Analysing lexical richness in French learner language: what frequency lists and teacher judgements can tell us about basic and advanced words

We show how teacher judgements can be used to assess the quality of vocabulary used by L2 learners of French

L1 transfer in the acquisition of manner and path in Spanish by native speakers of English

In this article the authors argue that L1 transfer from English is not only important in the early stages of L2 acquisition of Spanish, but remains influential in later stages if there is not enough positive evidence for the learners to progress in their development (Lefebvre, White, & Jourdan, 2006). The findings are based on analyses of path and manner of movement in stories told by British students of Spanish (N = 68) of three different proficiency levels. Verbs that conflate motion and path, on the one hand, are mastered early, possibly because the existence of Latinate path verbs, such as enter and ascend in English, facilitate their early acquisition by British learners of Spanish. Contrary to the findings of Cadierno (2004) and Cadierno and Ruiz (2006), the encoding of manner, in particular in boundary crossing contexts, seems to pose enormous difficulties, even among students who had been abroad on a placement in a Spanish-speaking country prior to the data collection. An analysis of the frequency of manner verbs in Spanish corpora shows that one of the key reasons why students struggle with manner is that manner verbs are so infrequent in Spanish. The authors claim that scarce positive evidence in the language exposed to and little or no negative evidence are responsible for the long-lasting effect of transfer on the expression of manner

Delayed Cardiomyopathy in Dystrophin Deficient mdx Mice Relies on Intrinsic Glutathione Resource

Oxidative stress contributes to the pathogenesis of Duchenne muscular dystrophy (DMD). Although they have been a model for DMD, mdx mice exhibit slowly developing cardiomyopathy. We hypothesized that disease process was delayed owing to the development of an adaptive mechanism against oxidative stress, involving glutathione synthesis. At 15 to 20 weeks of age, mdx mice displayed a 33% increase in blood glutathione levels compared with age-matched C57BL/6 mice. In contrast, cardiac glutathione content was similar in mdx and C57BL/6 mice as a result of the balanced increased expression of glutamate cysteine ligase catalytic and regulatory subunits ensuring glutathione synthesis in the mdx mouse heart, as well as increased glutathione peroxidase-1 using glutathione. Oral administration from 10 weeks of age of the glutamate cysteine ligase inhibitor, l-buthionine(S,R)-sulfoximine (BSO, 5 mmol/L), led to a 33% and 50% drop in blood and cardiac glutathione, respectively, in 15- to 20-week-old mdx mice. Moreover, 20-week-old BSO-treated mdx mice displayed left ventricular hypertrophy associated with diastolic dysfunction, discontinuities in β-dystroglycan expression, micronecrosis and microangiopathic injuries. Examination of the glutathione status in four DMD patients showed that three displayed systemic glutathione deficiency as well. In conclusion, low glutathione resource hastens the onset of cardiomyopathy linked to a defect in dystrophin in mdx mice. This is relevant to the glutathione deficiency that DMD patients may suffer