A minority of Australian languages contrast stops at the same place of articulation – oppositions described in a variety of ways: e.g. fortis vs lenis, geminate vs singleton – but not well understood due to a lack of instrumental data. To shed more light on these contrasts, acoustic phonetic properties of stops were analyzed in medial pre-vocalic environments in Kamu, Larrakia, Warlmanpa, and Warumungu. In all four languages, stops at the same place of articulation are differentiated primarily by duration, and also degree of voicing estimated using Harmonic Ratios. There is a degree of correlation between voicing and duration, but duration is found to be the property that most consistently differentiates stop modes. These data suggest that the opposition in these languages is best characterised as a length contrast, and that these stop oppositions are realized with complex interactions between duration and voicing.

Jimmie Barker (1900-1972) was a Muruwari Elder, Cultural Knowledge Holder, linguist, historian, ethnographer, inventor and sound engineer who produced over 113 h of audio recordings using reel-to-reel tape recorders between 1968 and 1972. Jimmie was supported in his endeavours by Janet Mathews and the Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies (AIATSIS) (formerly, the Australian Institute of Aboriginal Studies). The "Barker Collection" of audio recordings is now housed in the AIATSIS Collection. Jimmie initially set out to record a Muruwari-English dictionary, but this expanded into documenting Muruwari language and culture, as well as personal, family, domestic and international history. Much of the collection comprises self-elicitation, metalinguistic analyses, oral histories and reflections. It includes some of the earliest recordings and language documentation by an Aboriginal person of other Aboriginal people, observations of typological properties and language change in Aboriginal languages, and critical analyses of linguistic and anthropological research. Since 2021, Roy J. Barker, grandson of Jimmie and Muruwari Cultural Knowledge Holder, has overseen a team of linguists designing a time-aligned ELAN corpus of Jimmie's recordings for language revival outcomes. The recordings are transcribed, annotated with metadata and coded with cultural and language tags with consideration to the FAIR and CARE Principles.

Abstract Contemporary contact languages used by Indigenous people in Australia share many words and grammatical features and structures. I trace the development of contact varieties in Australia between 1788 to 1848, arguing that their similarities arise from the dominance of English-speakers among the invaders, their ways of talking to people who did not speak English fluently, the transfer of people between penal settlements, and the fact that sea traffic was the fastest form of travel between colonies. Evidence for zones of influence in which particular features appear is drawn from geographic distribution and time of first attestation. I use four types of reports for locating features: outsiders’ reports of direct speech by Aborigines and of outsiders’ speech to Aborigines, imitations by outsiders of Aboriginal speech, and outsiders’ comments on Aboriginal speech. Another kind of evidence comes from the adoption of contact variety words into Aboriginal languages. This is illustrated with a case study of words for ‘white woman’ in Aboriginal languages.

Dictionaries for under-resourced languages are, like other dictionaries, traditionally in hard-copy form. Electronic online formats can improve access to dictionaries for under-resourced languages. To make it easier to create online dictionaries with linked sound and image files, starting from a Toolbox file or similar backslash-formatted dictionary text file, a new online tool, WordSpinner, was created. It was used and iteratively improved over several years in order to convert backslash lexicon text files into formatted dictionary output pages, with five Indigenous languages of Australia. In various stages of dictionary creation, checking, and formatting, the online tool was revised to meet user needs. The resulting version of WordSpinner is another free option now available to users for creating online dictionaries.

Youth residential home care is, in many countries, terminated at 18 years of age. However, current research suggests that leaving care at 18 is associated with several negative or suboptimal outcomes. Denmark has, in response to this, established an extension of care which can continue until the age of 23 years. This study aimed to provide a detailed understanding of the experiences of living in the Danish extended care program. This qualitative study explored the experiences of eight young adult residents (4 men and 4 women). Interpretative phenomenological analysis was used to analyze the residents' accounts which constructed three group experiential themes: (1) "It was me; I just didn't want to listen:" The experience of the transition to adulthood while in residential care. (2) "I still need to learn some things:" The experience of maturation in extended care. (3) "They don't come running to me every day anymore:" The experience of preparing to transition out of extended care. This study has important implications for practice given the sample's perceived inability to live independently outside of care at 18 years of age. The findings support current arguments for establishing an extended care system in countries which currently only offer juvenile residential care.

This research examines relationships between social and emotional wellbeing in various language ecology contexts. Previous studies have shown a correlation between speaking an Indigenous language and improved social and emotional wellbeing among Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples within the population nationally. This study considers the rich variety of contemporary Indigenous language contexts and the extent to which traditional languages, new contact languages and English are spoken. It adopts the concept of ‘language ecologies’ — the different configurations of languages spoken in a location — to investigate how the relationship between Indigenous language use (traditional or new), and social and emotional wellbeing varies by ecology type. We classify the country geographically into five language ecology types, and use regression analysis to investigate associations between Indigenous language use and social and emotional wellbeing by language ecology type. We find heterogenous associations across different language ecologies Speaking an Indigenous language is associated with lower than average levels of wellbeing in areas where English is frequently spoken as a first language, while it is associated with greater than average wellbeing in other areas. Associations between wellbeing and speaking an Indigenous language are relatively larger in areas where traditional Indigenous languages are frequently spoken as a first language than in other areas. The findings suggest that the extent and type of wellbeing benefits from speaking an Indigenous language are dependent on the type of languages in individuals’ language repertoires (person-based) and the language contexts where they live (place-based language ecologies).

This article discusses the problems encountered in accessing archival Indigenous language records, both by Indigenous people looking for information on their own languages and by non-Indigenous researchers supporting language work. It is motivated by Indigenous people not being able to access materials in archives, libraries, and museums that they need for heritage reasons, for personal reasons, or for revitalisation of language or cultural performance. For some of the authors, the experience of using Nyingarn, which aims to make manuscript language material available for re-use today, has been dispiriting, with what we term the ‘new protectionism’ preventing use of these materials.

Contemporary contact languages used by Indigenous people in Australia share many words and grammatical features and structures. I trace the development of contact varieties in Australia between 1788 to 1848, arguing that their similarities arise from the dominance of English-speakers among the invaders, their ways of talking to people who did not speak English fluently, the transfer of people between penal settlements, and the fact that sea traffic was the fastest form of travel between colonies. Evidence for zones of influence in which particular features appear is drawn from geographic distribution and time of first attestation. I use four types of reports for locating features: outsiders' reports of direct speech by Aborigines and of outsiders' speech to Aborigines, imitations by outsiders of Aboriginal speech, and outsiders' comments on Aboriginal speech. Another kind of evidence comes from the adoption of contact variety words into Aboriginal languages. This is illustrated with a case study of words for 'white woman' in Aboriginal languages.

Many Australian languages express meanings relating events and participants through endings, ‘semantic cases’, which share properties with cases such as Ergative and Accusative that express grammatical relations. Four classes of meaning are discussed: location in space and time (Locative, Allative, Perlative, and Ablative/Elative cases), purpose (intent, desire, and avoidance), association (which includes possession (Genitive and Proprietive), association with a place, accompaniment (Comitative), Instrumental, and the absence of something (Privative)), and finally resemblance (Semblative or Similative). Also discussed is the relation between adpositions and semantic cases, their morphological properties (allomorphy and derivation), their syntactic properties including whether they can act as the main predicate of a clause, where case-markers appear inside nominal phrases, and how agreement and case-stacking work. Examples are provided from 27 Pama-Nyungan and non-Pama-Nyungan languages across the continent.

PURPOSE:Multiple sclerosis (MS) is a chronic condition linked to a wide range of psychological difficulties. While traditional cognitive behavioural therapy has been studied extensively with people with MS, much less is known about more recent "third wave" approaches. METHODS:A scoping review was carried out by performing a systematic search across MEDLINE Complete, PsycINFO, CINAHL, Academic Search Ultimate, and Cochrane Library up to January 2022. RESULTS:From an initial return of 8306 citations, 35 studies were included, 20 of which were randomised controlled trials (RCTs). These showed that four third wave approaches have been investigated with people with MS to date: acceptance and commitment therapy (ACT), dialectical behaviour therapy (DBT), mindfulness-based stress reduction (MBSR), and mindfulness-based cognitive therapy (MBCT). MBSR and MBCT may be helpful to address a range of psychological difficulties up to three months post-intervention. However, MS-specific adaptations may be required, and more evidence is needed on longer-term effectiveness. Limited evidence is also available for DBT and ACT, but additional research is warranted before any recommendation can be made. CONCLUSIONS:As third wave approaches keep being refined, further more rigorous investigations are needed to implement them to the benefit of people with MS. Implications for RehabilitationMultiple sclerosis is linked to a wide range of psychological difficulties in adults.Little is currently known on third wave psychotherapies for people with MS.Mindfulness-based stress reduction and mindfulness-based cognitive therapy may be helpful to address a wide range of difficulties in MS.Specific adaptations may be needed to deliver suitable therapies to people with MS.Additional research is warranted to build on preliminary findings for DBT and ACT.

Abstract Address forms have been studied in various contexts, and it has been assumed that the determining dimensions are solidarity, including closeness and equality, and power, including distance and hierarchy. Solidarity is indexed with singular forms while power is represented with plural forms. Using ethnography of communication framework, this study enriches this discussion by examining the use of address forms by Bima people in a multilingual community in Bima, Indonesia, where Bima, Indonesian and other languages in contact have been used for centuries. Address forms including speaker reference forms were identified and classified in 1,250 h of data collected through observation, interviews, elicitation, and recordings of conversation. The study shows that address forms from languages in contact with Bima have been borrowed to represent dimensions within the solidarity-power continuum including intimacy, closeness, equality, hierarchy and respect. The Bima forms are used to exercise traditional solidarity-power relations, but the borrowed forms of Arab, Bugis, Chinese, English, and Makassarese origins are used to negotiate more intimate, close, equal and respectful relations within the social hierarchy. Using the native and the borrowed forms according to referent’s age, gender, status, and contexts, speakers construct different social spaces of intimacy, closeness, equality, hierarchy, respect, and power.

BackgroundReceiving the diagnosis of a motor neurodegenerative condition (MNDC) can be a life-changing experience. Although several studies of individuals' experiences have indicated dissatisfaction with aspects of how an MNDC diagnosis was communicated, few studies have addressed doctors' experiences of breaking bad news for these conditions, especially from a qualitative perspective. This study explored UK neurologists' lived experience of delivering an MNDC diagnosis.MethodsInterpretative phenomenological analysis was used as the overarching method. Eight consultant neurologists working with patients with MNDCs took part in individual, semi-structured interviews.ResultsTwo themes were constructed from the data: 'Meeting patients' emotional and information needs at diagnosis: a balancing act between disease, patient and organization-related factors', and 'Empathy makes the job harder: the emotional impact and uncovered vulnerabilities associated with breaking bad news'. Breaking the news of an MNDC diagnosis was challenging for participants, both in terms of achieving a patient-centred approach and in terms of dealing with their own emotions during the process.ConclusionsBased on the study's findings an attempt to explain sub-optimal diagnostic experiences documented in patient studies was made and how organizational changes can support neurologists with this demanding clinical task was discussed.

This paper presents exploratory research on temporally dynamic patterns of vowel nasalization from two speakers of Arabana. To derive a dynamic measure of nasality, we use gradient tree boosting algorithms to statistically learn the mapping between acoustics and vowel nasality in a speaker-specific manner. Three primary findings emerge: (1) NVN contexts exhibit nasalization throughout the entirety of the vowel interval, and we propose that a similar co-articulatory realization previously acted to resist diachronic change in this environment; (2) anticipatory vowel nasalization is nearly as extensive as carryover vowel nasalization, which is contrary to previous claims; and (3) the degree of vowel nasalization in word-initial contexts is relatively high, even in the #_C environment, suggesting that the sound change *#Na > #a has involved the loss of the oral constriction associated with N but not the complete loss of the velum gesture.

OBJECTIVE:Stigma is reported to cause as much distress and effect on quality of life for individuals with epilepsy as the physical symptoms of seizures. Existing quantitative reviews have focused on describing levels of stigma in epilepsy, but no qualitative review has been undertaken despite the increasing number of relevant studies. We provide a qualitative synthesis to aid the understanding of stigma experiences in adults with epilepsy across different sociocultural contexts.METHODS:A systematic database search yielded an initial set of 3,032 relevant papers, of which 28 were included. A meta-synthesis was conducted according to a meta-ethnographic approach which has been adapted for health research.RESULTS:Five themes were generated: 1) Societal negative perceptions of epilepsy result in discrimination and rejection; 2) Internal attributions of blame lead to negative self-perception and shame; 3) Stigma impacts everyday life and contributes to reliance on others; 4) Stigma is managed through concealment and avoidance; 5) Support from others is beneficial but dependant on own and others' understandings of epilepsy. These themes highlighted the key individual experiences of epilepsy stigma, which appeared to some degree culture-specific. Culturally-informed misconceptions of epilepsy were readily internalised, resulting in emotional challenges and affecting participants' lives. Strategies for coping with this were also described.SIGNIFICANCE:This synthesis characterised the experiences of stigma among adults with epilepsy and highlighted key similarities and differences in these experiences across sociocultural contexts. Educational programmes to inform communities about epilepsy hold importance going forward.

Background Anxiety is one of the most common psychological difficulties reported among people with HD (pwHD) and has been shown to negatively impact on quality of life and everyday functioning. Expert guidelines recommend psychological therapy as the first treatment offered to people experiencing anxiety in early-stage HD. Guided self-help, an evidence-based psychological approach, is known to improve anxiety but has not yet been specifically applied to HD. Aims GUIDE-HD aims to identify whether it is feasible to undertake a randomised controlled trial (RCT) to assess the use of guided self-help, aimed at improving anxiety among pwHD, compared to treatment as usual (TAU). Methods/Techniques Participants will be at an early disease stage or pre-manifest HD. GUIDE-HD compares guided self-help with TAU and fifteen participants will be allocated to each group. Recruitment is ongoing in the UK. The 10-module intervention uses process-based cognitive behavioural therapy adapted to meet the specific needs of pwHD. Data gathered will assess whether the intervention and study design meet pre-determined feasibility criteria. HD participants and carers (where applicable) will be interviewed post-intervention and these data will be analysed qualitatively. Results The study ends in Dec 2023. Thereafter, the results will be fully reported. Discussion GUIDE-HD is a new psychological approach designed specifically to reduce anxiety among pwHD. This feasibility trial will help determine whether a fully powered RCT is warranted.

Many archival recordings of speech from endangered languages remain unannotated and inaccessible to community members and language learning programs. One bottleneck is the time-intensive nature of annotation. An even narrower bottleneck occurs for recordings with access constraints, such as language that must be vetted or filtered by authorised community members before annotation can begin. We propose a privacy-preserving workflow to widen both bottlenecks for recordings where speech in the endangered language is intermixed with a more widely-used language such as English for meta-linguistic commentary and questions (e.g. What is the word for 'tree'?). We integrate voice activity detection (VAD), spoken language identification (SLI), and automatic speech recognition (ASR) to transcribe the metalinguistic content, which an authorised person can quickly scan to triage recordings that can be annotated by people with lower levels of access. We report work-in-progress processing 136 hours archival audio containing a mix of English and Muruwari. Our collaborative work with the Muruwari custodian of the archival materials show that this workflow reduces metalanguage transcription time by 20% even given only minimal amounts of annotated training data: 10 utterances per language for SLI and for ASR at most 39 minutes, and possibly as little as 39 seconds.

Ngarrindjeri is one of many Aboriginal languages being actively revived in southern Australia. Women in the Ngarrindjeri community have expressed a desire to speak, read and write their language with the same richness as when it was spoken fluently over 70 years ago. Like many Aboriginal languages, Ngarrindjeri has a rich selection of free and bound pronouns, which express person, number and case, but unlike most other Australian languages, it has a third set of reduced free form pronouns. This tripartite set is used to express discourse saliency and continuing topic, and to definitize noun phrases. This paper addresses the issue of teaching and learning how to use Ngarrindjeri pronouns in traditional ways, but for contemporary purposes. Learning Ngarrindjeri requires understanding grammatical categories such as case that differ substantially from English, plus understanding the use of free forms for discourse saliency, bound forms for continuing topics, and free reduced forms where English uses articles. Finally, it requires memorizing a large number of pronoun forms. We share anecdotes on learning pronouns from individual authors, and a reflection from a young Ngarrindjeri woman. We then propose strategies and resources to make it easier to learn, remember and use the complex, regularized pronoun paradigms of Ngarrindjeri.

Purpose Research on breaking bad news (BBN) in healthcare has mostly focused on the doctor-patient interaction during a single consultation. However, it has been increasingly recognised that BBN is a wider process that also involves other healthcare professionals. This qualitative study explored non-medical(1) healthcare professionals' involvement in BBN to newly diagnosed patients with motor neurodegenerative conditions in the UK. Materials and methods 19 healthcare professionals working with people with motor neurone disease, multiple sclerosis, Parkinson's disease or Huntington's disease took part in individual, semi-structured interviews which were analysed using thematic analysis. Results Four themes were constructed: dealing with the diagnostic aftermath, unpacking the diagnosis, breaking bad news as a balancing act and empowering patients to regain control over their health and lives. Participants reported being broadly involved in BBN by supporting patients with negative diagnostic experiences, re-iterating diagnostic information and helping patients understand the impact of their condition. The challenges of effectively breaking bad news and how these difficult conversations could help empower patients were also emphasised. Conclusions BBN was a critical and challenging aspect of healthcare professionals' clinical work with newly diagnosed patients with motor neurodegenerative conditions. Besides providing information, BBN was perceived as a way to educate patients, encourage them to make decisions and prepare for the future.