Where is spoken interaction in LSP?

Peer reviewe

ELF and Translation as Language Contact

This paper explores multilingual language contact in seemingly unrelated settings: translation and English as a lingua franca, also touching on learner language. By delving into similar processes in these settings at three levels – the macro level of a language as a whole, the intermediate level of social interaction, and the micro level of cognition – it argues that translation and ELF are sites of multilingual contact resulting in a degree of hybridization in the languages involved, and thereby important drivers of language change. It is suggested that macro-level similarities in translation and ELF, such as the relative overrepresentation of high-frequency items and structures and untypical multi-word combinations ensue from interactional and cognitive processes where one fundamental mechanism is priming. Translations engage in cross-linguistic textual priming, while users of ELF interact with other ‘similects’ in complex second-order language contact. Both can contribute crucially to understanding processes of change and contact-induced variation.Peer reviewe

Syntactic complexity in English as a lingua franca academic writing

This study complements previous research on linguistic features of English as a lingua franca (ELF) from a syntactic complexity perspective. Specifically, the present study seeks to find out how ELF users express meaning relations in research articles using different syntactic structures. The same syntactic phenomena are also analyzed in comparable texts written in American English (AmE) to see in which way ELF writing is shaping research writing in English. Our findings show that the values of nine indices from four syntactic complexity dimensions in ELF research articles are significantly different from those in comparable AmE research articles. ELF authors use longer sentences to improve communication efficiency, and more coordinate phrases and complex nominals to enhance clarity and to increase explicitness. In addition, considering phrasal complexity, ELF research articles show greater reliance on nominal phrases in comparison to AmE articles. In other words, the convention of a nominal style is valued in ELF academic written discourse. These features of syntactic complexity illustrate writers’ handling of two competing goals, explicitness and conciseness, in the ELF academic writing. This study is significant in that it offers insights to the description of the emerging use of ELF in academic written discourse.Peer reviewe

Suomalaista tieteen diskurssia

Kirja-arvioLuukka, Minna-Riitta: Puhuttua ja kirjoitettua tiedettä. Funktionaalinen ja yhteisöllinen näkökulma tieteen kielen interpersonaalisiin piirteisii

Päätoimittajilta

Kuvaruudullasi tai käsissäsi on AASF:n vuoden 2023 toinen numero. Sen artikkelit ovat jälleen suomeksi, ruotsiksi tai englanniksi kirjoitettuja ja edustavat laajaa tieteenalojen valikoimaa

Päätoimittajilta

AASF:n toinen numero tarjoaa mielenkiintoisen kokoelman kirjoituksia eri tieteenaloilta. Monessa artikkelissa tarkastellaan tieteellisen tiedon kehitystä eri aikaskaaloilla ja sitä, miten tutkimustiedon ja yhteiskunnan kehityslinjat ovat kietoutuneet toisiinsa

Work for Food – A Solution to Restricting Food Intake in Group Housed Rats?

Rodents spend a great proportion of their time searching for food. The foraging drive in rats is so strong  that the animals readily work for food even when food is freely available. Commonly used ad libitum feeding  is associated with a reduced life span, increased incidence of tumours and risk of liver and kidney diseases.  It is also considered to be the most poorly controlled variable in rodent bioassays. The aim of this  study was to assess whether rats will gnaw wood in order to obtain food hidden in wooden walls, whether  this activity has a beneficial effect on controlling weight gain, and whether a typical diurnal activity rhythm  is maintained. A total of 18 BN/RijHsd and 18 F344/NHsd male rats were housed in either open or individually  ventilated cages (IVC), three rats in each cage. 10 of 36 were fitted with a telemetric transponder.  Four groups were used: two groups (diet board and plain board) with a maze made of two crossed aspen  boards, the third having a rectangular aspen tube. One maze was of plainboard, but the other included  drilled holes snugly loaded with food pellets, the “diet board”, such that the rats had to gnaw wood to reach  the food. The other two groups – and the controls – were fed ad libitum. The study used a crossover design  and the added item was changed every two weeks. Rats, added items, and amount of food left at the end of  the two week period were weighed. The statistical assessment showed that in terms of weight gain there  was a significant interaction both in IVC- (p = 0.005) and in open cages (p < 0.001) between the strains  and the group. In the F344 rats the diet board was more effective in controlling weight, but when combining  the strains, all comparisons with diet board were significant (p < 0.05). Use of strain and added item  as main effects, and age as covariate, showed that in the IVC-system there was a significant (p < 0.001)  interaction between the strain and the group, this effect being rather clear in the F344 rats in terms of  amount of food disappearing. In the open cage system, both strain and group were significant (p < 0.001)  factors; all three comparisons with diet board were significant (p < 0.001) in the amount of food disappearing.  In conclusion, the work-for-food approach appears to be a promising way of avoiding obesity  without causing untoward effects on diurnal activity in rats. Hence, the approach may have considerable  refinement and reduction potential.

Perceptual chunking of spontaneous speech : Validating a new method with non-native listeners

Human perception relies on chunking up an incoming information stream into smaller units to make sense of it. Evidence of chunking has been found across different domains, including visual events, music, and dance movement. It is largely uncontested that language processing must also proceed in smaller chunks of some kind. What these online chunks consist in is much less understood. In this paper, we propose that cognitively relevant chunks can be identified by crowdsourcing listener perceptions of chunk boundaries in real-time speech, even if the listeners are non-native speakers of the language. We present a paradigm in which experiment participants simultaneously listen to short extracts of authentic speech and mark chunk boundaries using a custom-built tablet application. We then test the internal validity of the method by measuring the extent to which fluent L2 listeners agree on chunk boundaries. To do this, we use three datasets collected within the paradigm and a suite of different statistical methods. The external validity of the method is studied in a separate paper and is briefly discussed at the end.Peer reviewe

Refinement and Reduction Value of Aspen Furniture and Restricted Feeding of Rats in Conventional Cages

This study evaluated the impact of aspen furniture on cardiovascular parameters, locomotor activity (LA) and faecal welfare indicators in rats. A total of 12 BN and 12 F344 male rats were group housed (n=3) in conventional cages. In this crossover study, responses of all rats to the following cage furniture items were investigated: two types of simple maze, a rectangular tube and a control with no cage furniture. In one of the two maze groups, the rats had to gnaw through wood in order to obtain food. The mean values of the LA in all groups and differences in mean arterial pressure (MAP) and heart rate of the rats housed in the various furniture item groups were compared to the values of the rats housed in control cages with no furniture, on days two, six, ten and 14 in each period (both light and dark phases). The F344 rats were generally more active than the BN rats during the dark phase, but not during the light phase. Based on the MAP results, the tube appeared to be a poor choice for F344 rats, while for BN rats all furniture items seemed beneficial, with both board types apparently superior to the tube. In general, F344 rats had higher faecal corticosterone levels than BN rats with the reverse being true for secretory IgA values. In conclusion, LA and cardiovascular parameters seemed appropriate ways to evaluate the impact of cage furniture on physiological parameters, and covered structures such as tubes do not seem to provide any enrichment value in these two rat strains

Event-related responses reflect chunk boundaries in natural speech

Chunking language has been proposed to be vital for comprehension enabling the extraction of meaning from a continuous stream of speech. However, neurocognitive mechanisms of chunking are poorly understood. The present study investigated neural correlates of chunk boundaries intuitively identified by listeners in natural speech drawn from linguistic corpora using magneto-and electroencephalography (MEEG). In a behavioral experiment, subjects marked chunk boundaries in the excerpts intuitively, which revealed highly consistent chunk boundary markings across the subjects. We next recorded brain activity to investigate whether chunk boundaries with high and medium agreement rates elicit distinct evoked responses compared to non-boundaries. Pauses placed at chunk boundaries elicited a closure positive shift with the sources over bilateral auditory cortices. In contrast, pauses placed within a chunk were perceived as interruptions and elicited a biphasic emitted potential with sources located in the bilateral primary and non-primary auditory areas with right-hemispheric dominance, and in the right inferior frontal cortex. Furthermore, pauses placed at stronger boundaries elicited earlier and more prominent activation over the left hemisphere suggesting that brain responses to chunk boundaries of natural speech can be modulated by the relative strength of different linguistic cues, such as syntactic structure and prosody.Peer reviewe