Exploring individual variation in Turkish heritage speakers’ complex linguistic productions: Evidence from discourse markers

Research on multilingual speakers is often compared to monolingual baselines which are commonly treated as if they were homogeneous across speakers. Despite recent research showing that this homogeneity does not hold, these practices reproduce native-speakerism and monolingualism. Heritage language research, which established itself in the past two decades, is no exemption. Focusing on three predefined linguistic groups, namely Turkish speakers which are framed as monolingual in Turkey as well as two heritage bilingually framed groups in Germany and the USA, we ask: (1) Do heritage speakers of Turkish produce more discourse and fluency markers (FMs) than monolingual speakers? (2) Are the groups homogeneous, or is there wide variation between speakers across groups? We focus on the variation between and within groups using Bayesian Linear Regression with a multilevel model for speakers and heritage groups. Our findings confirm that the use of discourse and FMs is largely defined through individual variation, and not through the belonging to a certain speaker group. By focusing on variation across groups rather than between groups, our study design supports the growing body of literature that questions common heritage language research practices of today and shows alternative paths to understanding heritage grammars.Peer Reviewe

Trimming Phonetic Alignments Improves the Inference of Sound Correspondence Patterns from Multilingual Wordlists

Sound correspondence patterns form the basis of cognate detection and phonological reconstruction in historical language comparison. Methods for the automatic inference of correspondence patterns from phonetically aligned cognate sets have been proposed, but their application to multilingual wordlists requires extremely well annotated datasets. Since annotation is tedious and time consuming, it would be desirable to find ways to improve aligned cognate data automatically. Taking inspiration from trimming techniques in evolutionary biology, which improve alignments by excluding problematic sites, we propose a workflow that trims phonetic alignments in comparative linguistics prior to the inference of correspondence patterns. Testing these techniques on a large standardized collection of ten datasets with expert annotations from different language families, we find that the best trimming technique substantially improves the overall consistency of the alignments. The results show a clear increase in the proportion of frequent correspondence patterns and words exhibiting regular cognate relations.Comment: The paper was accepted at the SIGTYP workshop 2023 co-located with EAC

Clasificación filolingüística de la familia lingüística quechua

We present a computational phylogeny for the internal classification of the Quechua language family. Based on a concept list of 150 lexical items, we manually analyzed data from 39 contemporaneous Quechua varieties for cognacy and computed a family tree using Bayesian phylogenetic methods. The results provide further evidence for the classification of individual varieties. We also compare the results to the existing hypotheses for the evolution of the Quechua language family.Presentamos una filogenia computacional para la clasificación interna de la familia lingüística quechua. Basándonos en una lista de conceptos de 150 elementos léxicos, analizamos manualmente los cognados de 39 variedades quechuas contemporáneas para calcular un árbol genealógico utilizando métodos filogenéticos bayesianos. Los resultados proporcionan más pruebas para la clasificación de las variedades individuales. También comparamos los resultados con las hipótesis existentes sobre la evolución de la familia lingüística quechua

Representing and Computing Uncertainty in Phonological Reconstruction

Despite the inherently fuzzy nature of reconstructions in historical linguistics, most scholars do not represent their uncertainty when proposing proto-forms. With the increasing success of recently proposed approaches to automating certain aspects of the traditional comparative method, the formal representation of proto-forms has also improved. This formalization makes it possible to address both the representation and the computation of uncertainty. Building on recent advances in supervised phonological reconstruction, during which an algorithm learns how to reconstruct words in a given proto-language relying on previously annotated data, and inspired by improved methods for automated word prediction from cognate sets, we present a new framework that allows for the representation of uncertainty in linguistic reconstruction and also includes a workflow for the computation of fuzzy reconstructions from linguistic data.Comment: To appear in: Proceedings of the 4th Workshop on Computational Approaches to Historical Language Chang

Introducción al dossier “Avances en lingüística andina”

Introducción al dossierIntroduction to the DossierIntroducción al dossierIntroducción al dossie

Introducción al dossier “Avances en lingüística andina” (1º parte)

Introduction to the DossierIntroducción al dossie

Time travelling with Triticum: An Ecotron experiment to study the wheat of the future

2. Zero hunger3. Good health and well-being12. Responsible consumption and production13. Climate action15. Life on land17. Partnerships for the goal

Body Fluid Cytokine Levels in Mild Cognitive Impairment and Alzheimer’s Disease: a Comparative Overview

This article gives a comprehensive overview of cytokine and other inflammation associated protein levels in plasma, serum and cerebrospinal fluid (CSF) of patients with Alzheimer's disease (AD) and mild cognitive impairment (MCI). We reviewed 118 research articles published between 1989 and 2013 to compare the reported levels of 66 cytokines and other proteins related to regulation and signaling in inflammation in the blood or CSF obtained from MCI and AD patients. Several cytokines are evidently regulated in (neuro-) inflammatory processes associated with neurodegenerative disorders. Others do not display changes in the blood or CSF during disease progression. However, many reports on cytokine levels in MCI or AD are controversial or inconclusive, particularly those which provide data on frequently investigated cytokines like tumor necrosis factor alpha (TNF-α) or interleukin-6 (IL-6). The levels of several cytokines are possible indicators of neuroinflammation in AD. Some of them might increase steadily during disease progression or temporarily at the time of MCI to AD conversion. Furthermore, elevated body fluid cytokine levels may correlate with an increased risk of conversion from MCI to AD. Yet, research results are conflicting. To overcome interindividual variances and to obtain a more definite description of cytokine regulation and function in neurodegeneration, a high degree of methodical standardization and patients collective characterization, together with longitudinal sampling over years is essential

Potential of Core-Collapse Supernova Neutrino Detection at JUNO

JUNO is an underground neutrino observatory under construction in Jiangmen, China. It uses 20kton liquid scintillator as target, which enables it to detect supernova burst neutrinos of a large statistics for the next galactic core-collapse supernova (CCSN) and also pre-supernova neutrinos from the nearby CCSN progenitors. All flavors of supernova burst neutrinos can be detected by JUNO via several interaction channels, including inverse beta decay, elastic scattering on electron and proton, interactions on C12 nuclei, etc. This retains the possibility for JUNO to reconstruct the energy spectra of supernova burst neutrinos of all flavors. The real time monitoring systems based on FPGA and DAQ are under development in JUNO, which allow prompt alert and trigger-less data acquisition of CCSN events. The alert performances of both monitoring systems have been thoroughly studied using simulations. Moreover, once a CCSN is tagged, the system can give fast characterizations, such as directionality and light curve

Detection of the Diffuse Supernova Neutrino Background with JUNO

As an underground multi-purpose neutrino detector with 20 kton liquid scintillator, Jiangmen Underground Neutrino Observatory (JUNO) is competitive with and complementary to the water-Cherenkov detectors on the search for the diffuse supernova neutrino background (DSNB). Typical supernova models predict 2-4 events per year within the optimal observation window in the JUNO detector. The dominant background is from the neutral-current (NC) interaction of atmospheric neutrinos with 12C nuclei, which surpasses the DSNB by more than one order of magnitude. We evaluated the systematic uncertainty of NC background from the spread of a variety of data-driven models and further developed a method to determine NC background within 15\% with {\it{in}} {\it{situ}} measurements after ten years of running. Besides, the NC-like backgrounds can be effectively suppressed by the intrinsic pulse-shape discrimination (PSD) capabilities of liquid scintillators. In this talk, I will present in detail the improvements on NC background uncertainty evaluation, PSD discriminator development, and finally, the potential of DSNB sensitivity in JUNO