How do children process language as they get older? Is there continuity in the functions assigned to specific structures? And what changes in their processing and their representations as they acquire more language? They appear to use bracketing (finding boundaries), reference (linking to meanings), and clustering (grouping units that belong together) as they analyze the speech stream and extract recurring units, word classes, and larger constructions. Comprehension precedes production. This allows children to monitor and repair production that doesn’t match the adult forms they have represented in memory. Children also track the frequency of types and tokens; they use types in setting up paradigms and identifying regular versus irregular forms. Amount of experience with language, (the diversity of settings) plus feedback and practice, also accounts for individual differences in the paths followed during acquisition. Ultimately, models of the process of acquisition need to incorporate all this to account for how acquisition takes place.

Clement of Alexandria’s Protreptikos or Exhortation to the Greeks, written in the late second century, begins with an elaborate story of a song that lures fish, and a cicada that jumps up to fill in for the broken string of a lyre, scraping away with perfect pitch. I have long thought this was odd. The ancient genre of protreptic offered a kind of professional calling card, an introduction to speakers’ cultural sophistication, the strength of their argument and teaching, and a demonstration of their ability to argue for the superior form of philosophy-theology.

In skilled hands, assisted vaginal birth (AVB) remains the most efficient and effective method of expediting birth in the second stage of labour. It is associated with fewer adverse maternal and neonatal outcomes compared to second stage emergency caesarean section. In this chapter we will focus on the history and role of AVB as it currently stands. We will review relevant literature, examine important areas of practice and suggest a way forward that aims to maintain AVB at the heart of obstetric practice in the twenty-first century. The need for such focus is clear – complications in the second stage of labour (fetal compromise, obstructed labour, maternal exhaustion, or maternal medical conditions exacerbated by the act of pushing) remain a major cause of maternal and neonatal mortality and morbidity across the world. Such complications are responsible for 4 to 13% of maternal deaths in Africa, Asia, Latin America and the Caribbean. In 2013 obstructed labour alone accounted for 0.4 deaths per 100,000 women worldwide.

Children’s first words are remarkably consistent over languages and over time: They first talk about people (dada, mama), food (juice), body-parts (eye), clothing (sock), animals (dog), vehicles (car), toys (ball), household objects (key), routines (bye), and activities (uhoh, up). Their first productions emerge between 12 months and 24 months, and they attain some 50 words in production about 6 months later. Earlier claims about a vocabulary spurt may rather reflect increased motor skill that aids production. Do children learn to produce nouns before verbs? The proportions of nouns and verbs differ by context, e.g., toy play versus book reading. Spontaneous speech samples and parental checklists of vocabulary often differ. Overall, production lags behind comprehension. This leads to communicatively driven overextensions in production until 2;6 or so, as well as reliance on general purpose terms (do, go, that). As children add more words, they stop using earlier overextensions. Early word meanings are based on children’s existing conceptual and perceptual categories, based on their experience of the world so far. And as they take different perspectives, they begin to use of different words for the same referent (animal, dog, pug; do, mend).

This chapter deals with methods of analgesia and anaesthesia for AVB. Previous chapters have discussed the decision-making processes underpinning which type of birth is required and where to perform it; this chapter details the various types of analgesia and anaesthesia used in different situations.

AVB can be undertaken either in the labour room or in theatre. Estimation of the likelihood of vaginal birth proving successful is pivotal to informing decision-making in terms of analgesic and anaesthetic requirements.

Someone had it out for a garland weaver named Karpimē Babbia, a low-status woman who lived in Corinth in the late first or early second century CE. Chthonic Hermes, the goddess Anankē or Necessity, and the justice-exacting Fates are called upon to bring monthly destruction to her entire body, head to toe. Someone – a ritual practitioner with a client, most likely – made this curse by inscribing letters onto a thin lead tablet (Figure 0.1). What they wrote included rhythmic Greek, but also bubbled into a continuous stream of letters and sounds, the meaning of which is still unclear, which scholars call voces magicae: magical utterances. The curse-makers then rolled up the lead and pierced it with a nail, depositing it on or near a pedestal at the sanctuary of the goddesses Demeter and Kore, midway up the Acrocorinth, facing the busy city below and the blue of the Gulf of Corinth beyond.

The components of a good AVB are complex and layered. They go far beyond a degree of knowledge and technical ability. They encompass a range of cognitive and social skills that promote respect for women and their partners and enable an environment in which women feel safe and secure, acknowledging her rite of passage and the privilege of assisting at the birth of a new life. This chapter explores our understanding of these important ‘non-technical’ skills of a consummate accoucheur.

Children add more information to their utterances by packing more material into a single clause. They can specify roles, modify nouns with adjectives and verbs with added locatives and adverbs. They can add demonstratives (those) and quantifiers (many) to nouns, and make clearer what they are referring to. Young children’s early constructions tend to mirror parental usage, just as their lexical choices do. They follow preferred argument structure and place given information in the Agent slot of transitive verbs, and keep the Object slot of transitives and the Subject slot of intransitives for new information. They may omit given information at this stage and only later add the relevant pronoun subjects. In both questions and negations, they take time to master the use of auxiliary verbs and rely on fixed “frames” for some time as they learn the meaning of each wh- question word. Children also take time in learning how different perspectives can be marked within the clause, with choices of causative, location, or voice alternations. Here children must learn the options verb by verb.

Maternity claims represent the highest value and second highest number of clinical negligence claims reported to NHS Resolution. The three most frequent categories of claim were those relating to management of labour (14.05%), caesarean section (13.24%) and cerebral palsy (10.65%). Two of these categories, namely cerebral palsy and management of labour, along with CTG interpretation, were also the most expensive and together accounted for approximately 70% of the total figure of £3.1 billion, paid out on or expected to be paid, for all maternity claims.