Kaqchikel and Spanish Language Contact: The Case of Bilingual Mayan Children

The University of Kansas has long historical connections with Central America and the many Central Americans who have earned graduate degrees at KU. This work is part of the Central American Theses and Dissertations collection in KU ScholarWorks and is being made freely available with permission of the author through the efforts of Professor Emeritus Charles Stansifer of the History department and the staff of the Scholarly Communications program at the University of Kansas Libraries’ Center for Digital Scholarship.This study examined the lexical and morphosyntactic knowledge of Kaqchikel Maya children in the Kaqchikel and Spanish languages. Eight bilingual children, who acquired Kaqchikel at home and Spanish at school participated in this study, whose main methodology was the elicited production method. The collection and recording of the data were conducted during three visits to Tecpan, Guatemala. My inquiry into the lexical knowledge of these children showed that their lexicons were not twice as large as that of a monolingual. Generally, they knew more Spanish lexical items than Kaqchikel ones. All the children borrowed from Spanish to various degrees from core and noncore semantic domains. The children's bilingual lexicons were organizationally complex and fluid, e.g., lexical items in lexical pairs were polysemous. Other major findings are that LI lexical items were subordinated to L2 lexical items and that Spanish loanwords in the bilingual lexicon undergo cycles of phonological and lexical change. Regarding verb morphology, it was found that the children were more productive at inflecting ergative case than absolutive case. Moreover, they were more productive at inflecting ergative singular prefixes than their plural counterparts. The children were found to be at different interlanguage levels in Spanish, but generally they had better knowledge of accusative cliticization than reflexive or dative cliticization. An important finding is that the children's scores for both reflexive and dative clitics increased with the number of years in school. The data demonstrated that the children acquired the properties of L2 verbs in stages and that they transferred the morphosyntactic properties of specific Kaqchikel transitive verbs onto their Spanish equivalents. It was found that the younger the child was when she or he started school, the weaker this child was in Kaqchikel, while the older the child was, the stronger knowledge she or he had in Kaqchikel. Spanish and Kaqchikel dominant levels of bilingual competence were documented. The children with two years of school were Kaqchikel dominant, those between 3 and 5 years were Spanish dominant, while the one child with six years had reached a state of equilibrium in her levels of competence in both languages

Finishing the euchromatic sequence of the human genome

The sequence of the human genome encodes the genetic instructions for human physiology, as well as rich information about human evolution. In 2001, the International Human Genome Sequencing Consortium reported a draft sequence of the euchromatic portion of the human genome. Since then, the international collaboration has worked to convert this draft into a genome sequence with high accuracy and nearly complete coverage. Here, we report the result of this finishing process. The current genome sequence (Build 35) contains 2.85 billion nucleotides interrupted by only 341 gaps. It covers ∼99% of the euchromatic genome and is accurate to an error rate of ∼1 event per 100,000 bases. Many of the remaining euchromatic gaps are associated with segmental duplications and will require focused work with new methods. The near-complete sequence, the first for a vertebrate, greatly improves the precision of biological analyses of the human genome including studies of gene number, birth and death. Notably, the human enome seems to encode only 20,000-25,000 protein-coding genes. The genome sequence reported here should serve as a firm foundation for biomedical research in the decades ahead

The mitochondrial genome of Arctica islandica; Phylogeny and Variation

Arctica islandica is known as the longest-lived non-colonial metazoan species on earth and is therefore increasingly being investigated as a new model in aging research. As the mitochondrial genome is associated with the process of aging in many species and bivalves are known to possess a peculiar mechanism of mitochondrial genome inheritance including doubly uniparental inheritance (DUI), we aimed to assess the genomic variability of the A. islandica mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA). We sequenced the complete mitochondrial genomes of A. islandica specimens from three different sites in the Western Palaearctic (Iceland, North Sea, Baltic Sea). We found the A. islandica mtDNA to fall within the normal size range (18 kb) and exhibit similar coding capacity as other animal mtDNAs. The concatenated protein sequences of all currently known Veneroidea mtDNAs were used to robustly place A. islandica in a phylogenetic framework. Analysis of the observed single nucleotide polymorphism (SNP) patterns on further specimen revealed two prevailing haplotypes. Populations in the Baltic and the North Sea are very homogenous, whereas the Icelandic population, from which exceptionally old individuals have been collected, is the most diverse one. Homogeneity in Baltic and North Sea populations point to either stronger environmental constraints or more recent colonization of the habitat. We also detected potential signs of recombination between these two haplotypes. Our analysis lays the foundation for further studies on A. islandica population structures, age research with this organism, and for phylogenetic studies. Accessions for the mitochondrial genome sequences: KC197241 Iceland KF363951 Baltic Sea KF363952 North Se

Implementation interventions in preventing surgical site infections in abdominal surgery: a systematic review

AbstractBackgroundSurgical site infections (SSIs) are highly prevalent in abdominal surgery despite evidence-based prevention measures. Since guidelines are not self-implementing and SSI-preventive compliance is often insufficient, implementation interventions have been developed to promote compliance. This systematic review aims to identify implementation interventions used in abdominal surgery to prevent SSIs and determine associations with SSI reductions.MethodsLiterature was searched in April 2018 (Medline/PubMed and Web of Science Core Collection). Implementation interventions were classified using the implementation subcategories of the EPOC Taxonomy (Cochrane Review Group Effective Practice and Organisation of Care, EPOC). Additionally, an effectiveness analysis was conducted on the association between the number of implementation interventions, specific compositions thereof, and absolute and relative SSI risk reductions.ResultsForty studies were included. Implementation interventions used most frequently (“top five”) were audit and feedback (80% of studies), organizational culture (70%), monitoring the performance of healthcare delivery (65%), reminders (53%), and educational meetings (45%). Twenty-nine studies (72.5%) used a multimodal strategy (≥3 interventions). An effectiveness analysis revealed significant absolute and relative SSI risk reductions. E.g., numerically, the largest absolute risk reduction of 10.8% pertained to thirteen studies using 3–5 interventions (p &lt; .001); however, this was from a higher baseline rate than those with fewer or more interventions. The largest relative risk reduction was 52.4% for studies employing the top five interventions, compared to 43.1% for those not including these. Furthermore, neither the differences in risk reduction between studies with different numbers of implementation interventions (bundle size) nor between studies including the top five interventions (vs. not) were significant.ConclusionIn SSI prevention in abdominal surgery, mostly standard bundles of implementation interventions are applied. While an effectiveness analysis of differences in SSI risk reduction by number and type of interventions did not render conclusive results, use of standard interventions such as audit and feedback, organizational culture, monitoring, reminders, and education at least does not seem to represent preventive malpractice. Further research should determine implementation interventions, or bundles thereof, which are most effective in promoting compliance with SSI-preventive measures in abdominal surgery.</jats:sec

Molecular phylogeny of the bivalve subclass Heterodonta using concatenated protein sets from complete mitochondrial genomes.

<p>The evolutionary history was inferred using the Neighbor-Joining (NJ) method [<a href="http://www.plosone.org/article/info:doi/10.1371/journal.pone.0082857#B37" target="_blank">37</a>], MrBayes, and Maximum likelihood (ML) analysis. The tree shows the topology of the ML tree and the values next to the branches indicate (ordered from left to right) Percentage support by ML tree/Posterior probability of MrBayes tree/) Percentage support by NJ tree. The tree was rooted using <i>Crassostrea hongkongensis</i> as an outgroup. The tree is drawn to scale, with branch lengths measured in the number of substitutions per site. Evolutionary analyses were conducted in MEGA5 [<a href="http://www.plosone.org/article/info:doi/10.1371/journal.pone.0082857#B38" target="_blank">38</a>] (NJ and ML) and with MrBayes [<a href="http://www.plosone.org/article/info:doi/10.1371/journal.pone.0082857#B39" target="_blank">39</a>]. The asterisk indicates that the Solenoida branch is associated with Tellinoidea in NJ and MrBayes analyses.</p