Language and syntactic impairment following stroke in late bilingual aphasics.

PURPOSE: Bilingual aphasia generally affects both languages. However, the age of acquisition of the second language (L2) seems to play a role in the anatomo-functional correlation of the syntactical/grammatical processes, thus potentially influencing the L2 syntactic impairment following a stroke. The present study aims to analyze the influence of late age of acquisition of the L2 on syntactic impairment in bilingual aphasic patients. METHODS: Twelve late bilingual participants (speaking French as L2 and either English, German, Italian or Spanish as L1) with stroke-induced aphasia participated in the study. The MAST or BAT aphasia batteries were used to evaluate overall aphasia score. An auditory syntactic judgement task was developed and used to test participants syntactic performance. RESULTS: The overall aphasia scores did not differ between L1 and L2. In a multiple case analysis, only one patient had lower scores in L2. However, four patients presented significantly lower performances in syntactic processing in the late L2 than in their native language (L1). In these four patients the infarct was localized, either exclusively or at least partially, in the pre-rolandic region. CONCLUSION: This pilot study suggests that, in late bilingual aphasics, syntactic judgment abilities may be more severely impaired in L2, and that this syntactic deficit is most likely to occur following anterior lesions.

Measurement of parent satisfaction in french-speaking PICUs: a need for translation and cultural adaptation of the empathic questionnaire

Background and aims: Family-centred care is an expected standard in PICU and parent reported outcomes are rarely measured. The Dutch validated EMPATHIC questionnaire provides accurate measures of parental perceptions of family-centred care in PICU. A French version would provide an important resource for quality control and benchmarking with other PICUs. The study aimed to translate and to assess the French cultural adaptation of the EMPATHIC questionnaire. Methods: In September 2012, following approval from the developer, translation and cultural adaptation were performed using a structured method (Wild et al. 2005). This included forward-backward translation and reconciliation by an official translator, harmonization assessed by the research team, and cognitive debriefing with the target users' population. In this last step, a convenience sample of parents with PICU experience assessed the comprehensibility and cultural relevance of the 65-item French EMPATHIC questionnaire. The PICUs in Lausanne, Switzerland and Lille, France participated. Results: Seventeen parents, including 13 French native and 4 French as second language speakers, tested the cognitive equivalence and cultural relevance of the French EMPATHIC questionnaire. The mean agreement for comprehensibility of all 65 items reached 90.2%. Three items fell below the cut-off 80% agreement and were revised for inclusion in the final French version. Conclusions: The translation and the cultural adaptation permitted to highlight a few cultural differences that did not interfere with the main construct of the EMPATHIC questionnaire. Reliability and validity testing with a new sample of parents is needed to strengthen the psychometric properties of the French EMPATHIC questionnaire.

Conceptualisation et emploi du passé composé et de l'imparfait en français langue étrangère (L3) au Sri Lanka : l'impact du singhalais langue maternelle (L1) et de l'anglais langue seconde (L2)

Résumé: Notre étude chevauche deux domaines de recherche quasi indissociables : ceux de la linguistique et de la didactique des langues. Comme l'indique le sujet, elle examine la conceptualisation et l'emploi de deux notions aspecto-temporelles du français (le passé composé et l'imparfait), sous l'impact des connaissances grammaticales déjà acquises sur deux autres langues : le singhalais et l'anglais. Notre recherche relève des domaines de la psycholinguistique, de la linguistique acquisitionnelle et de la linguistique comparative. Toutefois, dans le cadre de cette étude, nous examinons ces notions grammaticales françaises et leurs équivalents présumés dans les deux autres langues comme étant des concepts relevant des langues à statuts sociaux spécifiques [à savoir, langue maternelle (L1), langue seconde (L2) et langue étrangère (L3)], dans un contexte particulier d'enseignement/apprentissage et d'acquisition de langue [à savoir, le contexte d'enseignement/apprentissage et d'acquisition du français langue étrangère (FLE) au Sri Lanka]. En ce sens, notre étude est également liée aux domaines de la sociolinguistique et de la didactique des langues, notamment, étrangères. Ce qui pourrait probablement distinguer cette recherche des autres, c'est qu'elle aborde certaines questions linguistiques et didactiques peu étudiées jusqu'ici. Entre autres, l'influence de deux langues sur l'enseignement/apprentissage d'une L3, l'enseignement/apprentissage des langues dans des contextes exolingues et le rôle des transferts dans la conceptualisation des notions grammaticales. Pourtant, lorsque nous avons choisi le contexte d'apprentissage du FLE au Sri Lanka comme terrain de recherche, nous avons également visé d'autres objectifs : examiner les systèmes verbaux de trois langues dont l'imbrication n'a pas encore été objet d'étude ; examiner le système verbal aspecto-temporel peu explicité du singhalais à la lumière des descriptions linguistiques occidentales ; vérifier certains préjugés concernant les liens de proximité et de distance entre les trois langues choisies et étudier les causes de ces préjugés. Notre corpus provient de plusieurs classes de FLE au Sri Lanka. Le public observé était constitué d'adolescents ou d'adultes bilingues ayant le singhalais en L1 et l'anglais en L2. Les cours choisis se distinguaient les uns des autres par plusieurs critères, mais travaillaient tous sur les notions du passé composé et de l'imparfait. A la conclusion de notre étude, nous avons constaté qu'un nombre important de nos hypothèses initiales se sont avérées véridiques. A titre d'exemples, les transferts entre les langues premières et la langue cible sont récurrents et non négligeables chez l'écrasante majorité des apprenants exolingues observés, et parfois, même chez leurs enseignants; si ces apprenants recourent à ces langues pour étayer leur apprentissage, ni leurs enseignants ni leurs manuels provenant de l'étranger ne les guident dans ce travail; les transferts ayant l'anglais pour origine l'emportent considérablement sur ceux provenant du singhalais. De même, suite à l'analyse contrastive des trois systèmes verbaux aspecto-temporels et à l'analyse du corpus, nous avons également eu un résultat imprévu : contrairement à une représentation répandue chez les apprenants singhalais, il existe des points convergents entre leur L1 et le français ; du moins, au niveau de l'emploi de certains temps du passé. Un fait dont on était jusqu'ici ignorants mais dont on peut sûrement profiter dans les cours de FLE au Sri Lanka. Suite à ces observations et à la fin de notre thèse, nous avons fait quelques recommandations didactiques afin d'améliorer les conditions d'enseignement/apprentissage des langues étrangères, au Sri Lanka et ailleurs. Abstract: Our research is related to the fields of both linguistics and didactics, two research areas which are almost inseparable. As the title shows, the thesis examines the issue of conceptualizing and using of two grammatical (aspectual and temporal) concepts of the French language (le passé composé and l'imparfait), under the influence of previously acquired grammatical knowledge of two other languages: Sinhalese and English. Thus, our research is linked to the domains of psycholinguistics, acquisitional linguistics and comparative linguistics. However, within the framework of this study, we will consider the above-mentioned two French grammatical concepts and their presumed equivalents in the other two languages as concepts belonging to three languages with specific social status [i.e. first language (L1), second language (L2) and foreign language (L3)], taught/learnt/acquired in a particular language teaching/learning context [the context of teaching/learning of French as a foreign language (FFL) in Sri Lanka]. In that sense, our study is also associated with the fields of sociolinguistics and language teaching, especially foreign language teaching. What could probably make this study outstanding is that it studies certain linguistic and didactic issues which have not yet been studied. For example, it examines, among other issues, the following: the influence of two languages (i.e. mother tongue -L1 & second language -L2) on the teaching/learning process of a third language (i.e. foreign language- L3); foreign language teaching and learning in an exolingual context (where the target language is not spoken outside the classroom); the role of language transfers in the process of grammatical notion conceptualization. However, in selecting the FFL teaching/learning context in Sri Lanka as our field of research, we had further objectives in mind : i.e. 1) studying the verb systems of three languages whose combination has never been studied before ; 2) studying the aspectual-temporal formation of the Sinhalese verb system (which is hardly taught explicitly) in the light of the linguistic descriptions of dominant European languages; 3) verifying certain preconceived ideas regarding the proximity and the distance between the three chosen languages, and 4) studying the causes for these preconceptions. Our corpus is obtained from a number of FFL classes in Sri Lanka. The observed student groups consisted of bilingual adolescents and adults whose first language (L1) was Sinhalese and the second language (L2) was English. The observed classes differed in many ways but in each of those classes, a common factor was that the students had been learning some aspect of the two grammatical concepts, le passé composé and l'imparfait. Having completed our study, we now see that a considerable number of our initial hypotheses are proven correct. For example, in the exolingual French language teaching/learning context in Sri Lanka where we carried out our research, language transfers between the first and target languages were recurrent and numerous in the work of the greater majority of the observed language learners, and even their teachers; these transfers were so frequent that they could hardly be ignored during the teaching/learning process ; although learners turned to their first languages to facilitate the learning process of a new language, neither their teachers, nor their text books helped them in this task; the transfers originating from English were far too numerous than those originating from Sinhalese; however, contrary to the popular belief among many Sinhalese learners of French, the contrastive analysis of the three aspectual-temporal verb systems and the study of our corpus helped us in proving that there are common linguistic features between the Sinhalese and the French languages ; at least, when it comes to using some of their past tenses. This is a fact which had been ignored up to now but which could probably be used to improve French teaching/learning in Sri Lanka. Taking all observations into account, we made some pedagogical recommendations in the concluding part of our thesis with the view of improving foreign language teaching/learning in Sri Lanka, and elsewhere.

The fourth extracellular loop of the alpha subunit of Na,K-ATPase. Functional evidence for close proximity with the second extracellular loop.

Na,K-ATPase is the main active transport system that maintains the large gradients of Na(+) and K(+) across the plasma membrane of animal cells. The crystal structure of a K(+)-occluding conformation of this protein has been recently published, but the movements of its different domains allowing for the cation pumping mechanism are not yet known. The structure of many more conformations is known for the related calcium ATPase SERCA, but the reliability of homology modeling is poor for several domains with low sequence identity, in particular the extracellular loops. To better define the structure of the large fourth extracellular loop between the seventh and eighth transmembrane segments of the alpha subunit, we have studied the formation of a disulfide bond between pairs of cysteine residues introduced by site-directed mutagenesis in the second and the fourth extracellular loop. We found a specific pair of cysteine positions (Y308C and D884C) for which extracellular treatment with an oxidizing agent inhibited the Na,K pump function, which could be rapidly restored by a reducing agent. The formation of the disulfide bond occurred preferentially under the E2-P conformation of Na,K-ATPase, in the absence of extracellular cations. Using recently published crystal structure and a distance constraint reproducing the existence of disulfide bond, we performed an extensive conformational space search using simulated annealing and showed that the Tyr(308) and Asp(884) residues can be in close proximity, and simultaneously, the SYGQ motif of the fourth extracellular loop, known to interact with the extracellular domain of the beta subunit, can be exposed to the exterior of the protein and can easily interact with the beta subunit.

Il desiderio materno nei casi di maltrattamento infantile

The work of this thesis would like to investigate two particular questions about the care of underage: on the one hand, the maltreatment, and the mother's desire on the other hand. About the first, this proposal try to underscore the elaborate irregularity and disparity related to this phenomenon and his historical evolution. The objective's thesis propose to underline that the abuse crosses the crisis of educational dimension inside and outside the family. We are talking about a type of crisi that places at the origin of a specific clinic and that it is about the maltreatment designated, at the same time, to cope with the educational void and with the ill-treated under age's hardships. The so-called clinic of the maltreatment horns, therefore, with the purpose to join and to set in order the normative and educational aspects. However, the prescriptive requirement is intended to measure against the same one crisis in a paradoxical way; the laws and the juveniles court must make up for the lack absence of the rules that characterized the maltreatment, getting around to use the typical reference that traditionally were been at the base of the educational way's construction. The same crimes on underage often found in the father the responsibility. The requirements and the therapeutic needs has utilized the theoretical construct of the trauma as the key line of clinical practice. On the one hand, the trauma was been paired controversially to the psychoanalytical concepts as the notion of the phantom, in the same manner that the objective truth is been opposed to the notion of the imagination and fantasy; on the other hand, the trauma was gotten to be the mark and the characteristic that defined the individual identity of the mistreated persons, regardless of the person's clinical structure or, generally, regardless of the their individual position. Both the normative demand and therapeutic converge on the idealization of the imaginary figure that is able to supply to every type of maltreatment: the mother. This position is connected on theoretical construct well-established in the mythology, that associated the mother figure to a natural dimension; this is related to the second point at issue: the mother's desire. The awareness of the mother figure in natural and idealized terms describes accusingly and negatively the trauma, without seeing the difference between trauma that helps to give a structure to the individual position from the trauma solely devastating. The mother's mythology, therefore, is in an evident antagonism with the female figure and woman's sexuality. In these way the maltreatment's clinic suggests that a woman is able to be a mother only when she doesn't appreciate the rule of female. This situation preclusives a comparison with own sexuality and gives to the women a complex of castration. The clinic cases reported highlight as these difficulties are the expression of the familiarity's heredity that wasn't been sufficiently elaborated. This condition (into the relation between mother and his child) turn the infant in the incapacity to symbolized and it doesn't help him to accede to the positive trauma, to the language and to the edipic rule; this is the reason why the child toils difficulties to approach to own personality and to orient himself in the relation with his body, with the body of the adults and the same age children.

ARCHITECTING USER-CENTRIC PRIVACY-AS-A-SET-OF-SERVICES: DIGITAL IDENTITY RELATED PRIVACY FRAMEWORK

AbstractDigitalization gives to the Internet the power by allowing several virtual representations of reality, including that of identity. We leave an increasingly digital footprint in cyberspace and this situation puts our identity at high risks. Privacy is a right and fundamental social value that could play a key role as a medium to secure digital identities. Identity functionality is increasingly delivered as sets of services, rather than monolithic applications. So, an identity layer in which identity and privacy management services are loosely coupled, publicly hosted and available to on-demand calls could be more realistic and an acceptable situation. Identity and privacy should be interoperable and distributed through the adoption of service-orientation and implementation based on open standards (technical interoperability). Ihe objective of this project is to provide a way to implement interoperable user-centric digital identity-related privacy to respond to the need of distributed nature of federated identity systems. It is recognized that technical initiatives, emerging standards and protocols are not enough to guarantee resolution for the concerns surrounding a multi-facets and complex issue of identity and privacy. For this reason they should be apprehended within a global perspective through an integrated and a multidisciplinary approach. The approach dictates that privacy law, policies, regulations and technologies are to be crafted together from the start, rather than attaching it to digital identity after the fact. Thus, we draw Digital Identity-Related Privacy (DigldeRP) requirements from global, domestic and business-specific privacy policies. The requirements take shape of business interoperability. We suggest a layered implementation framework (DigldeRP framework) in accordance to model-driven architecture (MDA) approach that would help organizations' security team to turn business interoperability into technical interoperability in the form of a set of services that could accommodate Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA): Privacy-as-a-set-of- services (PaaSS) system. DigldeRP Framework will serve as a basis for vital understanding between business management and technical managers on digital identity related privacy initiatives. The layered DigldeRP framework presents five practical layers as an ordered sequence as a basis of DigldeRP project roadmap, however, in practice, there is an iterative process to assure that each layer supports effectively and enforces requirements of the adjacent ones. Each layer is composed by a set of blocks, which determine a roadmap that security team could follow to successfully implement PaaSS. Several blocks' descriptions are based on OMG SoaML modeling language and BPMN processes description. We identified, designed and implemented seven services that form PaaSS and described their consumption. PaaSS Java QEE project), WSDL, and XSD codes are given and explained.

Who we are and who can join us: National identity content and entry criteria for new immigrants

We argue that attitudes about immigration can be better understood by paying closer attention to the various ways in which national group boundaries are demarcated. We describe two related lines of work that address this. The first deals with national group definitions and, based on evidence from studies carried out in England and analyses of international survey data, argues that the relationship between national identification and prejudice toward immigrants is contingent on the extent to which ethnic or civic definitions of nationality are endorsed. The second, which uses European survey data, examines support for ascribed and acquired criteria that can be applied when determining who is permitted to migrate to one's country, and the various forms of national and individual threat that affect support for these criteria. We explain how the research benefits from a multilevel approach and also suggest how these findings relate to some current policy debates.

Regional and hemispheric determinants of language laterality: Implications for preoperative fMRI.

Language is typically a function of the left hemisphere but the right hemisphere is also essential in some healthy individuals and patients. This inter-subject variability necessitates the localization of language function, at the individual level, prior to neurosurgical intervention. Such assessments are typically made by comparing left and right hemisphere language function to determine "language lateralization" using clinical tests or fMRI. Here, we show that language function needs to be assessed at the region and hemisphere specific level, because laterality measures can be misleading. Using fMRI data from 82 healthy participants, we investigated the degree to which activation for a semantic word matching task was lateralized in 50 different brain regions and across the entire cortex. This revealed two novel findings. First, the degree to which language is lateralized across brain regions and between subjects was primarily driven by differences in right hemisphere activation rather than differences in left hemisphere activation. Second, we found that healthy subjects who have relatively high left lateralization in the angular gyrus also have relatively low left lateralization in the ventral precentral gyrus. These findings illustrate spatial heterogeneity in language lateralization that is lost when global laterality measures are considered. It is likely that the complex spatial variability we observed in healthy controls is more exaggerated in patients with brain damage. We therefore highlight the importance of investigating within hemisphere regional variations in fMRI activation, prior to neuro-surgical intervention, to determine how each hemisphere and each region contributes to language processing. Hum Brain Mapp, 2010. © 2010 Wiley-Liss, Inc.

Testing new identity models and processes in French-speaking adolescents and emerging adults students

Developing a sense of identity is a crucial psychosocial task for young people. The purpose of this study was to evaluate identity development in French-speaking adolescents and emerging adults (in France and Switzerland) using a process-oriented model of identity formation including five dimensions (i.e., exploration in breadth, commitment making, exploration in depth, identification with commitment, and ruminative exploration). The study included participants from three different samples (total N = 2239, 66.7% women): two samples of emerging adult student and one sample of adolescents. Results confirmed the hypothesized five-factor dimensional model of identity in our three samples and provided evidence for convergent validity of the model. The results also indicated that exploration in depth might be subdivided in two aspects: a first form of exploration in depth leading to a better understanding and to an increase of the strength of current commitments and a second form of exploration in depth leading to a re-evaluation and a reconsideration of current commitments. Further, the identity status cluster solution that emerged is globally in line with previous literature (i.e., achievement, foreclosure, moratorium, carefree diffusion, diffused diffusion, undifferentiated). However, despite a structural similarity, we found variations in identity profiles because identity development is shaped by cultural context. These specific variations are discussed in light of social, educational and economic differences between France and the French-speaking part of Switzerland. Implications and suggestions for future research are offered.

Identity [R]Evolution: Multi-Disciplinary Perpectives

The identity [r]evolution is happening. Who are you, who am I in the information society? In recent years, the convergence of several factors - technological, political, economic - has accelerated a fundamental change in our networked world. On a technological level, information becomes easier to gather, to store, to exchange and to process. The belief that more information brings more security has been a strong political driver to promote information gathering since September 11. Profiling intends to transform information into knowledge in order to anticipate one's behaviour, or needs, or preferences. It can lead to categorizations according to some specific risk criteria, for example, or to direct and personalized marketing. As a consequence, new forms of identities appear. They are not necessarily related to our names anymore. They are based on information, on traces that we leave when we act or interact, when we go somewhere or just stay in one place, or even sometimes when we make a choice. They are related to the SIM cards of our mobile phones, to our credit card numbers, to the pseudonyms that we use on the Internet, to our email addresses, to the IP addresses of our computers, to our profiles... Like traditional identities, these new forms of identities can allow us to distinguish an individual within a group of people, or describe this person as belonging to a community or a category. How far have we moved through this process? The identity [r]evolution is already becoming part of our daily lives. People are eager to share information with their "friends" in social networks like Facebook, in chat rooms, or in Second Life. Customers take advantage of the numerous bonus cards that are made available. Video surveillance is becoming the rule. In several countries, traditional ID documents are being replaced by biometric passports with RFID technologies. This raises several privacy issues and might actually even result in changing the perception of the concept of privacy itself, in particular by the younger generation. In the information society, our (partial) identities become the illusory masks that we choose -or that we are assigned- to interplay and communicate with each other. Rights, obligations, responsibilities, even reputation are increasingly associated with these masks. On the one hand, these masks become the key to access restricted information and to use services. On the other hand, in case of a fraud or negative reputation, the owner of such a mask can be penalized: doors remain closed, access to services is denied. Hence the current preoccupying growth of impersonation, identity-theft and other identity-related crimes. Where is the path of the identity [r]evolution leading us? The booklet is giving a glance on possible scenarios in the field of identity.