Predicted microplastic uptake through trophic transfer by the short-beaked common dolphin (Delphinus delphis) and common bottlenose dolphin (Tursiops truncatus) in the Northeast Atlantic Ocean and Mediterranean Sea

Marine mammals can serve as an indicator of ecosystem health, and are likely exposed to significant amounts of microplastics (MPs). In this study we estimated the MP uptake of two odontocetes, the short-beaked common dolphin (Delphinus delphis) and the common bottlenose dolphin (Tursiops truncatus), in the Mediterranean Sea and the Northeast Atlantic. These two species are expected to primarily ingest MPs through trophic transfer. To this end, data was collected on their diet, which was subsequently linked to MP occurrence and abundance in prey families. We estimated that D. delphis ingests 76 MPs/day in the Northeast Atlantic and 164 MPs/day in the Mediterranean, and T. truncatus ingests 36 MPs/day in the Northeast Atlantic and 179 MPs/day in the Mediterranean. This study provides important new predictions on MP exposure in two odontocetes, and opens up new research opportunities on the effect of this exposure on the health of organisms.Environmental Biolog

Native 'um's elicit prediction of low-frequency referents, but non-native 'um's do not

Speech comprehension involves extensive use of prediction. Linguistic prediction may be guided by the semantics or syntax, but also by the performance characteristics of the speech signal, such as disfluency. Previous studies have shown that listeners, when presented with the filler uh, exhibit a disfluency bias for discourse-new or unknown referents, drawing inferences about the source of the disfluency. The goal of the present study is to study the contrast between native and non-native disfluencies in speech comprehension. Experiment 1 presented listeners with pictures of high-frequency (e.g., a hand) and low-frequency objects (e.g., a sewing machine) and with fluent and disfluent instructions. Listeners were found to anticipate reference to low-frequency objects when encountering disfluency, thus attributing disfluency to speaker trouble in lexical retrieval. Experiment 2 showed that, when participants listened to disfluent non-native speech, no anticipation of low-frequency referents was observed. We conclude that listeners can adapt their predictive strategies to the (non-native) speaker at hand, extending our understanding of the role of speaker identity in speech comprehension

Both native and non-native disfluencies trigger listeners' attention

Disfluencies (such as uh and uhm) are a common phenomenon in spontaneous speech. Rather than filtering these hesitations from the incoming speech signal, listeners are sensitive to disfluency and have been shown to actually use disfluencies for speech comprehension. For instance, disfluencies have been found to have beneficial effects on listeners’ memory. Accumulating evidence indicates that attentional mechanisms underlie this disfluency effect: upon encountering disfluency, listeners raise their attention to the incoming speech signal. The experiments reported here investigated whether these beneficial effects of disfluency also hold when listening to a non-native speaker. Recent studies on the perception of non-native disfluency suggest that disfluency effects on prediction are attenuated when listening to a non-native speaker. This attenuation may be a result of listeners being familiar with the frequent and more variant incidence of disfluencies in non-native speech. If listeners also modulate the beneficial effect of disfluency on memory when listening to a non-native speaker, it would indicate a certain amount of control on the part of the listener over how disfluencies affect attention, and thus comprehension. Furthermore, it would argue against the hypothesis that disfluencies affect comprehension in a rather automatic fashion (cf. the Temporal Delay Hypothesis). Using the Change Detection Paradigm, we presented participants with three-sentence passages that sometimes contained a filled pause (e.g., “... that the patient with the uh wound was...”). After each passage, participants saw a transcript of the spoken passage in which one word had been substituted (e.g., “wound” > “injury”). In our first experiment, participants were more accurate in recalling words from previously heard speech (i.e., detecting the change) if these words had been preceded by a disfluency (relative to a fluent passage). Our second experiment - using non-native speech materials - demonstrated that non-native uh’s elicited an effect of the same magnitude and in the same direction: when new participants listened to a non-native speaker producing the same passages, they were also more accurate on disfluent (as compared to fluent) trials. These data suggest that, upon encountering a disfluency, listeners raise their attention levels irrespective of the (non-)native identity of the speaker. Whereas listeners have been found to modulate prediction effects of disfluencies when listening to non-native speech, no such modulation was found for memory effects of disfluencies in the present data, thus potentially constraining the role of listener control in disfluency processing. The current study emphasizes the central role of attention in an account of disfluency processing

Young children working together:Cooperative learning effects on group work of children in Grade 1 of primary education

It was examined whether cooperative learning within the Success for All (SfA) program led to improved group work behaviour of Grade 1 pupils. 168 pupils of six SfA schools and 144 pupils of four control schools participated. Positive and negative group work behaviour was observed during a group task, taking into account socioemotional ethos, group participation, and type of dialogue. Longitudinal multilevel analysis was used for the sequence of observed 20-s time intervals. SfA groups showed more positive and less negative group work behaviour compared to control groups, whilst controlling for several group characteristics. Results suggest that negative group work behaviour increased gradually during the whole task in control groups, while in SfA groups it increased only towards the end of the task. The findings indicate that cooperative learning may lead to improved group work behaviour of young pupils (6–7 years old)

Enhancing young students' high-level talk by using cooperative learning within Success for All lessons

This study examined whether students achieved high-level talk during group work because of involvement in cooperative learning within the Success for All (SfA) program. SfA is a comprehensive school program in which cooperative learning plays a key role, in addition to several other components such as parental involvement and tutoring. A quasi-experimental design with a treatment and a control group was used. At the end of the school year, grade-1 students (6- and 7-years-old children) executed a group task in small groups of four students. At that moment, SfA students had experienced cooperative learning within SfA lessons for a whole school year. In total, 160 students participated in this study. Using a coding scheme the quality of student's talk during group work was compared between treatment and control group. Compared to the control group, SfA students showed more high-level talk. SfA students expressed more extended elaborations of propositions and asked more open elaboration questions. Hence, the results of this study suggest that cooperative learning activities within SfA-lessons contributed to students' high-level talk.</p

Determining global distribution of microplastics by combining citizen science and in-depth case studies

Industrial EcologyConservation Biolog

Salinity and sensitivity to endocrine disrupting chemicals: A comparison of reproductive endpoints in small-bodied fish exposed under different salinities

Conservation Biolog