Children who receive cochlear implants develop spoken language on a protracted timescale. The home environment facilitates speech-language development, yet it is relatively unknown how the environment differs between children with cochlear implants and typical hearing. We matched eighteen preschoolers with implants (31-65 months) to two groups of children with typical hearing: by chronological age and hearing age. Each child completed a long-form, naturalistic audio recording of their home environment (appx. 16 hours/child; >730 hours of observation) to measure adult speech input, child vocal productivity, and caregiver-child interaction. Results showed that children with cochlear implants and typical hearing were exposed to and engaged in similar amounts of spoken language with caregivers. However, the home environment did not reflect developmental stages as closely for children with implants, or predict their speech outcomes as strongly. Home-based speech-language interventions should focus on the unique input-outcome relationships for this group of children with hearing loss.

This article explores the European Union’s (EU) practices of international state recognition in a transitional international order. It illustrates the difficulties that the EU has encountered in attempting to reach a collective position on sensitive cases of recognition – through a complex balance of internal and external considerations – at a time when the norms regarding recognition are increasingly under challenge. Whether the organisation takes a collective European position on recognition or allows its members to adopt individual national positions, acute inconsistencies and tensions have been exposed, with implications for the EU’s standing in the world. Through this, the article identifies a key tension between the EU’s normative commitments and its geopolitical interests. In conclusion, the article argues that while a uniform EU policy on recognition may not be feasible and case-by-case pragmatism will likely continue, a more coherent approach and greater understanding of the impact of the EU’s position on recognition are necessary. The article draws upon interview material and extensive analysis of official EU documentation in order to provide new insights into this complex challenge. By exploring the intricacies of recognition politics, the article also makes an empirical contribution to understanding the practice of international relations in this area.

Mainstream International Relations teaching and scholarship is often argued to be social scientific and therefore able to generate propositions about international life that have general (even universal) explanatory value. However, the methods and research questions of IR can in part be explained by the nature of the national academies in which they develop and by a range of national and regional sociological and political circumstances. Thus, following Ole Waever, the “American approach to the study of IR” and its predominance can be explained by reference to certain cultural and structural factors. Yet if the sociological underpinnings of teaching and researching in IR are inevitable and readily apparent, why is there no distinct ‘East Asian tradition’? Why is the East Asian IR community relatively weak? In fact, the relative weakness of indigenous national and regional East Asian IR approaches can be understood as an extension of national academic environments, historical circumstances, and national political traditions.

The methodologies and assumptions that guide our acquisition of knowledge and interpretation of data are context and time bound. Academic disciplines, sub-disciplines, methodological approaches and research agendas are to a large degree conditioned by the ‘real world,’ and none more so than International Relations. Accordingly, it is important to consider the possible sociological foundations of different epistemologies and paradigms of International Relations. Surely there is more than one way of looking at the world, unless one is steadfastly married to a positivist universal truth. Yet it is interesting that East Asian scholarship and teaching in IR has seemingly not developed strong ‘indigenous’ regional characteristics, perhaps with the exception of Japan with its large market, long tradition, political freedom and economic affluence. In fact IR has absorbed and closely followed Western and particularly North American social science. This introduction and the articles that follow will explore the fortunes of IR scholarship and regional studies in East Asia in the context of national and regional environments. It will consider how IR is taught and researched in various national settings, and examine the interaction between IR as a social science and national/regional historical experiences, cultural and pedagogical traditions, and politico-ideological values. The underlining problematique concerns the idea of an East Asian ‘IR community’: why has this tended to be comparatively weak? How can we envision the development of a more rigorous East Asian IR community, one that is not exclusively judged according to external — and particularly North American — terms of reference and standards? It goes without saying that we are not attempting to antagonize our American friends and colleagues, but simply to stimulate a ‘sociology of science’ reflection of the discipline in the East Asian regional setting. Two questions serve as the organizing themes of this special issue. The first concerns the primary characteristics of the regional IR community. Many of the papers in this collection point to the dominance of US-originated ideas and theories. The second question arises from the first question: whether these predominant approaches help us to understand the region in a time of change.

The insulin resistance syndrome (IRS) is characterized by a combination of interrelated coronary heart disease risk factors, including low high-density lipoprotein cholesterol (HDLC) levels, obesity and increases in triglyceride (TG), systolic and diastolic blood pressure (BP), small low-density lipoprotein particles (LDL-size), and fasting and postload plasma insulin and glucose. Using factor analysis, we previously identified multivariate factors based on data from women participating in the Kaiser Permanente Women Twins Study: 1) Weight/Fat, 2) Insulin/Glucose, 3) Lipids, and 4) BP. The purpose of this study is to evaluate evidence for genetic linkage between the multivariate factors and candidate genes. Quantitative sib-pair analysis based on the factor scores with markers for 9 candidate genes was carried out based on data from 126 pairs of dizygotic (DZ) women twins from the second exam of the Kaiser Permanente Women Twins study. Suggestive evidence for linkage was found for the Weight/fat factor and the Apo E gene (p = 0.01), and stronger evidence for linkage with the Lipid factor and the cholesterol ester transfer protein (p = 0.002) gene. Therefore, the CETP gene appears to influence covariation in LDL size, TG, and HDL, and may account for a portion of the well-established statistical and metabolic associations observed between these risk factors.

From a critical security studies perspective – and non-traditional security studies more broadly – is the concept of human security something which should be taken seriously? Does human security have anything significant to offer security studies? Both human security and critical security studies challenge the state-centric orthodoxy of conventional international security, based upon military defence of territory against ‘external’ threats. Both also challenge neorealist scholarship, and involve broadening and deepening the security agenda. Yet critical security studies have not engaged substantively with human security as a distinct approach to non-traditional security. This article explores the relationship between human security and critical security studies and considers why human security arguments – which privilege the individual as the referent of security analysis and seek to directly influence policy in this regard – have not made a significant impact in critical security studies. The article suggests a number of ways in which critical and human security studies might engage. In particular, it suggests that human security scholarship must go beyond its (mostly) uncritical conceptual underpinnings if it is to make a lasting impact upon security studies, and this might be envisioned as Critical Human Security Studies (CHSS).

Plant species mixtures vary in total herbage mass (total availability) and the fractional cover (horizontal availability) and bulk density or height (vertical availability) of the component plant species. The expected diet selection response of sheep to changes in these three components of availability was tested in an artificial food environment by releasing flocks (of three ewes) onto a vegetation-free field that contained patches (plastic bowls) of preferred and less preferred sheep pellets for 15 min and observing their behaviour. One hundred patches (bowls) were laid out at equidistant intervals on a 50 × 50 m field. The patches were filled with either cereal (preferred) or lucerne (less preferred) pellets in different amounts to create in a factorial design two levels of total availability (10000 g or 15000 g of pellet in the field), two levels of horizontal availability (20 or 50 of the 100 patches contained cereal pellets, the rest contained lucerne pellets) and two levels of vertical availability (the mass of pellet in the cereal patches was either 10 or 80% relative to the mass of pellet in the lucerne patches). All patches were positioned at random in the field. Although, in all cases, the proportion of cereal pellets in the diet was higher than that expected if the sheep had foraged at random, it was sensitive to the horizontal and vertical availability of the food resource. The proportion declined as the horizontal availability declined from 50 to 20 patches, but only at 10% not 80% vertical availability. The lower proportion for this treatment combination arose because sheep ate from a higher proportion of the lucerne patches that they encountered and rejected more of the cereal patches that they encountered. Total availability did not affect diet selection. From these results it is pointed out why conclusions of diet selection experiments that do not consider how the food alternatives are distributed horizontally and vertically can be equivocal. The effect of variable levels of selective grazing in relation to changing horizontal and vertical availability of plant species on the species composition of plant communities is considered.

Plant species or vegetation characteristics (e.g. sward height) are often distributed in patches within a background of continuous vegetation. Grazing animals exploit this spatial heterogeneity by concentrating their foraging in patches that are of preferred species or in patches that offer high rates of intake (Bazely, 1988). However, little is known of the mechanisms or individual behaviours that animals use to accomplish this preferential patch use. One hypothesis proposed to account for the preferential patch use is that animals remember information about the spatial distribution of the patches they encounter and use this information on subsequent foraging bouts to increase the rate at which they encounter preferred food patches (Bell, 1991). In this study, we tested whether sheep could remember the spatial location of patches in simple and complex environments or whether they needed continually to sample to know what was located in each area.

Recent grazing preference studies show that sheep offered a choice between large adjacent monocultures of perennial ryegrass and white clover choose a diet that is a mixture of the two species (ca. 0·7 white clover) (Parsons et al., 1994). One possible hypothesis to explain this is that animals need to sample different areas to know what is located there or the different plant species to know what eating each species represents and because of this include apparently less desirable foods (here ryegrass) in the diet (see Parsons et al., 1994). Edwards et al., (1996) showed that sheep can use spatial memory and so may not need to sample on an area basis. In this study, we tested directly whether sheep could distinguish between ryegrass and white clover without grazing them and whether they can form associations between the appearance of the vegetation and the food reward it represents.