Student nurses' life story work on inpatient wards

Life story work can be a valuable resource on dementia inpatient wards as student mental health nurses who participants in this research project discovere

The acquisition of Sign Language: The impact of phonetic complexity on phonology

Research into the effect of phonetic complexity on phonological acquisition has a long history in spoken languages. This paper considers the effect of phonetics on phonological development in a signed language. We report on an experiment in which nonword-repetition methodology was adapted so as to examine in a systematic way how phonetic complexity in two phonological parameters of signed languages — handshape and movement — affects the perception and articulation of signs. Ninety-one Deaf children aged 3–11 acquiring British Sign Language (BSL) and 46 hearing nonsigners aged 6–11 repeated a set of 40 nonsense signs. For Deaf children, repetition accuracy improved with age, correlated with wider BSL abilities, and was lowest for signs that were phonetically complex. Repetition accuracy was correlated with fine motor skills for the youngest children. Despite their lower repetition accuracy, the hearing group were similarly affected by phonetic complexity, suggesting that common visual and motoric factors are at play when processing linguistic information in the visuo-gestural modality

The emotional impact of verbal irony: eye-tracking evidence for a two-stage process

In this paper we investigate the socio-emotional functions of verbal irony. Specifically, we use eye-tracking while reading to assess moment-to-moment processing of a character’s emotional response to ironic versus literal criticism. In Experiment 1, participants read stories describing a character being upset following criticism from another character. Results showed that participants initially more easily integrated a hurt response following ironic criticism; but later found it easier to integrate a hurt response following literal criticism. In Experiment 2, characters were instead described as having an amused response, which participants ultimately integrated more easily following ironic criticism. From this we propose a two-stage process of emotional responding to irony: Whilst readers may initially expect a character to be more hurt by ironic than literal criticism, they ultimately rationalise ironic criticism as being less hurtful, and more amusing