Operationalising and measuring language dominance

The paper offers a new way to measure language ability in bilinguals, based on measures of lexical richness. The validity of proposed approach is tested in a variety of ways.

Language dominance and lexical diversity: how bilinguals and L2 learners differ in their knowledge and use of French lexical and functional items

This chapter compares lexical diversity of French words used by Dutch-French bilinguals, English-French bilinguals and Flemish L2 learners of French.

Ideological dominance in recreation provision: towards a theory of Local Authority response to Compulsory Competitive Tendering in Britain

This paper considers how the delivery of public leisure services in Britain has been affected by the imposition of Compulsory Competitive Tendering (CCT) on the management of facilities. In particular, it focuses on the changing relationship between the central and local levels of government, theorising a tripartite local response to CCT, incorporating local statism, post-Fordist rejection of CCT and post- Fordist compliance with the aims of the central administration. The paper then discusses the actual implementation of CCT, relating the theorised responses to those witnessed in practice. This results in the delineation of a continuum of stances, ranging from pragmatic forms of local statism, such as the protection of the former direct labour force, to centrist attempts to combine the ethics of socialism with the mechanics of the market, to an outright rejection of state organisation and control. The paper concludes that although legitimate attempts have been made to protect local services, the outcome of the CCT process has undoubtedly been the regeneration of public leisure provision away from its service roots towards a market model of provision.

Public leisure provision under Compulsory Competitive Tendering: the maintenance of ideological dominance?

Although much has been written about the effect on services of public sector restructuring, little is yet available on public leisure provision. This omission is addressed by considering how the delivery of public leisure services in Britain has been affected by the imposition of Compulsory Competitive Tendering (CCT). In particular, it focuses on the changing relationship between the central and local levels of government recognising, on the part of local government, a continuum of structural responses to central initiatives which have, in some cases, conspired to reduce the impact of CCT on public leisure provision. The paper concludes that although attempts have been made to protect local services, the outcome of the CCT process has been the regeneration of public leisure provision away from its service roots, but within an enduring ideological paradigm of conservative professionalism.

Dominance in the Tetra Pak case: an empirical approach

The 1991 decision of the European Commission on the Tetra Pak case was based on information which seemed to prove the firm's anti-competitive behavior. The Tetra Pak case is investigated here focusing on the meaning of multimarket dominance, using empirical techniques. We find that a more rigorous analysis of the data available would not confirm the Commission's assertions. That is, it cannot be concluded with certainty that the Commission was right to relate Tetra Pak's dominance in the aseptic sector to its market power in the non-aseptic sector. Our results suggest a general framework for the analysis of abusive transfer of market power across vertically or/and horizontally related markets.

Leader of the pack? German monetary dominance in Europe prior to EMU

In this paper, the monetary policy independence of European nations in the years before European Economic and Monetary Union (EMU) is investigated using cointegration techniques. Daily data is used to assess pairwise relationships between individual EMU nations and ‘lead’ nation Germany, to assess the hypothesis that Germany was the dominant European nation prior to EMU. By and large our econometric investigations support this hypothesis, and lead us to conclude that the only European nation to lose monetary policy independence in the light of monetary union was Germany. Our results have important policy implications. Given that the loss of monetary policy independence is generally viewed as the main cost of monetary unification, our findings suggest a reconsideration of the costs and benefits of monetary integration. A country can only lose what it has, and in Europe the countries that joined EMU — spare Germany — apparently did not have much to lose, at least not in terms of monetary independence. Instead, they actually gained monetary policy influence by getting a seat in the ECB's governing council which is responsible for setting interest policy in the euro area.

Species diversity and dominance-richness relationships for ground and arboreal ant (Hymenoptera: Formicidae) assemblages in Namibian desert, saltpan, and savannah

Namibia has high levels of invertebrate endemism, but biodiversity research has been geographically and taxonomically limited. In South African savannah, species richness of ground-foraging ant assemblages is regulated by dominant ant species, but this pattern has not been tested in other arid environments. In this study, we provide a description of ant diversity at baits in three different Namibian habitats (savannah, saltpan and desert), and we test the relationship between ant dominance and richness for ground-foraging and arboreal species. Forty-two ant species were collected in this study, with species richness being highest in the saltpan, followed by savannah and then desert. Ant assemblages were most similar between the savannah and desert, due to shared arboreal species. Similarity between savannah and saltpan ant assemblages was due to an overlap in ground-foraging species. Ground ants were more diverse than arboreal ants, and several species were observed at baits for both strata, although the degree of overlap varied with habitat type. The dominance-richness relationship varied depending on habitat and sampling strata. We found a unimodal relationship in the saltpan, but not in the savannah. For ground ants the relationship was logarithmic, with increasing abundance of dominants leading to decreasing overall species richness. However, no trend was observed for the arboreal ant assemblage. In the desert, low ant abundance meant that we were unable to assign species dominance, possibly due to reduced foraging activity caused by high temperatures. The lack of a consistent dominance-richness trend across assemblages may be the result of varying degrees of environmental stress or competition. Our study is a preliminary description of diversity and dominance in Namibia, and we hope it stimulates further research on ant assemblages in arid regions of Africa.

Using lexical diversity measures to operationalise language dominance in bilinguals

Treffers-Daller and Korybski propose to operationalize language dominance on the basis of measures of lexical diversity, as computed, in this particular study, on transcripts of stories told by Polish-English bilinguals in each of their languages They compute four different Indices of Language Dominance (ILD) on the basis of two different measures of lexical diversity, the Index of Guiraud (Guiraud, 1954) and HD-D (McCarthy & Jarvis, 2007). They compare simple indices, which are based on subtracting scores from one language from scores for another language, to more complex indices based on the formula Birdsong borrowed from the field of handedness, namely the ratio of (Difference in Scores) / (Sum of Scores). Positive scores on each of these Indices of Language Dominance mean that informants are more English-dominant and negative scores that they are more Polish-dominant. The authors address the difficulty of comparing scores across languages by carefully lemmatizing the data. Following Flege, Mackay and Piske (2002) they also look into the validity of these indices by investigating to what extent they can predict scores on other, independently measured variables. They use correlations and regression analysis for this, which has the advantage that the dominance indices are used as continuous variables and arbitrary cut-off points between balanced and dominant bilinguals need not be chosen. However, they also show how the computation of z-scores can help facilitate a discussion about the appropriateness of different cut-off points across different data sets and measurement scales in those cases where researchers consider it necessary to make categorial distinctions between balanced and dominant bilinguals. Treffers-Daller and Korybski correlate the ILD scores with four other variables, namely Length of Residence in the UK, attitudes towards English and life in the UK, frequency of usage of English at home and frequency of code-switching. They found that the indices correlated significantly with most of these variables, but there were clear differences between the Guiraud-based indices and the HDD-based indices. In a regression analysis three of the measures were also found to be a significant predictor of English language usage at home. They conclude that the correlations and the regression analyses lend strong support to the validity of their approach to language dominance.

A new understanding of El Niño's impact over East Asia: dominance of the ENSO combination mode

Previous studies have shown that the Indo-Pacific atmospheric response to ENSO comprises two dominant modes of variability: a meridionally quasi-symmetric response (independent from the annual cycle) and an anti-symmetric response (arising from the nonlinear atmospheric interaction between ENSO variability and the annual cycle), referred to as the combination mode (C-Mode). This study demonstrates that the direct El Niño signal over the tropics is confined to the equatorial region and has no significant impact on the atmospheric response over East Asia. The El Niño-associated equatorial anomalies can be expanded towards off-equatorial regions by the C-Mode through ENSO’s interaction with the annual cycle. The C-Mode is the prime driver for the development of an anomalous low-level anticyclone over the western North Pacific (WNP) during the El Niño decay phase, which usually transports more moisture to East Asia and thereby causes more precipitation over southern China. We use an Atmospheric General Circulation Model that well reproduces the WNP anticyclonic anomalies when both El Niño sea surface temperature (SST) anomalies as well as the SST annual cycle are prescribed as boundary conditions. However, no significant WNP anticyclonic circulation anomaly appears during the El Niño decay phase when excluding the SST annual cycle. Our analyses of observational data and model experiments suggest that the annual cycle plays a key role in the East Asian climate anomalies associated with El Niño through their nonlinear atmospheric interaction. Hence, a realistic simulation of the annual cycle is crucial in order to correctly capture the ENSO-associated climate anomalies over East Asia.

Faces and awareness: low-level, not emotional factors determine perceptual dominance

Threat-relevant stimuli such as fear faces are prioritized by the human visual system. Recent research suggests that this prioritization begins during unconscious processing: A specialized (possibly subcortical) pathway evaluates the threat relevance of visual input, resulting in preferential access to awareness for threat stimuli. Our data challenge this claim. We used a continuous flash suppression (CFS) paradigm to present emotional face stimuli outside of awareness. It has been shown using CFS that salient (e.g., high contrast) and recognizable stimuli (faces, words) become visible more quickly than less salient or less recognizable stimuli. We found that although fearful faces emerge from suppression faster than other faces, this was wholly explained by their low-level visual properties, rather than their emotional content. We conclude that, in the competition for visual awareness, the visual system prefers and promotes unconscious stimuli that are more “face-like,” but the emotional content of a face has no effect on stimulus salience.

English compound and non-compound processing in bilingual and multilingual speakers: effects of dominance and sequential multilingualism

This article reports on a study investigating the relative influence of the first and dominant language on L2 and L3 morpho-lexical processing. A lexical decision task compared the responses to English NV-er compounds (e.g., taxi driver) and non-compounds provided by a group of native speakers and three groups of learners at various levels of English proficiency: L1 Spanish-L2 English sequential bilinguals and two groups of early Spanish-Basque bilinguals with English as their L3. Crucially, the two trilingual groups differed in their first and dominant language (i.e., L1 Spanish-L2 Basque vs. L1 Basque-L2 Spanish). Our materials exploit an (a)symmetry between these languages: while Basque and English pattern together in the basic structure of (productive) NV-er compounds, Spanish presents a construction that differs in directionality as well as inflection of the verbal element (V[3SG] + N). Results show between and within group differences in accuracy and response times that may be ascribable to two factors besides proficiency: the number of languages spoken by a given participant and their dominant language. An examination of response bias reveals an influence of the participants' first and dominant language on the processing of NV-er compounds. Our data suggest that morphological information in the nonnative lexicon may extend beyond morphemic structure and that, similarly to bilingualism, there are costs to sequential multilingualism in lexical retrieval.

Global observations and forecast skill

The impact of selected observing systems on forecast skill is explored using the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts (ECMWF) 40-yr reanalysis (ERA-40) system. Analyses have been produced for a surface-based observing system typical of the period prior to 1945/1950, a terrestrial-based observing system typical of the period 1950-1979 and a satellite-based observing system consisting of surface pressure and satellite observations. Global prediction experiments have been undertaken using these analyses as initial states, and which are available every 6 h, for the boreal winters of 1990/1991 and 2000/2001 and the summer of 2000, using a more recent version of the ECMWF model. The results show that for 500-hPa geopotential height, as a representative field, the terrestrial system in the Northern Hemisphere extratropics is only slightly inferior to the control system, which makes use of all observations for the analysis, and is also more accurate than the satellite system. There are indications that the skill of the terrestrial system worsens slightly and the satellite system improves somewhat between 1990/1991 and 2000/2001. The forecast skill in the Southern Hemisphere is dominated by the satellite information and this dominance is larger in the latter period. The overall skill is only slightly worse than that of the Northern Hemisphere. In the tropics (20 degrees S-20 degrees N), using the wind at 850 and 250 hPa as representative fields, the information content in the terrestrial and satellite systems is almost equal and complementary. The surface-based system has very limited skill restricted to the lower troposphere of the Northern Hemisphere. Predictability calculations show a potential for a further increase in predictive skill of 1-2 d in the extratropics of both hemispheres, but a potential for a major improvement of many days in the tropics. As well as the Eulerian perspective of predictability, the storm tracks have been calculated from all experiments and validated for the extratropics to provide a Lagrangian perspective.