The latest development of the DELAD project for sharing corpora of speech disorders

Corpora of speech of individuals with communication disorders (CSD) are invaluable resources for education and research, but they are costly and hard to build and difficult to share for various reasons. DELAD, which means 'shared' in Swedish, is a project initiated by Professors Nicole Muller and Martin Ball in 2015 that aims to address this issue by establishing a platform for researchers to share datasets of speech disorders with interested audiences. To date four workshops have been held, where selected participants, covering various expertise including researchers in clinical phonetics and linguistics, speech and language therapy, infrastructure specialists, and ethics and legal specialists, participated to discuss relevant issues in setting up such an archive. Positive and steady progress has been made since 2015, including refurbishing the DELAD website (http://delad.net/) with information and application forms for researchers to join and share their datasets and linking with the CLARIN K-Centre for Atypical Communication Expertise (https://ace.ruhosting.nl/) where CSD can be hosted and accessed through the CLARIN B-Centres, The Language Archive (https://tla.mpi.nl/tools/tla-tools/) and TalkBank (https://talkbank.org/). The latest workshop, which was funded by CLARIN (Common Language Resources and Technology Infrastructure) was held as an online event in January 2021 on topics including Data Protection Impact Assessments, reviewing changes in ethics perspectives in academia on sharing CSD, and voice conversion as a mean to pseudonomise speech. This paper reports the latest progress of DELAD and discusses the directions for further advance of the initiative, with information on how researchers can contribute to the repository.Peer reviewe

Climate, human behaviour or environment: individual-based modelling of Campylobacter seasonality and strategies to reduce disease burden

Acknowledgements: We thank colleagues within the Modelling, Evidence and Policy Research Group for useful feedback on this manuscript. Competing interests: The authors declare that they have no competing interests. Availability of data and materials: The R code used in this research is available at https://gitlab.com/rasanderson/campylobacter-microsimulation; it is platform independent, R version 3.3.0 and above. Funding: This research was funded by Medical Research Council Grant, Natural Environment Research Council, Economic and Social Research Council, Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council, and the Food Standards Agency through the Environmental and Social Ecology of Human Infectious Diseases Initiative (Sources, seasonality, transmission and control: Campylobacter and human behaviour in a changing environment (ENIGMA); Grant Reference G1100799-1). PRH, SJO’B, and IRL are funded in part by the NIHR Health Protection Research Unit in Gastrointestinal Infection, at the University of Liverpool. PRH and IRL are also funded in part by the NIHR Health Protection Research Unit in Emergency Preparedness and Response, at King’s College London. The views expressed are those of the author(s) and not necessarily those of the NHS, the NIHR, the Department of Health or Public Health England.Peer reviewedPublisher PD

Towards a phonetic and phonological typology of post-velar articulation

This dissertation develops a typology of post-velar articulation from the point of view of available inventory, phonetic and phonological studies. The database on which such typologies can draw is expanded by the examination of data from the Interior Salish languages of the Pacific Northwest. The post-velar inventory of Interior Salish is examined acoustically in order to place it within the phonetic typology of post-velars as understood from work on Semitic and Caucasian. Pharyngeals from six Interior Salish languages are examined to determine the range of variation. The basic finding of this acoustic work is that the Interior Salish post-velars are commensurate with what is known about post-velars based on Semitic data and articulatory modelling. Interior Salish phonological data support the extension of articulator-based feature geometry to a fourth node, here termed Tongue Root. It is shown that the fourth node is required to class Interior Salish faucals and accommodate their participation in harmony processes. Furthermore, constraints on the phonology of the fourth node in Interior Salish suggest that we are dealing with an Advanced Tongue Root phenomenon such as found in some African vowel harmonies. This is an encouraging result in the sense that it confirms the existence of Tongue Root consonants and does not confine the fourth node to vowels. The analysis of Interior Salish laryngeals without the fourth node that characterizes their Semitic counterparts corroborates our understanding of laryngeals as lacking Place specifications in the default case. Furthermore, it is argued that the descriptivist and Dependency Phonology view of /2, h/ as minimal stop and fricative is phonologically appropriate. Evidence from epenthesis, laryngeal transparency and debuccalization support the analysis of ii, h/ as (+consonantal, -sonorant, +/-continuant]. Debuccalization and epenthesis processes also suggest that h/ do not necessarily bear Laryngeal Node features. It is argued that unless phonemic phonation features are present in an inventory, there is no need for /2, h/ to bear [constricted glottis, spread glottis]. It is noted that the phonology of post-velars in Interior Salish contrasts with their patterning in Semitic (McCarthy 1991) and Nisgha (Shaw 1991b), specifically with respect to the representation of /2, h/. The presence of a fourth node in Interior Salish does not require that laryngeals be dependents of it. The same finding is reported by McCarthy (1991) for Semitic. Given that there is no acoustic evidence at present to suggest that we are dealing with distinct phonetic entities, it appears that there presentation of laryngeals in languages with a fourth node must be stipulated.Arts, Faculty ofLinguistics, Department ofGraduat

Common variation near CDKN1A, POLD3 and SHROOM2 influences colorectal cancer risk

We performed a meta-analysis of five genome-wide association studies to identify common variants influencing colorectal cancer (CRC) risk comprising 8,682 cases and 9,649 controls. Replication analysis was performed in case-control sets totaling 21,096 cases and 19,555 controls. We identified three new CRC risk loci at 6p21 (rs1321311, near CDKN1A; P = 1.14 × 10 -10), 11q13.4 (rs3824999, intronic to POLD3; P = 3.65 × 10 -10) and Xp22.2 (rs5934683, near SHROOM2; P = 7.30 × 10 -10) This brings the number of independent loci associated with CRC risk to 20 and provides further insight into the genetic architecture of inherited susceptibility to CRC.</p