Pediatric cancer is accompanied by many ethical challenges, particularly those related to respecting the child's opinion and parental responsibility and consent.Questionnaires were collected from 400 participants, from four equal groups: doctors, nurses, parents and medical students, from three cities in Saudi Arabia, about three problematic issues which revolve around the mandatory consent of one or both parents, the extent of a child’s assent, and the acceptable form of consent and assent.Despite the diversity of the participants' cultural backgrounds, most preferred both (...) parents to give consent, followed by either parent without differentiation between parents, which reinforced a trend towards more gender equality. The majority of participants preferred that parental consent forms be detailed enough to obtain the maximum information, while others chose medium‐size consent forms; a large majority preferred that the form seeking to obtain the assent of the child with cancer be short, reflecting their desire not to increase the burden on the child, in addition to the fact that the final decision belongs to the parents rather than the child. Most participants preferred to rely on a child's level of maturity rather than having reached a certain age so that they could give assent, while the rest considered the age of 13‐14 as a suitable age.These findings reflect an increasing ethical awareness regarding parental consent and child assent, and they can be formulated in a recommendation for a more ethical practice in the field of childhood cancer and pediatrics in general. (shrink)

In this study, we examined the word superiority effect in Arabic and English, two languages with significantly different morphological and writing systems. Thirty-two Arabic–English bilingual speakers performed a post-cued letter-in-string identification task in words, pseudo-words, and non-words. The results established the presence of the word superiority effect in Arabic and a robust effect of context in both languages. However, they revealed that, compared to the non-word context, word and pseudo-word contexts facilitated letter identification more in Arabic than in English. In (...) addition, the difference between word and pseudo-word contexts was smaller in Arabic compared to English. Finally, there was a consistent first-letter advantage in English regardless of the context, while this was more consistent only in the word and pseudo-word contexts in Arabic. We discuss these results in light of previous findings and argue that the differences between the patterns reported for Arabic and English are due to the qualitative difference between word morphophonological representations in the two languages. (shrink)