Background: Healthcare facilities have experienced many challenges during the COVID-19 pandemic, including limited personal protective equipment (PPE) supplies. Healthcare personnel (HCP) rely on PPE, vaccines, and other infection control measures to prevent SARS-CoV-2 infections. We describe PPE concerns reported by HCP who had close contact with COVID-19 patients in the workplace and tested positive for SARS-CoV-2. Method: The CDC collaborated with Emerging Infections Program (EIP) sites in 10 states to conduct surveillance for SARS-CoV-2 infections in HCP. EIP staff interviewed HCP with positive SARS-CoV-2 viral tests (ie, cases) to collect data on demographics, healthcare roles, exposures, PPE use, and concerns about their PPE use during COVID-19 patient care in the 14 days before the HCP’s SARS-CoV-2 positive test. PPE concerns were qualitatively coded as being related to supply (eg, low quality, shortages); use (eg, extended use, reuse, lack of fit test); or facility policy (eg, lack of guidance). We calculated and compared the percentages of cases reporting each concern type during the initial phase of the pandemic (April–May 2020), during the first US peak of daily COVID-19 cases (June–August 2020), and during the second US peak (September 2020–January 2021). We compared percentages using mid-P or Fisher exact tests (α = 0.05). Results: Among 1,998 HCP cases occurring during April 2020–January 2021 who had close contact with COVID-19 patients, 613 (30.7%) reported ≥1 PPE concern (Table 1). The percentage of cases reporting supply or use concerns was higher during the first peak period than the second peak period (supply concerns: 12.5% vs 7.5%; use concerns: 25.5% vs 18.2%; p Conclusions: Although lower percentages of HCP cases overall reported PPE concerns after the first US peak, our results highlight the importance of developing capacity to produce and distribute PPE during times of increased demand. The difference we observed among selected groups of cases may indicate that PPE access and use were more challenging for some, such as nonphysicians and nursing home HCP. These findings underscore the need to ensure that PPE is accessible and used correctly by HCP for whom use is recommended.

Funding: None

Disclosures: None

Healthcare personnel with severe acute respiratory coronavirus virus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) infection were interviewed to describe activities and practices in and outside the workplace. Among 2,625 healthcare personnel, workplace-related factors that may increase infection risk were more common among nursing-home personnel than hospital personnel, whereas selected factors outside the workplace were more common among hospital personnel.

We examined the effects of object attributes on children's descriptive patterns in a referential communication task. Thirty preschoolers described object pairs that were selected by the experimenter. The targets were defined by shared size or colour, and differed on the non-target dimension in half of the trials. The children also completed a non-verbal reasoning task with analogous stimuli. They selected objects after observing the experimenter make a choice and inferring the basis for selection. In the communication task, the children produced fewer size than colour descriptions, particularly when the size targets differed in colour. They also over-specified colour features more often than size. They did not show a similar challenge identifying size relationships in the non-verbal task. The results support the conclusion that target attributes have a systematic influence on children's referential performance. Potential mechanisms for these effects, and directions for future research are discussed.

We investigated the relationship between lexical activation and syntactic planning in children's sentences. Four- and 7-year-old children described transitive scenes following patient-related prime pictures and control pictures. We examined syntactic choices, and compared onset latency, sentence length, and dysfluency rates for active transitive sentences in the two conditions. Early activation of the patient in the primed condition did not lead to the production of patient-subject sentences, but it did have consequences for active transitive sentence production. Namely, onset latencies were longer and sentences were shorter in the primed condition. Dysfluency rates did not differ between the two conditions. Correlation analyses revealed a stronger pattern of association between working memory scores and language variables in the patient-primed condition. The results indicate that conflicts between lexical activation order and syntactic plans are a source of processing difficulty during children's sentence production.

Fourteen matched pairs of German-speaking and English-speaking language-impaired children, aged 4;5–6;11, were tested for their knowledge of grammatical morphology and expressive vocabulary, using the Grammatical Closure subtest of the ITPA or its German adaptation, Grammatik in the PET, and the Expressive One-Word Picture Vocabulary Test or the Aktiver Wortschatztest. Children were matched pairwise on the basis of their chronological age, nonverbal IQ, and scores in a sentence imitation and a sentence production task. As predicted, the German-speaking language-impaired children earned higher scores in grammatical morphology and vocabulary than did the English-speaking children. These findings add to a growing body of literature that documents language-specific sensitivity to particular sorts of syntactic devices. They also suggest that the morphological difficulties seen in English-speaking language-impaired children stem in part from the minor functional role played by these forms during the early language learning years.

Twenty years ago the publication of Toward a Social Report by the United States Department of Health, Education and Welfare was hailed as a major forward step in developing indicators of conditions in society into a national system of social accounting of relevance to public policy. The resulting social indicators movement quickly mobilized able social scientists to produce a variety of indicators monitoring trends in their society, and internationally. National governments too began to sponsor new types of social reports. The years since have seen an apparent decline in the momentum of the social indicators movement. Hence, to evaluate developments, the Journal of Public Policy invited a number of distinguished pioneers in the movement in Europe and America to give their individual assessment of what has happened to social indicators.

This study investigated possible developmental asynchrony in children with specific language impairment (SL1). This was accomplished by comparing the development of temporal expressions of past reference in two linguistic domains. Verb tense and temporal adverbs served as representatives of the morphological and lexical domains. A cross-sectional design was used with four groups of subjects (N = 48) from 3 to 5 years old. Three groups had normal language and one group had impaired language. Results indicated that the performances of SLI children were similar to those of their 3-year-old language peers on the verb tasks and similar to the 4-year-olds on the adverb tasks. Such differential delays provide direct experimental evidence for asynchronous language development in SLI children.

Studies of locatives suggest regularities in order and age of acquisition, including systematic changes in context of use for behind and in front of. The present investigation extends earlier work by utilizing more naturalistic elicitation procedures and exploring an early use of behind and in front of with large reference objects. Thirty-three children, ages 2; 7 to 4; 7, told puppets where to look for missing objects. Results indicate an order of acquisition for English locatives which is consistent with prior reports. However, the puppet story method elicited given locatives at younger ages, and the first uses of behind occurred with large, non-featured reference objects. The patterns of use for behind and in front of suggest an acquisition process in which new conceptual resources lead to the re-analysis of object configurations and thus to new aspects of meaning.

This study explores factors other than the concept of comparison which influence the learning of specific comparative adjective forms, namely, (a) the nature of the perceptual input, and (b) the nature of the event. Thirty subjects, age 4; 5 to 7; 9, were asked to describe objects reflecting various attribute differences in both multiple-object comparison and single-object, dynamic-change tasks. Children used comparative adjectives to talk about dynamic changes prior to static comparisons, and attributes based on visual or tactile input were easier than those based on both. These results are interpreted as indicating that perceptual cue redundancy and heterogeneity affects the learning of attribute dimensions, and that children first use the -er suffix in a non-comparative sense.

The ability of children between the ages of 2; 0 and 4; 8 to produce locative pre- or postpositions was investigated in English, Italian, Serbo-Croatian, and Turkish. Across languages, there was a general order of development: (1) ‘in’, ‘on’, ‘under’, and ‘beside’, (2) ‘between’, ‘back’ and ‘front’ with featured objects, (3) ‘back’ and ‘front’ with non-featured objects. This order of development is discussed in terms of nonlinguistic growth in conceptual ability. Language-specific differences in the general pattern of development are discussed in terms of a number of linguistic factors which may facilitate or retard the child's discovery of the linguistic means for encoding concepts.

The ability to make clear reference in connected discourse was examined in children learning Cantonese, a Chinese language where noun phrase constituents, whatever their grammatical role, are omissible from sentences under discourse conditions that are not well-understood. Forty-three typically developing children aged 3;0, 5;0, 7;0 and 12;0 told 16 stories based on picture sequences. A panel of adult native Cantonese speakers was asked to judge the referential adequacy of each child's stories by identifying the character the child was talking about in 32 targeted referential acts. The targeted acts were of three sorts: MAINTENANCE of a known character, INTRODUCTION of a second new character, and REINTRODUCTION of a known character. Reference was judged to be adequate when 3 out of 4 ‘listeners’ could successfully identify the character. Children's referential expressions were most adequate for Maintenance, less adequate for Introduction, and least adequate for Reintroduction. The twelve- and seven-year-olds approached ceiling on all three functions. The five-year-olds scored poorly on Reintroduction, and the three-year-olds failed both Introduction and Reintroduction, despite knowledge of at least one of the possible linguistic forms required for these acts as evidenced in a sentence imitation task. Viewed within the framework of Levelt's (1989) discourse model, the data improve our understanding of the developmental period during which children learn to make appropriate presuppositions about the listener's knowledge and attentional states.

Two experiments investigated the role of inflections in verb learning. In Study I, 3- to 5-year-olds with typical language development were asked to extend novel verbs to new instances. They heard the verbs inflected with either -ed or -ing and were given a forced choice between events that maintained either the activity or the result of the original event. The younger children selected events according to the verb inflection: same-activity events for -ing and same-result events for -ed. Older preschoolers chose same-result events throughout. Study II was conducted to investigate the nature of this causal bias. A group of 4- to 5-year-olds with specific language impairment completed the same verb extension task. They were equivalent to the older Study I children in age and IQ but were at lower language levels than the younger group. Children in the SLI group used neither the inflectional strategy nor the same-result strategy. Findings from the two studies point to a developmental period during which children treat inflectional cues as reliable guides to verb meaning. The discussion focuses on the rise and fall of such inflectional bootstrapping and the linguistic character of the same-result bias that replaces it.

This article argues that self-expression is a crucial though heretofore largely overlooked part of the explanation for linguistic variation. Self-expression mediates between linguistic choices and social facts such as gender, occupation, linguistic ideology, and place of origin, as speakers use language not only to express their identification with or rejection of social groupings, but also to express their individuality. All language use is thus essentially idiosyncratic and syncretic. The point is illustrated with reference to case studies of the speech and writing of two Texas women who use language in public contexts. The article further argues for the sociolinguistic study of public modes of discourse in addition to “vernacular” modes, and for the need in sociolinguistic research for rhetorical as well as linguistic analysis. (Variation, self-expression, individuality, case studies, Texas, public speech)

Recent research on a helmet of Illyrian type, found in the River Alpheios and purchased by the British Museum in 1914, has yielded interesting historical, epigraphical, and technological information. The helmet was made between about 550 and 525 BC, and it was probably dedicated to Olympian Zeus in the latter years of the century; it was embellished with various types of silver decoration, notably appliqués of horsemen on the cheek-pieces. The inscription, incised in unusual herring-bone fashion, indicates that the helmet was dedicated by the Koroneans, and the event commemorated by the dedication is here considered.