One size doesn't fit all: Research methodologies in a language variation study of Sudanese teens

The research reported here draws on a study of five teenagers from a Dinka-speaking community of Sudanese settling in Australia. A range of factors including language proficiency, social network structure and language attitudes are examined as possible causes for the variability of language use. The results and discussion illustrate how the use of a triangular research approach captured the complexity of the participants' language situation and was critical to developing a full understanding of the interplay of factors influencing the teens' language maintenance and shift in a way that no single method could. Further, it shows that employment of different methodologies allowed for flexibility in data collection to ensure the fullest response from participants. Overall, this research suggests that for studies of non-standard communities, variability in research methods may prove more of a strength that the use of standardised instruments and approaches

Does treatment of acne with Retin A and tetracycline cause adverse effects?

Self-Adverse reactions to long-term tetracycline therapy are rare, and most will occur within 2 months of initiating therapy (strength of recommendation [SOR]: B, systematic review of ecological studies). Rare but serious drug reactions include a severe cutaneous reaction, hypersensitivity syndrome reaction, serum sickness-like reaction, and isolated single-organ dysfunction (SOR: B, systematic review). Duration of antibiotic treatment is strongly associated with increased bacterial resistance (SOR: B, systematic review and 1 outcomes study), but antibiotics for acne do not appear to interfere with oral contraceptive efficacy (SOR: B, case-control study and supporting expert opinion). Laboratory monitoring is not indicated in otherwise healthy patients (SOR: B, consistent cohort studies). No reports have been published regarding long-term topical tretinoin (Retin A) therapy. Short-term follow-up reports note no systemic effects (SOR: C, expert opinion), no teratogenicity (SOR: B, single case control study), and negligible systemic absorption (SOR: B, outcome studies).Thus, long-term topical tretinoin is presumed to be safe (SOR: C, expert opinion and extrapolation of pharmacologic data)

Putting practice into words: The state of data and methods transparency in grammatical descriptions

Language documentation and description are closely related practices, often performed as part of the same fieldwork project on an un(der)-studied language. Research trends in recent decades have seen a great volume of publishing in regards to the methods of language documentation, however, it is not clear that linguists' awareness of the importance of robust data-collection methods is translating into transparency about those methods or data citation in resultant publications. We analyze 50 dissertations and 50 grammars from a ten-year span (2003-2012) to assess the current state of the field. Publications are critiqued on the basis of transparency of data collection methods, analysis and storage, as well as citation of primary data. While we found examples of transparent reporting in these areas, much of the surveyed research does not include key information about methodology or data. We acknowledge that descriptive linguists often practice good methodology in data collection, but as a field we need to build a better culture with regard to making this clear in research writing. Thus we conclude with suggested benchmarks for the kind of information we believe is vital for creating a rich and useful research methodology in both long and short format descriptive research writing.National Foreign Language Resource Cente

Child language documentation: The sketch acquisition project

This paper reports on an on-going project designed to collect comparable corpus data on child language and child-directed language in under-researched languages. Despite a long history of cross-linguistic research, there is a severe empirical bias within language acquisition research: Data is available for less than 2% of the world's languages, heavily skewed towards the larger and better-described languages. As a result, theories of language development tend to be grounded in a non-representative sample, and we know little about the acquisition of typologically-diverse languages from different families, regions, or sociocultural contexts. It is very likely that the reasons are to be found in the forbidding methodological challenges of constructing child language corpora under fieldwork conditions with their strict requirements on participant selection, sampling intervals, and amounts of data. There is thus an urgent need for proposals that facilitate and encourage language acquisition research across a wide variety of languages. Adopting a language documentation perspective, we illustrate an approach that combines the construction of manageable corpora of natural interaction with and between children with a sketch description of the corpus data – resulting in a set of comparable corpora and comparable sketches that form the basis for cross-linguistic comparisons

Gesture categorisation and understanding speaker attention to gesture

The field of gesture classification has b Abstract een an area of intense scholarship in recent decades. This article provides a brief overview of the area in seeking to understand how this theoretical framework relates to the way speakers attend to gestural information. 48 native English speakers participated in a web-based survey centred on a short narrative. The gestures focused on in the film narrative were based around McNeill’s common gesture typology. Half of the participants watched the video with sound and the other half without to help ascertain whether the presence of speech affects how people attend to gestural information. Participants were asked to count the total number of gestures and list what they thought the five “best” examples of a gesture were. While there was no significant difference between the number of gestures counted by each group, the categories of gesture which were attended to varied between the two groups. Those with sound were more likely to include iconic gestures while those without were more likely to attend to beat gestures. This indicates that the presence or absence of sound has no affect on how many gestures participants observe, but it does affect what gestural information they pay more attention to