Monolingualism or multiple versions for Erasmus+ Guidelines? Incompatibilities and utopia.

Since the ECSC Treaty signed in Paris in 1951, marking the beginning of the commun destiny of the first international integration organization until the most recent decisions, such as the single currency or the immigration policies, it is a matter of fact that European Union progresses only with harmonious dialogue and joint actions, built on mutual respect of others’ differences. Nowadays, in the rapidly changing societies, financial concurrence and geopolitical stakes together with arrogance, or dominance, often outweigh the plurilingual communication, thereby leading to worries about linguistic equality within the Union; hence, the subject of the present stydy. Communication in this polyglottic supranational union should be based on an equal pattern, without what the impact of English as lingua franca[1] may be contested and criticised. This combined with the fact that translations are not fully compatible with the English text, implies that European Union does not always resonate at the same frequencies.[1] http://www.euractiv.fr/section/langues-culture/news/l-anglais-se-confirme-comme-la-lingua-franca-de-l-europe

Monolingualism or multiple versions for Erasmus+ Guidelines? Incompatibilities and utopia.

Since the ECSC Treaty signed in Paris in 1951, marking the beginning of the commun destiny of the first international integration organization until the most recent decisions, such as the single currency or the immigration policies, it is a matter of fact that European Union progresses only with harmonious dialogue and joint actions, built on mutual respect of others’ differences. Nowadays, in the rapidly changing societies, financial concurrence and geopolitical stakes together with arrogance, or dominance, often outweigh the plurilingual communication, thereby leading to worries about linguistic equality within the Union; hence, the subject of the present stydy. Communication in this polyglottic supranational union should be based on an equal pattern, without what the impact of English as lingua franca[1] may be contested and criticised. This combined with the fact that translations are not fully compatible with the English text, implies that European Union does not always resonate at the same frequencies.[1] http://www.euractiv.fr/section/langues-culture/news/l-anglais-se-confirme-comme-la-lingua-franca-de-l-europe

The Process of Comprehension from a Psycholinguistic Approach – Implications for Translation

The present paper provides a psycholinguistic approach to the process of comprehension. Namely, how people represent and make use of the literal and figurative meaning of words and sentences, how they decode the communicative purpose of linguistic elements, and how memory is involved in this decoding. By explaining the findings of psycholinguistic studies on the mental processes that underlie the comprehension of language, we show (i) how closely related translatology and psycholinguistics can be, and (ii) suggest ways in which knowledge of the latter may be used to both enrich theories and practices of the former, and in the instruction of future translators.Cet article présente l’approche psycholinguistique du processus de compréhension du langage c’est-à-dire la façon dont on représente et utilise le sens littéral et le sens figuré des mots et des phrases, la façon dont on décode l’intention communicative des éléments linguistiques, ainsi que la participation de la mémoire dans ce décodage. L’analyse des recherches psycholinguistiques sur les processus mentaux à la base de la compréhension du langage met en avant le lien étroit entre la traductologie et la psycholinguistique. En effet, les connaissances acquises grâce à la psycholinguistique permettent de développer les théories ainsi que les pratiques utilisées pour la formation des futurs traducteurs

Emotional Attractors in Subject-Verb Number Agreement

Considering the crosstalk between brain networks that contain linguistic and emotional information and that no studies have examined the impact of semantic information of affective nature on subject-verb number agreement, the present Event Related Potential (ERP) study investigated the extent to which emotional local nouns whose number mismatched that of subject head nouns might be considered by the parser during comprehension of grammatically correct sentences. To this end, twenty-eight Spanish native speakers were tested on a self-paced reading task while their brain activity was recorded. The experimental materials consisted of 120 sentences where the valence (negative vs. neutral) and number (singular vs. plural) of the local noun of the singular subject noun-phrase (NP) were manipulated; El gorro de aquel/aquellos cazador(es)/mecanico(s) era horizontal ellipsis [The hat of that/those hunter(s)/mechanic(s) was horizontal ellipsis ]. ERP results measured in the local noun position showed that valence and number interacted in the 300-500 ms (negative component) and 780-880 ms (late positivity) time windows. In the (target) verb position, the two factors only interacted in the late 780-880 ms time window, revealing an "ungrammatical illusion" for plural marked neutral words. Our findings suggest that number agreement is sensitive to affective meaning but that the emotional information of an attractor is considered in different operations and at different stages during grammatical sentence processing; it can affect lexical and syntactic representation retrieval of a subject-NP and impact agreement encoding only at late stages of processing, during verb agreement and feature integration.Funding This work was supported by the Special Account for Research Grants (National and Kapodistrian University of Athens), the Spanish Ministerio de Ciencia, Innovacion y Universidades (grant numbers PGC2018-097970-B-I00 and RED2018- 102615-T), and the Basque Government (grant number IT1169-19)

Interactions between languages in verb- and pronoun-agreement in bilingual sentence production

This thesis investigates how fluent bilinguals make use of the grammar of their two languages when they construct verb- and pronoun-agreement only in one language (monolingual mode) or in both their languages (bilingual mode). We are particularly interested in the impact of the non-response language in sentence processing on the response language. Bilingual research has provided evidence for language integration in bilingual speech (e.g., Hartsuiker, Pickering, & Veltkamp, 2004) which is also consistent with the phenomenon of code-switching whereby speakers can use elements of each language in producing mixed-language utterances (e.g., Myers-Scotton, 2002). So far, studies at the lexical level have provided support for parallel language activation (e.g., Colomé, 2001), yet the issue of whether activation of either language can be strong enough to influence the workings of the other is still in dispute (e.g., Hermans, Bongaerts, de Bot, & Schreuder, 1998, but see Costa, La Heij, & Navarrete, 2006). In three separate sections of the thesis we employ a sentence-completion paradigm widely used in monolingual agreement literature (Bock & Miller, 1991) to examine language interaction effects in the monolingual and the bilingual modes of speech (Grosjean, 2000). English-Greek and Greek-English fluent bilinguals produced completions to singular or plural subjects when the number of the translation was either the same or different, and when their completion either did or did not switch languages. The first section investigates whether there is influence of the divergent number properties of the nonresponse native language (L1) on verb-agreement in the response second language (L2). The results of Greek-English bilinguals show influence of the underlying number of the L1 on completions in the L2. We interpret this in terms of a markedness account (e.g., Eberhard, 1997) whereby parallel activation and competition between an L2 singular subject noun and its L1 plural translation results in plural verbagreement because the singular form is more vulnerable to the marked plural form. English-Greek bilinguals who perform on the same monolingual mode do not show influence of their L1 when speaking in the L2 (Greek). We attribute this finding to a difference of morphological/inflectional properties between the two languages which renders a language that displays fewer overt markings (English) easier to control when utterances are produced in a language that displays more overt markings (Greek) (e.g., Vigliocco, Butterworth, & Semenza, 1995)

Inverse baseline expression pattern of the NEP/neuropeptides and NFκB/proteasome pathways in androgen-dependent and androgen-independent prostate cancer cells

<p>Abstract</p> <p>Background</p> <p>Castration-resistance in prostate cancer (PC) is a critical event hallmarking a switch to a more aggressive phenotype. Neuroendocrine differentiation and upregulation of NFκB transcriptional activity are two mechanisms that have been independently linked to this process.</p> <p>Methods</p> <p>We investigated these two pathways together using <it>in vitro </it>models of androgen-dependent (AD) and androgen-independent (AI) PC. We measured cellular levels, activity and surface expression of Neutral Endopeptidase (NEP), levels of secreted Endothelin-1 (ET-1), levels, sub-cellular localisation and DNA binding ability of NFκB, and proteasomal activity in human native PC cell lines (LnCaP and PC-3) modelling AD and AI states.</p> <p>Results</p> <p>At baseline, AD cells were found to have high NEP expression and activity and low secreted ET-1. In contrast, they exhibited a low-level activation of the NFκB pathway associated with comparatively low 20S proteasome activity. The AI cells showed the exact mirror image, namely increased proteasomal activity resulting in a canonical pathway-mediated NFκB activation, and minimal NEP activity with increased levels of secreted ET-1.</p> <p>Conclusions</p> <p>Our results seem to support evidence for divergent patterns of expression of the NFκB/proteasome pathway with relation to components of the NEP/neuropeptide axis in PC cells of different level of androgen dependence. NEP and ET-1 are inversely and directly related to an activated state of the NFκB/proteasome pathway, respectively. A combination therapy targeting both pathways may ultimately prove to be of benefit in clinical practice.</p

Alternative consent methods used in the multinational, pragmatic, randomised clinical trial SafeBoosC-III

Background The process of obtaining prior informed consent for experimental treatment does not fit well into the clinical reality of acute and intensive care. The therapeutic window of interventions is often short, which may reduce the validity of the consent and the rate of enrolled participants, to delay trial completion and reduce the external validity of the results. Deferred consent and ‘opt-out’ are alternative consent methods. The SafeBoosC-III trial was a randomised clinical trial investigating the benefits and harms of cerebral oximetry monitoring in extremely preterm infants during the first 3 days after birth, starting within the first 6 h after birth. Prior, deferred and opt-out consent were all allowed by protocol. This study aimed to evaluate the use of different consent methods in the SafeBoosC-III trial, Furthermore, we aimed to describe and analyse concerns or complaints that arose during the first 6 months of trial conduct. Methods All 70 principal investigators were invited to join this descriptive ancillary study. Each principal investigator received a questionnaire on the use of consent methods in their centre during the SafeBoosC-III trial, including the possibility to describe any concerns related to the consent methods used during the first 6 months of the trial, as raised by the parents or the clinical staff. Results Data from 61 centres were available. In 43 centres, only prior informed consent was used: in seven, only deferred consent. No centres used the opt-out method only, but five centres used prior and deferred, five used prior, deferred and opt-out (all possibilities) and one used both deferred and opt-out. Six centres applied to use the opt-out method by their local research ethics committee but were denied using it. One centre applied to use deferred consent but was denied. There were only 23 registered concerns during the execution of the trial. Conclusions Consent by opt-out was allowed by the protocol in this multinational trial but only a few investigators opted for it and some research ethics boards did not accept its use. It is likely to need promotion by the clinical research community to unfold its potential

The Multilingual Picture Database

Publisher Copyright: © 2022, The Author(s).The growing interdisciplinary research field of psycholinguistics is in constant need of new and up-to-date tools which will allow researchers to answer complex questions, but also expand on languages other than English, which dominates the field. One type of such tools are picture datasets which provide naming norms for everyday objects. However, existing databases tend to be small in terms of the number of items they include, and have also been normed in a limited number of languages, despite the recent boom in multilingualism research. In this paper we present the Multilingual Picture (Multipic) database, containing naming norms and familiarity scores for 500 coloured pictures, in thirty-two languages or language varieties from around the world. The data was validated with standard methods that have been used for existing picture datasets. This is the first dataset to provide naming norms, and translation equivalents, for such a variety of languages; as such, it will be of particular value to psycholinguists and other interested researchers. The dataset has been made freely available.Peer reviewe

Ribonucleotide reductase subunits M1 and M2 mRNA expression levels and clinical outcome of lung adenocarcinoma patients treated with docetaxel/gemcitabine

Ribonucleotide reductase subunits M1 (RRM1) and M2 (RRM2) are involved in the metabolism of gemcitabine (2′,2′-difluorodeoxycytidine), which is used for the treatment of nonsmall cell lung cancer. The mRNA expression of RRM1 and RRM2 in tumours from lung adenocarcinoma patients treated with docetaxel/gemcitabine was assessed and the results correlated with clinical outcome. RMM1 and RMM2 mRNA levels were determined by quantitative real-time PCR in primary tumours of previously untreated patients with advanced lung adenocarcinoma who were subsequently treated with docetaxel/gemcitabine. Amplification was successful in 42 (79%) of 53 enrolled patients. Low levels of RRM2 mRNA were associated with response to treatment (P< 0.001). Patients with the lowest expression levels of RRM1 had a significantly longer time to progression (P=0.044) and overall survival (P=0.02) than patients with the highest levels. Patients with low levels of both RRM1 and RRM2 had a significantly higher response rate (60 vs 14.2%; P=0.049), time to progression (9.9 vs 2.3 months; P=0.003) and overall survival (15.4 vs 3.6; P=0.031) than patients with high levels of both RRM1 and RRM2. Ribonucleotide reductase subunit M1 and RRM2 mRNA expression in lung adenocarcinoma tumours is associated with clinical outcome to docetaxel/gemcitabine. Prospective studies are warranted to evaluate the role of these markers in tailoring chemotherapy