Assessment of Farmers' Attitudes Toward Pest Control Services Provided by Birds

Sustainable, conservation-oriented agricultural practices like pest regulation by insectivorous birds can decrease agrochemical use and enhance efforts on maximizing biodiversity. Previous research has shown that attracting insect-eating bird species can improve pest control in fruit crops and have a positive impact on fruit yield. We conducted a survey among fruit farmers to analyze the determinants of the potential adoption of biological pest control (BPC) provided by insectivorous birds on their farms. Quantitative analysis showed that their willingness to implement the innovative practice, favoring farmland wildlife, is influenced by both economic and noneconomic factors. Farmers’ overall interest in attracting birds to their farms was related to a variety of factors, including their understanding of the beneficial role of insectivorous birds in biodiversity, their desire to reduce production costs, and their personal characteristics. These factors influencing farmers’ motivations for participation in biological pest control should be taken into account to clarify the barriers that prevent, and the incentives that might draw them into adoption of an eco-friendly approach for insect pest control. Keywords: environmental benefits, innovative practice favoring farmland wildlife, farmers’ perception

Language Attrition and Lived Experiences of Attrition among Greek Speakers in London:Special Issue Investigating Language Contact and New Varieties

The purpose of this study was to investigate attrition effects in a group of L1-Greek–L2-English speakers and to explore their views on attrition and their feelings about their own use of both languages. The first part (n = 32) was a psycholinguistic study measuring semantic and formal verbal fluency which was part of a broader project. The second part (n = 14) was a sociolinguistic study of semi-structured interviews aiming to gain insights into participants’ lived experiences of attrition. In verbal fluency, monolinguals outperformed bilinguals in the number of correct responses in both semantic and formal fluency. The analysis of the interview transcripts suggested that attriters experience attrition negatively, as a loss of a competence they once had, with two types of negative experiences emerging more prominently: (a) the realisation that they have difficulties with lexical retrieval and (b) stigmatising and judgemental comments by (non)-attriters. Combining quantitative and qualitative methods, this study on attriters can give us unique insights into their lived experience of attrition

Generics as default? Comparing the acquisition of universals and generics in Spanish

This paper reports an experiment that investigates interpretive distinctionsbetween two different expressions of generalization in Spanish. In particular, our aimwas to find out when the distinction between generic statements (GS) such as Tigershave stripes and universal quantified statements (UQS) such as All tigers have stripeswas acquired in Spanish-speaking children of two different age groups (4/5-year-oldsand 8/9-year-olds), and then compare these results with adults. The starting point ofthis research was the semantic distinction between GS and UQS in that the formeradmits exceptions, unlike the latter. On the other hand, cognitive psychologists haveobserved a Generic overgeneralization effect (GOG) consisting in allowing for UQSto be felicitous in the face of exceptions, thus proposing that this “error” stems frompeople misinterpreting UQS as GS and from GS being defaults (simpler, more easilylearned and processed) instead of involving quasi-universal quantification, which wasthe learned view from semantics. In the current paper we aimed to test the “Generics asDefault” (GAD) hypothesis by comparing GS and UQS in three different age ranges.Our data show that, overall, participants accept GS more often than they reject UQS.Moreover, we also confirm a hypothesized interaction between age and NP type (GSvs UQS). Further, we present several data points that are not predicted by the GAD,including an observed decline in the accuracy of GS in the older group of children aswell as in adults with respect to younger children, and that children fail at rejectinggenerics that adults reject

Genericity in Greek: An Experimental Investigation

In this paper we present results from a context-acceptability judgment task that addressed genericity in Greek following a design used by Ionin et al. (2011). The task investigates two sources of genericity: (a) sentence-level genericity with a non-Well-Defined Kind (e.g., “a green lamp”) and (b) NP-level genericity with a WDK (e.g., “a dodo bird”) followed by a kind predicate (e.g., “be extinct”). Our results largely confirm the predictions and support Dayal’s (2004) theoretical account of genericity: definite singulars were rated higher with NP-level than with sentence-level genericity, definite plurals were rated equally high with both types of genericity, and modified indefinite singulars were rated higher with sentence-level than with NP-level genericity. With respect to the WDK restriction on definite singulars, even though the difference between the two conditions was significant, definite singulars with sentence-level genericity were rated higher than expected. This casts doubts on the universality WDK restriction, which would have to be addressed in future work

Generalizing About Striking Properties: Do Glippets Love to Play With Fire?

Two experiments investigated whether 4- and 5-year-old children are sensitive to whether the content of a generalization is about a salient or noteworthy property (henceforth "striking") and whether varying the number of exceptions has any effect on children's willingness to extend a property after having heard a generalization. Moreover, they investigated how the content of a generalization interacts with exception tolerance. Adult data were collected for comparison. We used generalizations to describe novel kinds (e.g., "glippets") that had either a neutral (e.g., "play with toys") or a striking property (e.g., "play with fire") and measured how willing participants were to extend the property to a new instance of the novel kind. Experiment 1 demonstrated that both adults and children show sensitivity to strikingness in that striking properties were extended less than neutral ones, although children extended less than adults overall. The responses of both age groups were significantly different from chance. Experiment 2 introduced varying numbers of exceptions to the generalization made (minimal: 1 exception; maximal: 3 exceptions). Both adults and children extended both types of properties even in the face of exceptions, but to a lower degree than in Experiment 1. Striking properties were extended less than neutral ones, as in Experiment 1. We observed that the greater the number of exceptions, the lower the rates of extension we obtained, for both types of properties in adults, but only with striking properties in children. Children seemed to keep track of varying numbers of exceptions for striking properties, but their performance did not differ from chance. The findings underscore that 4- and 5-year-old children are sensitive to strikingness and to exception tolerance for generalizations and are developing toward an adult-like behavior with respect to the interplay between strikingness and exception tolerance when they learn about novel kinds. We discuss the implications of these results with regards to how children make generalizations

Illusory vowels in Spanish-English sequential bilinguals : Evidence that accurate L2 perception is neither necessary nor sufficient for accurate L2 production

Altres ajuts: British Academy - SG112797Spanish native speakers are known to pronounce onset /sC/ clusters in English with a prothetic vowel, as in esport for sport, due to their native language phonotactic constraints. We assessed whether accurate production of e.g. spi instead of espi, was related to accurate perceptual discrimination of this contrast in L2 speech of Spanish-English sequential bilinguals. A same-different discrimination task in stimulus pairs such as spi-espi assessed speech perception and a phonemic verbal fluency task elicited speech production. Logistic mixed model regressions revealed significant differences in accuracy between the bilinguals and the English monolinguals, although some bilinguals performed within the monolingual range. For the production task, but not for the perception task, bilinguals with more exposure to English and greater grammatical knowledge of English performed significantly more accurately than those with less exposure and lower grammatical knowledge. There was no significant correlation between production accuracy and perception accuracy. Through examining phonotactic constraints, these results expand a growing body of research into single sounds which suggests dissociations between L2 perception and production. In contrast to predictions made by L2 speech models, the findings indicate that accurate L2 perception is neither necessary nor sufficient for accurate L2 production, and instead are interpreted to indicate that the two capacities recruit different executive control mechanisms and are acquired - at least to a certain extent - independently in L2 acquisition

Herb Sector in Greece: Training Needs and Perspectives

The Greek flora is rich in native herbaceous plants and due to the Mediterranean climate, there are optimal climatic and soil conditions for their cultivation. Herbs play a very important role in the Greek rural economy and facilitate change in the national agro-food sector as it is still developing. In recent years, this sector has become an area of interest. Many farmers changed their old crops into new cultivations like herbs. This development requires investments, training programs, new studies, and projects in order to enrich the knowledge and skills of all the participants involved in the value chain. HEGO is a Black Sea Project, funded by the European Union, and one of its main goals is the modernization of enterprises associated with the cultivation, production, and promotion of diversified, sustainable, value-added herb products, as well as the enhancement of cross-border trade opportunities for local herb enterprises in participating Black Sea Basin countries (Greece, Moldova, Georgia, and Armenia). This paper explores the current situation of the herb sector in Greece regarding the cultivation, processing legislation, managerial issues, and the trade value of herb products. More specifically, its purpose is to investigate the current skills and expertise in herbs of the participants in Greece. Additionally, this paper explores the future training needs in relation to the above mention topics. Descriptive statistics, SWOT, and PEST analysis were performed. The main results of this research revealed the lack of knowledge of wildcrafting practices and trading. The importance of further training was highlighted, especially in marketing and trading skills. These findings can be used to develop training curricula and courses in order to cope with potential threats in the herb sector in Greece. Keywords: herbs, Greece, training needs, skills, knowledg

Case Study Analysis on Agri-Food Value Chain: A Guideline-Based Approach

This study aims to identify the methods and associated indicators that are commonly used in value chain analyses (VCA) and to determine the areas of interest that have been excluded. Value chain analysis generally includes four different dimensions, which are institutional/functional, economic/financial, social, and environmental. This study has two main sources of literature. The first is the guidelines and the other is case studies on value chain analysis. The case study review is limited by the time between 2000 and 2022. The results showed that the researchers mainly focused on the institutional/functional analysis of the value chain, which is the first step of the analysis. Studies were mostly concentrated on the mapping of value chains, which includes the mapping of agents, core activities, and the marketing channels and flows of products. The second important area of interest is economic/financial analysis. Value added analysis is a top research area on the economical side of the value chain (VC). Consumer behavior and financial analysis are also included in the case studies. The research on consumer behavior of the value chain analysis has focused on the preferences, attitudes, and behaviors of the consumers. Financial analysis is another area of interest which generally concentrates on the cost of intermediate inputs, total output value, net present value, internal rate of return, cash flows and cost of fixed assets, and break-even point. The social and environmental sides of the value chain have been studied with less attention. This is much more important for a sustainable food VC

Illusory vowels in Spanish-English sequential bilinguals: Evidence that accurate L2 perception is neither necessary nor sufficient for accurate L2 production

Spanish native speakers are known to pronounce onset /sC/ clusters in English with a prothetic vowel, as in esport for sport, due to their native language phonotactic constraints. We assessed whether accurate production of e.g. spi instead of espi was related to accurate perceptual discrimination of this contrast in second language (L2) speech of Spanish–English sequential bilinguals. A same–different discrimination task in stimulus pairs such as spi–espi assessed speech perception and a phonemic verbal fluency task elicited speech production. Logistic mixed model regressions revealed significant differences in accuracy between the bilinguals and the English monolinguals, although some bilinguals performed within the monolingual range. For the production task, but not for the perception task, bilinguals with more exposure to English and greater grammatical knowledge of English performed significantly more accurately than those with less exposure and lower grammatical knowledge. There was no significant correlation between production accuracy and perception accuracy. Through examining phonotactic constraints, these results expand a growing body of research into single sounds which suggests dissociations between L2 perception and production. In contrast to predictions made by L2 speech models, the findings indicate that accurate L2 perception is neither necessary nor sufficient for accurate L2 production, and instead are interpreted to indicate that the two capacities recruit different executive control mechanisms and are acquired – at least to a certain extent – independently in L2 acquisition.Peer Reviewe