Per aprendre anglès, quan abans millor? L'aprenentatge de l'anglès com a llengua estrangera. When Learning English, is it a case of 'The earlier the better?' Learning English as a foreign Language

En contra del que molts pares i mestres pensen, i en contra del que s'ha trobat en contextos d'adquisició natural de segones llengües i d'immersió, començar al més aviat possible l'aprenentatge d'idiomes, sobretot pel que fa a les tasques cognitivament més exigents, com l'escriptura, no sembla l'opció més eficaç. Els resultats del Grup de Recerca en Adquisició de Llengües (GRAL) estudià aprenents d'anglès que començaren als vuit i onze anys i trobaren, sistemàticament, que a llarg termini, després de les mateixes hores d'instrucció, eren els més grans, que havien començat als onze anys, els que obtenien millors resultats en totes les proves orals i escrites d'anglès excepte en alguna de prova de reconeixement fonètic. La maduresa cognitiva dels alumnes més grans i els diferents mecanismes d¿aprenentatge implícit i explícit entre els nens més petits i els adults ajuden a explicar per què només començar abans l'aprenentatge d'idiomes no sembla suficient per obtenir millors resultats.

Inverted ductal papilloma of the oral cavity secondary to lower lip trauma. A case report and literature review

Inverted ductal papilloma of the oral cavity is an infrequent benign neoplasm of papillary appearance that originates in the secretory duct of a salivary gland. The etiology is unknown, though some authors have related it to human papillomavirus (HPV) infection. We present the case of a 40-year-old woman with a tumor of the lower lip mucosa. Histopathological study of the lesion diagnosed inverted ductal papilloma of the oral cavity. Human papillomavirus DNA detection and typing based on tumor lesion DNA amplification and posterior hybridization, revealed no presence of viral DNA. The antecedents of trauma reported by the patient could have played an important role in the development of this tumor

Distribution of events of positive selection and population differentiation in a metabolic pathway: the case of asparagine N-glycosylation

Background: Asparagine N-Glycosylation is one of the most important forms of protein post-translational modification in eukaryotes. This metabolic pathway can be subdivided into two parts: an upstream sub-pathway required for achieving proper folding for most of the proteins synthesized in the secretory pathway, and a downstream sub-pathway required to give variability to trans-membrane proteins, and involved in adaptation to the environment andinnate immunity. Here we analyze the nucleotide variability of the genes of this pathway in human populations, identifying which genes show greater population differentiation and which genes show signatures of recent positive selection. We also compare how these signals are distributed between the upstream and the downstream parts of the pathway, with the aim of exploring how forces of population differentiation and positive selection vary among genes involved in the same metabolic pathway but subject to different functional constraints. Results:Our results show that genes in the downstream part of the pathway are more likely to show a signature of population differentiation, while events of positive selection are equally distributed among the two parts of the pathway. Moreover, events of positive selection arefrequent on genes that are known to be at bifurcation points, and that are identified as beingin key position by a network-level analysis such as MGAT3 and GCS1.Conclusions: These findings indicate that the upstream part of the Asparagine N-Glycosylation pathway has lower diversity among populations, while the downstream part is freer to tolerate diversity among populations. Moreover, the distribution of signatures of population differentiation and positive selection can change between parts of a pathway, especially between parts that are exposed to different functional constraints. Our results support the hypothesis that genes involved in constitutive processes can be expected to show lower population differentiation, while genes involved in traits related to the environment should show higher variability. Taken together, this work broadens our knowledge on how events of population differentiation and of positive selection are distributed among different parts of a metabolic pathway.

Federalism and democracy. The case of minority nations: a federalist deficit

In this chapter, after pointing out the different logics that lie behind the familiar ideas of democracy and federalism, I have dealt with the case of plurinational federal democracies. Having put forward a double criterion of an empirical nature with which to differentiate between the existence of minority nations within plurinational democracies (section 2), I suggest three theoretical criteria for the political accommodation of these democracies. In the following section, I show the agonistic nature of the normative discussion of the political accommodation of this kind of democracies, which bring monist and pluralist versions of the demos of the polity into conflict (section 3.1), as well as a number of conclusions which are the result of a comparative study of 19 federal and regional democracies using four analytical axes: the uninational/plurinational axis; the unitarianism-federalism axis; the centralisation-decentralisation axis; and the symmetry-asymmetry axis (section 3.2). This analysis reveals shortcomings in the constitutional recognition of national pluralism in federal and regional cases with a large number of federated units/regions with political autonomy; a lower degree of constitutional federalism and a greater asymmetry in the federated entities or regions of plurinational democracies. It also reveals difficulties to establish clear formulas in these democracies in order to encourage a “federalism of trust” based on the participation and protection of national minorities in the shared government of plurinational federations/regional states. Actually, there is a federal deficit in this kind polities according to normative liberal-democratic patterns and to what comparative analysis show. Finally, this chapter advocates the need for a greater normative and institutional refinement in plurinational federal democracies. In order to achieve this, it is necessary to introduce a deeper form of “ethical” pluralism -which displays normative agonistic trends, as well as a more “confederal/asymmetrical” perspective, congruent with the national pluralism of these kind of polities.

Late bloomer or language impaired? Screening the speech of a Spanish-English bilingual toddler for early signs of language impairment

This case study presents corpus data gathered from a Spanish-English bilingual child with expressive language delay. Longitudinal data on the child’s linguistic development was collected from the onset of productive speech at age 1;1 until age 4 over the course of 28 video-taped sessions with the child’s principal caregivers. A literature review focused on the relationship between language delay and persisting disorders—including a discussion of the frequent difficulty in distinguishing between the two at early stages of bilingual development—is followed by an analysis of the child’s productive development in 2 distinct phases. An attempt is made to assess the child’s speech at age 4 for preliminary signs of SLI and to consider techniques for identifying ‘at risk’ bilingual children (that is, those with productive language delay, poor oral fluency, and family history of language problems) based on samples of recorded and transcribed speech.

Assessing the Political Viability of Labour Market Reform: The Case of Employment Protection

We analyze the political support for employment protection legislation. Unlike my previous work on the same topic, this paper pays a lot of attention to the role of obsolescence in the growth process. In voting in favour of employment protection, incumbent employees trade off lower living standards (because employment protection maintains workers in less productive activities) against longer job duration. The support for employment protection will then depend on the value of the latter relative to the cost of the former. We highlight two key deeterminants of this trade-off: first, the workers' bargaining power, second, the economy's growth rate-more precisely its rate of creative destruction.

A polynomial algorithm for special case of the one-machine scheduling problem with time-lags

The standard one-machine scheduling problem consists in schedulinga set of jobs in one machine which can handle only one job at atime, minimizing the maximum lateness. Each job is available forprocessing at its release date, requires a known processing timeand after finishing the processing, it is delivery after a certaintime. There also can exists precedence constraints between pairsof jobs, requiring that the first jobs must be completed beforethe second job can start. An extension of this problem consistsin assigning a time interval between the processing of the jobsassociated with the precedence constrains, known by finish-starttime-lags. In presence of this constraints, the problem is NP-hardeven if preemption is allowed. In this work, we consider a specialcase of the one-machine preemption scheduling problem with time-lags, where the time-lags have a chain form, and propose apolynomial algorithm to solve it. The algorithm consist in apolynomial number of calls of the preemption version of the LongestTail Heuristic. One of the applicability of the method is to obtainlower bounds for NP-hard one-machine and job-shop schedulingproblems. We present some computational results of thisapplication, followed by some conclusions.

Institutional constraints on organizations: The case of Spanish car dealerships

We study the effect of organizational choice and institutions on the performance ofSpanish car dealerships. Using outlet-level data from 1994, we find that verticallyintegrateddealerships showed substantially lower labor productivity, higher labor costs andlower profitability than franchised ones. Despite these gaps in performance, no verticallyintegratedoutlet was separated until 1994, yet the few outlets that were eventuallyseparated systematically improved their performance. We argue that the conversion ofintegrated outlets into franchised ones involved significant transaction costs, due to aninstitutional environment favoring permanent, highly-unionized employment relations. Inline with this argument, we find that the observed separations occurred in distributionnetworks that underwent marked reductions in worker unionization rates, following thelegalization of temporary labor contracts.

The case for a new accounting research agenda in Spain

In Spain both accounting practice and accounting research have been strongly influenced by accounting practices developed in the Englishspeaking world. This paper:1) Summarizes a seminal English paper, the 'Corporate Report', that identified the potential for accounting reports to serve a wide range of users.2) Identifies the ways in which English language accounting conceptual frameworks have paid lip service to a range of user needs, but in practice have excluded users other than investors and creditors.3) Argues that for Spain the ideas put forward in the Corporate Report have a particular relevance, and might usefully form the basis for a new research agenda.

Contractual allocation of decision rights and incentives: The case of automobile distribution

We analyze empirically the allocation of rights and monetary incentives in automobile franchise contracts. These contracts substantially restrict the decision rights of dealers and grant manufacturers extensive contractual completion and enforcement powers, converting the manufacturers, de facto, in a sort of quasi-judiciary instance. Variation in the allocation of decision rights andincentive intensity is explained by the incidence of moral hazard in the relation. In particular, when the cost of dealer moral hazard is higher and the risk of manufactureropportunism is lower, manufacturers enjoy more discretion in determining the performance required from their dealers and in using mechanisms such as monitoring, termination and monetary incentives to ensure such performance is provided. We also explore the existence of interdependencies between the different elements of the system. and find some complementarities between completion and termination rights, and between monitoring rights and the intensity of incentives.

Assesing the political viability of labour market reform: The case of employment protection

We analyze the political support for employment protection legislation.Unlike my previous work on the same topic, this paper pays a lot ofattention to the role of obsolescence in the growth process.In voting in favour of employment protection, incumbent employeestrade off lower living standards (because employment protectionmaintains workers in less productive activities) against longer jobduration. The support for employment protection will then depend onthe value of the latter relative to the cost of the former. Wehighlight two key deeterminants of this trade-off: first, the workers'bargaining power, second, the economy's growth rate-more preciselyits rate of creative destruction.

Optimization of multiclass queueing networks with changeover times via the achievable region method: Part II, the multi-station case

We address the problem of scheduling a multi-station multiclassqueueing network (MQNET) with server changeover times to minimizesteady-state mean job holding costs. We present new lower boundson the best achievable cost that emerge as the values ofmathematical programming problems (linear, semidefinite, andconvex) over relaxed formulations of the system's achievableperformance region. The constraints on achievable performancedefining these formulations are obtained by formulatingsystem's equilibrium relations. Our contributions include: (1) aflow conservation interpretation and closed formulae for theconstraints previously derived by the potential function method;(2) new work decomposition laws for MQNETs; (3) new constraints(linear, convex, and semidefinite) on the performance region offirst and second moments of queue lengths for MQNETs; (4) a fastbound for a MQNET with N customer classes computed in N steps; (5)two heuristic scheduling policies: a priority-index policy, anda policy extracted from the solution of a linear programmingrelaxation.

Returns to Foreign Language Skills in a Developing Country: The Case of Turkey

Foreign language skills represent a form of human capital that can be rewarded in the labor market. Drawing on data from the Adult Education Survey of 2007, this is the first study estimating returns to foreign language skills in Turkey. We contribute to the literature on the economic value of language knowledge, with a special focus on a country characterized by fast economic and social development. Although English is the most widely spoken foreign language in Turkey, we initially consider the economic value of different foreign languages among the employed males aged 25 to 65. We find positive and significant returns to proficiency in English and Russian, which increase with the level of competence. Knowledge of French and German also appears to be positively rewarded in the Turkish labor market, although their economic value seems mostly linked to an increased likelihood to hold specific occupations rather than increased earnings within occupations. Focusing on English, we also explore the heterogeneity in returns to different levels of proficiency by frequency of English use at work, birth-cohort, education, occupation and rural/urban location. The results are also robust to the endogenous specification of English language skills.

The importance of intraespeciphic variation in the taxonomy of marine nematodes: The case of Terschellingia longispiculata Wieser & Hopper 1967 (Nematoda, Linhomoeidae)

In the presentstudy, the priority of taxonomic characters of cephalic region of Terschellingialongispiculata over those of the tail and reproductive system is discussed.Four morphological varieties of the species are established based on variationsof the tail and reproductive system. The problem of considering only changes inthe posterior region for determination of some species is posed. From this,studies on important populations must be done for the establishment of newspecies based on one of these characters, but taken together with characters inother regions such as the cephalic.

Evolutionary dynamics of molecular markers during local adaptation: a case study in Drosophila subobscura

Background: Natural selection and genetic drift are major forces responsible for temporal genetic changes in populations. Furthermore, these evolutionary forces may interact with each other. Here we study the impact of an ongoing adaptive process at the molecular genetic level by analyzing the temporal genetic changes throughout 40 generations of adaptation to a common laboratory environment. Specifically, genetic variability, population differentiation and demographic structure were compared in two replicated groups of Drosophila subobscura populations recently sampled from different wild sources. Results: We found evidence for a decline in genetic variability through time, along with an increase in genetic differentiation between all populations studied. The observed decline in genetic variability was higher during the first 14 generations of laboratory adaptation. The two groups of replicated populations showed overall similarity in variability patterns. Our results also revealed changing demographic structure of the populations during laboratory evolution, with lower effective population sizes in the early phase of the adaptive process. One of the ten microsatellites analyzed showed a clearly distinct temporal pattern of allele frequency change, suggesting the occurrence of positive selection affecting the region around that particular locus. Conclusion: Genetic drift was responsible for most of the divergence and loss of variability between and within replicates, with most changes occurring during the first generations of laboratory adaptation. We also found evidence suggesting a selective sweep, despite the low number of molecular markers analyzed. Overall, there was a similarity of evolutionary dynamics at the molecular level in our laboratory populations, despite distinct genetic backgrounds and some differences in phenotypic evolution.