Maltreated children use more grammatical negations

Many studies reveal a strong impact of childhood maltreatment on language development, mainly resulting in shorter utterances, less rich vocabulary, or a delay in grammatical complexity. However, different theories suggest the possibility for resilience – a positive adaptation to an otherwise adverse environment – in children who experienced childhood maltreatment. Here, we investigated different measures for language development in spontaneous speech, examining whether childhood maltreatment leads to a language deficit only or whether it can also result in differences in language use due to a possible adaptation to a toxic environment. We compared spontaneous speech during therapeutic peer-play sessions of 32 maltreated and 32 non-maltreated children from the same preschool and equivalent in gender, age (2 to 5 years), home neighborhood, ethnicity, and family income. Maltreatment status was reported by formal child protection reports, and corroborated by independent social service reports. We investigated general language sophistication (i.e., vocabulary, talkativeness, mean length of utterance), as well as grammatical development (i.e., use of plurals, tense, grammatical negations). We found that maltreated and non-maltreated children showed similar sophistication across all linguistic measures, except for the use of grammatical negations. Maltreated children used twice as many grammatical negations as non-maltreated children. The use of this highly complex grammatical structure shows an advanced linguistic skill, which shows that childhood maltreatment does not necessarily lead to a language deficit. The result might indicate the development of a negativity bias in the structure of spontaneous language due to an adaptation to their experiences

Community Gardening: Integrating Social Responsibility and Sustainability in a Higher Education Setting—A Case Study from Australia

Community gardening (CG) has been the subject of growing interest, both within and without the realm of academia. The reasons for this increase in interest are straightforward, given that CG typically offers benefits in at least three areas: (1) fostering a sense of community among contributing stakeholders; (2) promoting a sense of social responsibility; and (3) heightening awareness in areas of sustainability. As such CG is typically recognised as having the capacity to conjointly meet core human needs. This paper presents a case study that describes the inception and progressive implementation of a community garden project (“campus greening”), set within the university context of a private higher education (HE) provider in Brisbane, Australia. The paper charts progress made to date, highlights hurdles that have had to be overcome, distils relevant lessons learned, and extrapolates success factors for future similar projects. Capitalising on ‘right timing’ emerges as a critical success factor for incentivising, progressing and implementing CG projects. The case study analysis also culminates in a shortlist of tentative recommendations for different stakeholders: (1) soliciting input from alternative leaders; (2) building supportive interdepartmental coalitions; (3) building a broad stakeholder base; and (4) building momentum and support through unconventional means. Experiences and lessons gathered in this paper will be useful for education stakeholders who are interested to use CG to promote community, social responsibility, and sustainability