This study examines the challenges caregivers face in interpreting the bodily behaviors of individuals with late-stage dementia as interactional signals. People with late-stage dementia often exhibit ambiguous, non-verbal conduct, referred to as liminal signs, which are not immediately recognized as communicative. Drawing on Goffman's distinction between "giving" and "giving off" information and Grice's theory of communicative intentions, we analyze interaction sequences where caregivers may or may not notice and respond to these signs. The findings highlight the potential for embodied conduct, such as non-verbal vocalizations and ge2stures, to serve as communicative signals. Three empirical examples show how contextual cues can help caregivers recognize these conduct as meaningful contributions, positioning the person with dementia as a partner in interaction and providing an opportunity for their agency to be expressed and their voice to be heard. The study therefore has theoretical implications for understanding liminal signs and practical implications for improving communication in dementia care. (c) 2025 The Author(s). Published by Elsevier B.V. This is an open access article under the CC BY license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).

Purpose:Provision of adequate support is much needed to secure equal educational opportunities for students with developmental language disorder (DLD). Important perspectives on support provision and its impact on academic progress are held by school professionals, caregivers, and students with DLD. This study sought to further the current knowledge on the perceived relation between educational support and academic progress for students with DLD by exploring key stakeholders' experiences.

Method:The study was centered around three students with DLD in the latter part of Swedish compulsory school (aged 12–16 years). The students, their caregivers, teachers, members of the support staff, and school-based speech-language pathologists were organized in three clusters, each centered around one student with DLD. Based on individual semistructured interviews, the stakeholders' perspectives were analyzed using reflexive thematic analysis.

Results:All stakeholders described educational support as crucial for the facilitation of the students' academic progress. Despite similarities in support provision, the perceived relation between the support provided and the students' academic progress varied in the three clusters. Our analysis is presented as three main themes, each constructed from stakeholder experiences in one cluster: (a) trade-off between student effort and achievement, (b) when support is not supportive, and (c) collaboration and targeted support have made great difference.

Conclusions:The results of this study emphasize the complexity of the relation between educational support and academic progress, showing that outcomes may differ considerably between educational contexts, despite similarities in support provision. The results suggest that the development of adequate support for students with DLD needs to include the perspectives of key stakeholders, particularly students themselves

This study examines children’s touch conduct in peer-group interaction in a Swedish preschool. Through a detailed analysis of 100 video-recorded touch episodes from everyday preschool activities, the study proposes an initial description of touch functions in children’s peer groups. The results suggest that touch was primarily used to control other children and to show affection. Both affectionate and control touch played significant roles to form and protect small social units within the larger group of children. Affectionate touch also played a central role in children’s friendship groups to establish and uphold intimate social relations. Children’s peer relations involved extended forms of touch between both boys and girls, and in mixed gender constellations. Children both initiated and received peer touch without paying these actions specific attention, and they granted others access to their whole bodies including vulnerable body parts. Children’s touch regularly occurred in parallel with other activities and was routinely not verbally topicalised as focal point of interaction. Detailed examination of touch episodes provides well-informed ground for understanding specificities of embodied conduct as socially and normatively organised children’s touch cultures.

This book investigates how people living with late-stage dementia can engage in communication and social interaction. Based on empirical research, it explores the remaining communicative resources of people living with cognitive impairment (e.g., intercorporeal interaction, bodily gestures, gaze), presenting the agency of the person with dementia as an integral part of their relations with others. The book provides a comprehensive theoretical framework for analyzing, describing, and understanding communication in late-stage dementia, and explores the use of video ethnography to record and analyze non-verbal, bodily interaction.

The authors skilfully bring together findings from their examinations of everyday interactions involving individuals living with late-stage dementia in nursing facilities, introducing the readers to the innovative theoretical and methodological approaches that undergird the fine-grained analyses at the heart of the book. The rich and nuanced case studies collected encompass embodied directives, habitual actions and objects, physical settings, assisted eating, and much more. An invaluable resource for graduate students and researchers at all levels in the fields of psychology, psychotherapy, social work, nursing, gerontology, and related disciplines, this volume makes an unparalleled contribution to current dementia research across the social sciences.

This video-ethnographic study explores preschool children’s ways of engaging in joint activities using touch, i.e., various types of physical contact. Focusing on how children (2–5 years old) in preschools in Sweden manage peer group activities, the study examines the ways in which physical contact features in children’s activity proposals and other actions that are aimed at including participants in a joint activity. It explores some of the diverse ways in which children initiate peer group activities by using touch as one of many multimodal resources for forming and sustaining activity-relevant participation frameworks. The study shows how children employed touch acts to i) initiate a joint participation framework by securing peers’ attention and bodily orientation; ii) create and sustain a joint participation framework within a multi-activity by assembling and managing simultaneous engagements; and iii) engage and include a child into an already ongoing activity. The study aims to contribute to knowledge about children’s touch cultures, as well as embodiment of children’s social relational work in early childhood educational settings.

In this chapter, we investigate how a couple where one of the spouses is diagnosed with dementia handle challenges in narrations of past shared events that arise when the spouse with dementia has limited access to these events. Partners of people diagnosed with dementia recurrently have to take into consideration that their spouse may not remember details in stories they tell, even though the person with dementia is a main participant in the events being retold. The design of such stories is complex as the interactants must keep track of both the content of the story and manage the potential sensitivity of telling a story that should already be known to both spouses. We show how the spouse without dementia (re)organizes the participation framework in resourceful ways and delicately deals with her spouse’s limited memory using a variety of face-saving practices. The analyses highlight how issues related to knowledge and dementia can benefit from using an interactional and distributed perspective. While access and rights to knowledge is usually divided between participants depending on the knowledge domain and the participants’ relation to the topic, in the case of a dementia disease a more flexible approach towards such divisions could be advantageous.

Background: This study aims to further the understanding of communication involv-ing people with late-stage dementia by highlighting assisted eating as an interactive joint activity. Assisted eating is, on the surface, primarily a care activity with the purpose of feeding the assisted person and thereby facilitating nutritional uptake. Helping someone to eat requires, nevertheless, fine-grained communication and co-ordination of both attention and embodied actions. Method: Using video recordings where a person with late-stage dementia is pro-vided with assistance to eat, we show how assisted eating is sequentially organized into smaller, local communicative projects, and how each projects completion is contingent upon the temporal co-ordination of the participants attention and embodied actions. Results: The analysis shows how actions necessary to carry out the eating (e.g., manipulating the food, bringing the food to the mouth) are also inherently commu-nicative and achieved through an embodied participation framework. Discussion/conclusion: Our findings show that while the caregiving staff perform most of the actions required in the assisted eating, the person with dementia is a central agent whose actions -displays of engagement and disengagement -are deci-sive for the progression of the eating activity and play central roles in the interactive achievement of the activity.

Dementia is a source of growing concern globally, and often impacts on social and commu-nicative functioning. INdependent LIving Support Functions for the Elderly (IN LIFE) was aproject carried out within the European Commission Research and Innovation programmeHorizon 2020 that resulted in the development of two digital communication aids for rem-iniscence intervention for elderly people with dementia and their communication partners.The purpose of this intervention study was to investigate the effects on quality of life forpeople with dementia when using these aids. People with dementia (N = 118) and their for-mal care-givers (N = 187) and relatives (N = 9) were given the communication aids for a per-iod of 4–12 weeks. To assess a range of outcomes, questionnaires developed within theproject were used along with the EQ-5D (European Quality of Life – 5 Dimensions) andQoL-AD (Quality of Life in Alzheimer’s Disease) questionnaires. Quality of life improvedamong people with dementia when measured using EQ-5D ( p < 0.05). There was also a cor-relation between the impact on the participants’ health and wellbeing, the carers’ rating ofthe usefulness of the digital communication aids and the care-givers’ satisfaction with usingtechnology ( p < 0.05). These results indicate that digital communication aids may be usefulin social interaction where one partner has dementia.

Purpose: Speech-language pathologists (SLPs) are a new but rapidly growing addition to the Swedish school work force. This study sought to inventory the employment and work task characteristics of school-based SLPs to assess equitable access to SLP services.

Method: We collected questionnaires from 111 SLPs currently practicing in Swedish schools. The respondents were asked for details regarding their employment.

Results: Roughly equal proportions of respondents reported to work with intervention and consultation to teaching staff. Almost all reported that the preservice training provided insufficient preparation for school-based practices. The work assignments of school-based SLPs were more similar than 10 years ago, likely a consequence of agreements between the parties caring for students with language disorder, and the vast majority of SLPs now being employed within student health teams. However, differences in workload and assigned tasks affect the nature of the work performed, to the point that current best practice cannot always be upheld.

Conclusions: The results indicate that the services provided by Swedish school-based SLPs can be expected to vary because of qualitative and quantitative differences in employment and work task characteristics. The results are discussed in light of reviews of language interventions for children and young people.

BackgroundThe risks of developmental language disorder (DLD) for both educational progress and socio-emotional development are well documented, but little is known about how children and young people with DLD experience and describe their language and communication. The need to complement experimental and quantitative studies with qualitative perspectives of the lived experience of individuals with DLD for speech and language therapists (SLT) practice has recently been foregrounded. AimsTo understand further the experiences of young people with DLD focusing on language and communication in a school context, and thereby contribute to the improvement of the communicative situation in school for this group. The study is guided by the following research question: How do young people diagnosed with DLD describe their experiences of language and communication in school? Methods & ProceduresThe study is based on data generated from qualitative semi-structured interviews with 23 participants diagnosed with DLD (age 13-19 years old) living in Sweden. All participants attended mainstream schools. To enable data to be collected during COVID-19 restrictions, all interviews were conducted using Zoom. Reflexive thematic analysis was used to analyse the data. Outcomes & ResultsFour main themes related to experiences of language and communication in school were constructed from the interviews: (1) feelings of inadequacy and comparisons with others; (2) feelings of being misjudged and misunderstood; (3) the importance of feeling safe and comfortable; and (4) the significance of the social and communicative context. The results bear witness of difficult and challenging aspects related to language and communication in school, including educational, social and emotional dimensions. An important outcome of this study is how young people diagnosed with DLD describe their language and communication functioning to be dependent on both individual characteristics and abilities, as well as situational, contextual and social factors. Conclusions & ImplicationsThe results from this study show that young people with DLD can have persisting problems related to language and communication in school, including educational, social and emotional dimensions. SLT services may therefore be needed throughout the school years to ensure that students with DLD receive adequate support. In addition, support that goes beyond language abilities and targets social, contextual and emotional aspects should be considered. WHAT THIS PAPER ADDSWhat is already known on this subjectChildren and young people have unique knowledge about their language and communication which is instrumental for designing interventions and support strategies. Qualitative analyses of interview data have been able to identify both risk factors and protective strategies in relation to the well-being of individuals with DLD. Despite this, children and young people with DLD are rarely heard in research or clinical discussions. What this paper adds to existing knowledgeIn this study we listen to the voices of young people with DLD as they describe their experiences of language and communication in school. The participants describe a condition that makes them struggle to keep up with peers and puts them at risk of being misjudged by teachers, but also give examples of situations where negative consequences are hardly felt. What are the potential or actual clinical implications of this work?DLD is a complex and dynamic disorder where contextual and social factors interact with individual abilities in creating the end result. The results of the study indicate that DLD can cause persisting problems related to language and communication in school, with impact on educational, social and emotional dimensions. To counteract these effects, SLT services may be needed throughout the school years, and support that goes beyond language abilities must be considered.