence to cultural rites of passage. Using the notion of ‘gender performativity’, I analyse how young people actively reconfigure gender norms and the concept of ‘the family’ on the street.

Exploring homeless people’s use of outreach services: applying a social psychological perspective

A number of critiques have been published drawing attention to the gaps in research methods applied to issues surrounding homelessness and service utilisation in Britain. This paper discusses the use of social identity, a theory drawn from the field of applied social psychology, and synthesises it with the pathways model, thereby providing a framework to further explore service utilisation. The synthesised framework was used to predict the uptake of outreach services in a prospective study of 121 homeless people in a major UK city. In general, homeless people's use of intervention services was affected by the extent to which they identified with the support services themselves. The study demonstrates the central role of social identity in understanding service utilisation patterns, and shows the importance of applying fresh techniques to fine-tune our understanding of uptake in the long term.

Thinking for speaking and linguistic relativity among bilinguals: towards a new research agenda

This article evaluates how the different papers in this special issue fill a gap in our understanding of cognitive processes that are being activated when second language learners or bilinguals prepare to speak. All papers are framed in Slobin’s (1987) Thinking for Speaking theory, and aim to test whether the conceptualisation patterns that were learned in early childhood can be relearned or restructured in L2 acquisition. In many papers the focus is on identifying constraints on this restructuring process. Among these constraints, the role of typological differences between languages is investigated in great depth. The studies involve different types of learners, language combinations and tasks. As all informants were given verbal rather than non-verbal tasks, the focus is here on the effects of conceptual transfer from one language on another, and not on the effects of language on non-linguistic cognition. The paper also sketches different avenues for further research in this field and proposes that researchers working in this field might want to take up the challenge of investigating whether speakers of different languages perceive motion outside explicitly verbal contexts differently, as this will enable us to gain an understanding of linguistic relativity effects in this domain. Studying which teaching methods can help learners to restructure their conceptualisation patterns may also shed new light on the aspects of discourse organization and motion event construal that are most difficult for learners.

Young people’s caring relations and transitions within families affected by HIV

This chapter provides insight into young people’s caring relations and transitions within what is often considered a particularly ‘troubling’ familial context in both the global North and South: living with HIV. I analyse the findings from two qualitative studies of young people’s caring roles in families affected by HIV in the UK, Tanzania and Uganda from the perspective of a feminist ethics of care, emotion work and life course transitions.

The ‘thinking’ in thinking-for-speaking: where is it?

According to the thinking-for-speaking (TFS) hypothesis, speakers of different languages think differently while in the process of mentally preparing content for speech. The aim of the present paper is to critically discuss the research carried out within the TFS paradigm, against the background of the basic tenets laid out by the proponents of this framework. We will show that despite substantial progress in the investigation of crosslinguistic differences in the organisation of information in discourse, the studies that actually examine the cognitive aspects of speech production are, to date, vanishingly few. This state of affairs creates a gap in our knowledge about the thought processes that co-occur with speech production during language use and acquisition. We will argue that in order to reach a more comprehensive picture of the cognitive processes and outcomes of speech production, methodologies additional to the analysis of information organisation must be used.

Broadly speaking: vocabulary in semantic dementia shifts towards general, semantically diverse words

One of the cardinal features of semantic dementia (SD) is a steady reduction in expressive vocabulary. We investigated the nature of this breakdown by assessing the psycholinguistic characteristics of words produced spontaneously by SD patients during an autobiographical memory interview. Speech was analysed with respect to frequency and imageability, and a recently-developed measure called semantic diversity. This measure quantifies the degree to which a word can be used in a broad range of different linguistic contexts. We used this measure in a formal exploration of the tendency for SD patients to replace specific terms with more vague and general words, on the assumption that more specific words are used in a more constrained set of contexts. Relative to healthy controls, patients were less likely to produce low-frequency, high-imageability words, and more likely to produce highly frequent, abstract words. These changes in the lexical-semantic landscape were related to semantic diversity: the highly frequent and abstract words most prevalent in the patients' speech were also the most semantically diverse. In fact, when the speech samples of healthy controls were artificially engineered such that low semantic diversity words (e.g., garage, spanner) were replaced with broader terms (e.g., place, thing), the characteristics of their speech production came to closely resemble that of SD patients. A similar simulation in which low-frequency words were replaced was less successful in replicating the patient data. These findings indicate systematic biases in the deterioration of lexical-semantic space in SD. As conceptual knowledge degrades, speech increasingly consists of general terms that can be applied in a broad range of linguistic contexts and convey less specific information.

Grammatical abilities of Greek-speaking children with autism

This study investigates pronoun reference and verbs with non-active morphology in high functioning Greek-speaking children with Autism Spectrum Disorders (ASD). It is motivated by problems with reflexive pronouns demonstrated by English-speaking children with ASD, and the fact that reflexivity is additionally expressed via non-active (reflexive) verbs in Greek. Twenty 5- to 8-year-old children with ASD and twenty vocabulary matched typically developing controls of the same age range completed a sentence-picture matching, an elicitation, and a judgment task. Children with ASD did not differ from controls in interpreting reflexive and strong pronouns, but were less accurate in the comprehension of clitics and omitted clitics in their production. The findings render clitics a vulnerable domain for autism in Greek, and potentially for other languages with clitics, and suggest that this could be a consequence of difficulties in the syntax-pragmatics or the syntax-phonology interface. The two groups did not differ in the comprehension of non-active morphology, but were less accurate in passive than reflexive verbs. This difference is likely to stem from the linguistic representation associated with each type of verb, rather than their input frequency.