Something Suit My Taste

My journey from suit to skin.

doi: 10.5694/mja15.00881 As my Aunty placed the possum skin cloak over me, I experienced a profound “inner experience” of cultural healing and connection. Wearing the cloak as part of the Wrapture project (http://www.speakingincolour.com.au/wrapture) restored an aspect of cultural traditional practice. It touched me holistically, creating a sense of healing, spiritual connection, belonging and ...

Fried Rice: My Taste of Culture, Home and Family

Something Old, Something New, Something Borrowed, Something Blue

The concept of commissioning is starting to gain traction in the Australian health system. Primary Care Networks began operations in July 2015 with a remit around commissioning health services. Despite the centrality of this concept, we know relatively little about commissioning in Australia. Other systems have experimented with it for some time, and this paper reviews the evidence and lessons ...

Something Old, Something New

Infants face the paramount task of learning a language. Here, I review recent literature on two separate topics that suggest they use a combination of both evolutionarily old and new cognitive tools to face this task. Research on the principles that guide how humans and nonhuman animals group sequences of sounds has shown that we share with other species perceptual biases that we apply to lingu...

Something old, something new.

MacWhinney’s list of proposed mechanisms for language acquisition seems so all-encompassing that it might appear churlish to dwell on a mechanism that’s left out, but on his ultimate list of critical mechanisms there is an indeed an important (and intended) omission: innate, linguisticallyspecialized constraints. Such constraints are indeed mentioned, but if I understand the point of the articl...