Violence and the postcolonial welfare state in France and Australia

What can analyses of violence in marginalised communities in France and Australia teach us about the evolving structures of the postcolonial welfare state? This collection originates from a workshop that was held in October 2007 at the University of Sydney for the purpose of exploring this question. It represents a conversation between scholars working on violence in Australian Aboriginal communities and those studying violence in immigrant communities in France, particularly in relation to rioting

The role of planning in pronunciation variation

In everyday speech, words are often produced with reduced pronunciation variants, in which segments are shorter or completely absent. We investigated whether word-final /t/ reduction in Dutch past-participles is affected by the ease of planning of the preceding word, and whether previously found morphological effects may actually be planning effects. We analyzed presence of 1369 /t/s and their durations in two speech corpora representing three speech styles. /t/ appeared more often absent and shorter if the past-participle followed a word that is highly predictable given the preceding context. Furthermore, /t/ was more reduced in irregular pastparticiples with a high frequency relative to the frequencies of the other inflected forms in the verbal paradigm, that is, in past-participles that can be selected more easily, and thus planned more quickly. Both effects were more pronounced in more spontaneous speech styles, which is as expected if the effects are driven by speech planning. These planning effects have to be incorporated in psycholinguistic models of speech production. Abstractionist models could, for instance, adapt the articulation level. Exemplar-based models have to incorporate planning as a factor influencing the choice of exemplar, or assume an articulation level that can modify the selected exemplar

Informal speech processes can be categorical in nature, even if they affect many different words

Contains fulltext : 106945.pdf (publisher's version ) (Open Access)12 p

How robust are exemplar effects in word comprehension?

This paper studies the robustness of exemplar effects in word comprehension by means of four long-term priming experiments with lexical decision tasks in Dutch. A prime and target represented the same word type and were presented with the same or different degree of reduction. In Experiment 1, participants heard only a small number of trials, a large proportion of repeated words, and stimuli produced by only one speaker. They recognized targets more quickly if these represented the same degree of reduction as their primes, which forms additional evidence for the exemplar effects reported in the literature. Similar effects were found for two speakers who differ in their pronunciations. In Experiment 2, with a smaller proportion of repeated words and more trials between prime and target, participants recognized targets preceded by primes with the same or a different degree of reduction equally quickly. Also, in Experiments 3 and 4, in which listeners were not exposed to one but two types of pronunciation variation (reduction degree and speaker voice), no exemplar effects arose. We conclude that the role of exemplars in speech comprehension during natural conversations, which typically involve several speakers and few repeated content words, may be smaller than previously assumed

Dissection of Events in the Resistance to β-Lactam Antibiotics Mediated by the Protein BlaR1 from Staphylococcus aureus

[Image: see text] A heterologous expression system was used to evaluate activation of BlaR1, a sensor/signal transducer protein of Staphylococcus aureus with a central role in resistance to β-lactam antibiotics. In the absence of other S. aureus proteins that might respond to antibiotics and participate in signal transduction events, we documented that BlaR1 fragmentation is autolytic, that it occurs in the absence of antibiotics, and that BlaR1 directly degrades BlaI, the gene repressor of the system. Furthermore, we disclosed that this proteolytic activity is metal ion-dependent and that it is not modulated directly by acylation of the sensor domain by β-lactam antibiotics

Contextual predictability influences word and morpheme duration in a morphologically complex language (Kaqchikel Mayan)

The probability is one of the many factors which influence phonetic variation. Contextual probability, which describes how predictable a linguistic unit is in some local environment, has been consistently shown to modulate the phonetic salience of words and other linguistic units in speech production (the probabilistic reduction effect). In this paper the question of whether the probabilistic reduction effect, as previously observed for majority languages like English, is also found in a language (Kaqchikel Mayan) which has relatively rich morphology is explored. Specifically, whether the contextual predictability of words and morphemes influences their phonetic duration in Kaqchikel is examined. It is found that the contextual predictability of a word has a significant effect on its duration. The effect is manifested differently for lexical words and function words. It is also found that the contextual predictability of certain prefixes in Kaqchikel affects their duration, showing that contextual predictability may drive reduction effects at multiple levels of structure. While the findings are broadly consistent with many previous studies (primarily on English), some of the details of the results are different. These differences highlight the importance of examining the probabilistic reduction effect in languages beyond the majority, Indo-European languages most commonly investigated in experimental and corpus linguistics