Exploring the professional nurse advocate role and restorative clinical supervision.

The professional nurse advocate (PNA) role is the key enabler of delivery of the NHS England Advocating and Educating for Quality Improvement (A-EQUIP) model of professional nursing leadership and clinical supervision. The aim of the PNA role is to provide clinical, educational and well-being support to nurses through restorative clinical supervision. This article describes the PNA role and the A-EQUIP model and discusses some of the challenges experienced by nurses in relation to delivering care to older people and current workforce pressures. The author suggests that restorative clinical supervision may support nurses to manage these challenges and enhance their practice in the care of older people, and describes part of a workforce improvement project to illustrate this in practice. Finally, the author considers some of the barriers to implementation of restorative clinical supervision.

Atrial fibrillation: symptoms, risk factors, assessment and management.

Atrial fibrillation (AF) is the most common cardiac arrhythmia, and its prevalence increases significantly with age. It is linked to serious adverse outcomes, including stroke and other thromboembolic events, heart failure and other serious conditions. AF is categorised according to its persistence and duration and its management includes rhythm and rate control to address symptoms and reduce the risk of complications. As a common and potentially serious condition with high morbidity, AF is associated with significant burden on patients, healthcare services and public health, and it is essential for nurses to understand the condition. This article provides an overview of AF, including its diagnosis, symptoms, risk factors and management.

Structural priming can inform syntactic analyses of partially grammaticalized constructions.

Branigan & Pickering (B&P) argue successfully that structural priming provides valuable information for developing psychologically plausible syntactic and semantic theories. I discuss how their approach can be used to help determine whether partially grammaticalized constructions that have undergone semantic change also have undergone syntactic reanalysis. I then consider cases in which evidence from priming cannot distinguish between competing syntactic analyses.

Impact of typical aging and Parkinson's disease on the relationship among breath pausing, syntax, and punctuation.

PURPOSE: The present study examines the impact of typical aging and Parkinson's disease (PD) on the relationship among breath pausing, syntax, and punctuation. METHOD: Thirty young adults, 25 typically aging older adults, and 15 individuals with PD participated. Fifteen participants were age- and sex-matched to the individuals with PD. Participants read a passage aloud 2 times. Utterance length, location of breath pauses relative to punctuation and syntax, and number of disfluencies and mazes were measured. RESULTS: Older adults produced shorter utterances, a smaller percentage of breaths at major boundaries, and a greater percentage of breaths at minor boundaries than did young adults, but there was no significant difference between older adults and individuals with PD on these measures. Individuals with PD took a greater percentage of breaths at locations unrelated to a syntactic boundary than did control participants. Individuals with PD produced more mazes than did control participants. Breaths were significantly correlated with punctuation for all groups. CONCLUSIONS: Changes in breath-pausing patterns in older adults are likely due to changes in respiratory physiology. However, in individuals with PD, such changes appear to result from a combination of changes to respiratory physiology and cognition.

Effects of weight and syntactic priming on the production of cantonese verb-doubling.

Verb-doubling, where a copy of the main verb occurs both before and after the direct object, is a structure commonly used in Chinese in sentences containing a frequency or duration phrase. In Cantonese, verb-doubling is highly optional and therefore problematic for existing syntactic, semantic, and pragmatic accounts of its distribution in Mandarin. The current study investigates the role of grammatical weight and syntactic priming in the choice of verb-doubling in Cantonese. Following (Hawkins in Efficiency and complexity in grammars, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2004) theory of efficiency and complexity in grammars, we hypothesized that speakers would choose verb-doubling over the canonical structure more often when the object NP was heavy, in order to minimize processing domains. In addition, we expected an effect of syntactic priming whereby the choice of structure is influenced by a previously encountered structure. The results of two elicited production experiments revealed no weight-based preference for verb-doubling, and only minor effects of grammatical weight, but clear effects of syntactic priming: (1) for both canonical primes and verb-doubling primes, speakers tended to repeat previously heard structures; (2) the priming effect was just as strong in the heavy NP condition, where speakers made more errors recalling the semantic content of the sentence, suggesting that semantic information is represented separately from syntactic information; (3) the priming effect was stronger for informationally accurate responses, suggesting that recently activated structures are easier to produce than other structures under conditions of increased cognitive load. We conclude that the choice between verb-doubling and canonical structure in Cantonese is easily influenced by the structure of recently encountered sentences, with weight effects, if any, being more difficult to detect.