Production and processing asymmetries in the acquisition of tense morphology by sequential bilingual children

This study investigates the production and on-line processing of English tense morphemes by sequential bilingual (L2) Turkish-speaking children with more than three years of exposure to English. Thirty nine 6-9-year-old L2 children and 28 typically developing age-matched monolingual (L1) children were administered the production component for third person –s and past tense of the Test for Early Grammatical Impairment (Rice & Wexler, 1996) and participated in an on-line word-monitoring task involving grammatical and ungrammatical sentences with presence/omission of tense (third person –s, past tense -ed) and non-tense (progressive –ing, possessive ‘s) morphemes. The L2 children’s performance on the on-line task was compared to that of children with Specific Language Impairment (SLI) in Montgomery & Leonard (1998, 2006) to ascertain similarities and differences between the two populations. Results showed that the L2 children were sensitive to the ungrammaticality induced by the omission of tense morphemes, despite variable production. This reinforces the claim about intact underlying syntactic representations in child L2 acquisition despite non target-like production (Haznedar & Schwartz, 1997).

Neurotrophic gene polymorphisms and response to psychological therapy

Therapygenetics, the study of genetic determinants of response to psychological therapies, is in its infancy. Here, we investigate whether single-nucleotide polymorphisms in nerve growth factor (NGF) (rs6330) and brain-derived neutrotrophic factor (BDNF) (rs6265) genes predict the response to cognitive behaviour therapy (CBT). Neurotrophic genes represent plausible candidate genes: they are implicated in synaptic plasticity, response to stress, and are widely expressed in brain areas involved in mood and cognition. Allelic variation at both loci has shown associations with anxiety-related phenotypes. A sample of 374 anxiety-disordered children with white European ancestry was recruited from clinics in Reading, UK, and in Sydney, Australia. Participants received manualised CBT treatment and DNA was collected from buccal cells using cheek swabs. Treatment response was assessed at post-treatment and follow-up time points. We report first evidence that children with one or more copies of the T allele of NGF rs6330 were significantly more likely to be free of their primary anxiety diagnosis at follow-up (OR=0.60 (0.42–0.85), P=0.005). These effects remained even when other clinically relevant covariates were accounted for (OR=0.62 (0.41–0.92), P=0.019). No significant associations were observed between BDNF rs6265 and response to psychological therapy. These findings demonstrate that knowledge of genetic markers has the potential to inform clinical treatment decisions for psychotherapeutic interventions.

Is prospective memory enhanced by cue-action semantic relatedness and enactment at encoding?

Benefits and costs on prospective memory performance, of enactment at encoding and a semantic association between a cue-action word pair, were investigated in two experiments. Findings revealed superior performance for both younger and older adults following enactment, in contrast to verbal encoding, and when cue-action semantic relatedness was high. Although younger adults outperformed older adults, age did not moderate benefits of cue-action relatedness or enactment. Findings from a second experiment revealed that the inclusion of an instruction to perform a prospective memory task led to increments in response latency to items from the ongoing activity in which that task was embedded, relative to latencies when the ongoing task only was performed. However, this task interference ‘cost’ did not differ as a function of either cue-action relatedness or enactment. We argue that the high number of cue-action pairs employed here influenced meta-cognitive consciousness, hence determining attention allocation, in all experimental conditions.

The civic zeitgeist: nationalism and liberal values in the European radical right

This article examines the relationship between nationalism and liberal values, and more specifically the redefinition of boundaries between national communities and others in the rhetoric of radical right parties in Europe. The aim is to examine the tension between radical right party discourse and the increasing need to shape this discourse in liberal terms. We argue that the radical right parties that successfully operate within the democratic system tend to be those best able to tailor their discourse to the liberal and civic characteristics of national identity so as to present themselves and their ideologies as the true authentic defenders of the nation's unique reputation for democracy, diversity and tolerance. Comparing the success of a number of European radical right parties ranging from the most electorally successful SVP to the more mixed BNP, FN and NPD, we show that the parties that effectively deploy the symbolic resources of national identity through a predominantly voluntaristic prism tend to be the ones that fare better within their respective political systems. In doing so, we challenge the conventional view in the study of nationalism which expects civic values to shield countries from radicalism and extremism.

Borrowing and shift-induced interference: contrasting patterns in French-Germanic contact in Brussels and Strasbourg

The main aim of the present article is to test hypotheses derived from the model for contact- induced language change as formulated in Thomason and Kaufman (1988 et seq.). As the model correctly predicts the asymmetries between the mutual influences of the Germanic and the Romance varieties in Brussels and Strasbourg it is a very powerful tool for describing the contact patterns in these cities. The analysis shows that the contact patterns are very similar, both from a quantitative and from a qualitative point of view, despite important differences in the sociolinguistic situation of both cities. The striking similarities in the outcome of language contact seem to find a plausible explanation in the fact that the language contact situations in both cities are similar from a typological point of view: in each city a variety of French is in contact with a Germanic variety (Alsatian and Brussels Dutch). Thus, the claim of the present article is that the structure of the languages plays a more prominent role in the outcome of language contact than the sociolinguistic history of the speakers.

The role of transfer in language variation and change: Evidence from contact varieties of French

In this Special Issue, the focus is on contact-induced language variation and change in situations of societal bilingualism that involve long-term contact between French and another language. As is well known, when two or more languages are spoken by groups of speakers in the same geographical area, over time, features from one language can be transferred to the other language, especially when the languages in question are unequal in terms of prestige, institutional support and demographic factors. The process that leads to the adoption of such features in the contact languages is generally known as INTERFERENCE or TRANSFER, and these terms are also used to describe the features in question (i.e. the end product of the process of transfer). In this issue we prefer to use the term TRANSFER over the use of the notion INTERFERENCE, as the former has fewer negative connotations than the latter.

Towards a ‘civic’ narrative: British national identity and the transformation of the British National Party

This article examines the ways in which the BNP utilises the elements of British national identity in its discourse and argues that, during Griffin's leadership, the party has made a discursive choice to shift the emphasis from an ethnic to a civic narrative. We put forward two hypotheses, 1: the modernisation of the discourse of extreme right parties in the British context is likely to be related to the adoption of a predominantly civic narrative and 2: in the context of British party competition the BNP is likely to converge towards UKIP, drawing upon elements of its perceived winning formula, i.e. a predominantly civic rhetoric of national identity. We proceed to empirically test our hypotheses by conducting a twofold comparison. First, we compare the BNP's discourse pre- and post-1999 showing the BNP's progressive adoption of a civic narrative; and second the BNP's post-1999 discourse to that of UKIP in order to illustrate their similarities in terms of civic values.

Use of nutritional complete supplements in older adults with dementia: systematic review and meta-analysis of clinical outcomes

Background & Aims: Malnutrition is prevalent in people diagnosed with dementia however ensuring adequate oral intake within this group is often problematic. It is important to determine whether providing nutritionally complete oral nutritional supplements (ONS) drinks is an effective way of improving clinical outcomes for older people with dementia. This paper systematically reviewed clinical, wellbeing and nutritional outcomes in people with long-term cognitive impairment. Methods: The CINAHL, Medline and EMBASE databases were searched from their inception until January 2012. Reference lists of the included papers, foreign language papers and review articles obtained were manually searched. Results: Twelve articles were included in the review containing 1076 people in the supplement groups (intervention) and 748 people in the control groups. Meta-analysis shows there was a significant improvement in weight (p=<0.0001), Body Mass Index (BMI) (p=<0.0001) and cognition at 6.5+/-3.9 month follow up (p=0.002) when supplements were given compared to the control group. Conclusions: Providing ONS drinks has a positive effect on weight gain and cognition at follow up in older people with dementia. Additional research is required in both comparing nutritional supplements to vitamin/mineral tablets and high protein/calorie shots and clinical outcomes relevant to hospitalised people with dementia.

Patterns of discourse semantics: A corpus-assisted study of financial crisis in British newspaper discourse in 2009

Corpus-assisted analyses of public discourse often focus on the lexical level. This article argues in favour of corpus-assisted analyses of discourse, but also in favour of conceptualising salient lexical items in public discourse in a more determined way. It draws partly on non-Anglophone academic traditions in order to promote a conceptualisation of discourse keywords, thereby highlighting how their meaning is determined by their use in discourse contexts. It also argues in favour of emphasising the cognitive and epistemic dimensions of discourse-determined semantic structures. These points will be exemplified by means of a corpus-assisted, as well as a frame-based analysis of the discourse keyword financial crisis in British newspaper articles from 2009. Collocations of financial crisis are assigned to a generic matrix frame for ‘event’ which contains slots that specify possible statements about events. By looking at which slots are more, respectively less filled with collocates of financial crisis, we will trace semantic presence as well as absence, and thereby highlight the pragmatic dimensions of lexical semantics in public discourse. The article also advocates the suitability of discourse keyword analyses for systematic contrastive analyses of public/political discourse and for lexicographical projects that could serve to extend the insights drawn from corpus-guided approaches to discourse analysis.

Subject-to-subject raising and the syntax of tense in L2 Spanish: a full access approach

This paper investigates the acquisition of syntax in L2 grammars. We tested adult L2 speakers of Spanish (English L1) on the feature specification of T(ense), which is different in English and Spanish in so-called subject-to-subject raising structures. We present experimental results with the verb parecer “to seem/to appear” in different tenses, with and without experiencers, and with Tense Phrase (TP), verb phrase (vP) and Adjectival Phrase (AP) complements. The results show that advanced L2 learners can perform just like native Spanish speakers regarding grammatical knowledge in this domain, although the subtle differences between both languages are not explicitly taught. We argue that these results support Full Access approaches to Universal Grammar (UG) in L2 acquisition, by providing evidence that uninterpretable syntactic features can be learned in adult L2, even when such features are not directly instantiated in the same grammatical domain in the L1 grammar.

Differentiating core and co-opted mechanisms in calculation: The neuroimaging of calculation in aphasia

The role of language in exact calculation is the subject of debate. Some behavioral and functional neuroimaging investigations of healthy participants suggest that calculation requires language resources. However, there are also reports of individuals with severe aphasic language impairment who retain calculation ability. One possibility in resolving these discordant findings is that the neural basis of calculation has undergone significant reorganization in aphasic calculators. Using fMRI, we examined brain activations associated with exact addition and subtraction in two patients with severe agrammatic aphasia and retained calculation ability. Behavior and brain activations during two-digit addition and subtraction were compared to those of a group of 11 healthy, age-matched controls. Behavioral results confirmed that both patients retained calculation ability. Imaging findings revealed individual differences in processing, but also a similar activation pattern across patients and controls in bilateral parietal cortices. Patients differed from controls in small areas of increased activation in peri-lesional regions, a shift from left fronto-temporal activation to the contralateral region, and increased activations in bilateral superior parietal regions. Our results suggest that bilateral parietal cortex represents the core of the calculation network and, while healthy controls may recruit language resources to support calculation, these mechanisms are not mandatory in adult cognition.

Effects of second language on cognition in English users of L2 Japanese

It is now established that certain cognitive processes such as categorisation are tightly linked to the concepts encoded in language. Recent studies have shown that bilinguals with languages that differ in their concepts may show a shift in their cognition towards the L2 pattern primarily as a function of their L2 proficiency. This research has so far focused predominantly on L2 users who started learning the L2 in childhood or early puberty. The current study asks whether similar effects can be found in adult L2 learners. English speakers of L2 Japanese were given an object classification task involving real physical objects, and an online classification task involving artificial novel objects. Results showed a shift towards the L2 pattern, indicating that some degree of cognitive plasticity exists even when a second language is acquired later in life. These results have implications for theories of L2 acquisition and bilingualism, and contribute towards our understanding of the nature of the relationship between language and cognition in the L2 user’s mind.

Dietary levels of pure flavonoids improve spatial memory performance and increase hippocampal brain-derived neurotrophic factor.

Evidence suggests that flavonoid-rich foods are capable of inducing improvements in memory and cognition in animals and humans. However, there is a lack of clarity concerning whether flavonoids are the causal agents in inducing such behavioral responses. Here we show that supplementation with pure anthocyanins or pure flavanols for 6 weeks, at levels similar to that found in blueberry (2% w/w), results in an enhancement of spatial memory in 18 month old rats. Pure flavanols and pure anthocyanins were observed to induce significant improvements in spatial working memory (p = 0.002 and p = 0.006 respectively), to a similar extent to that following blueberry supplementation (p = 0.002). These behavioral changes were paralleled by increases in hippocampal brain-derived neurotrophic factor (R = 0.46, p<0.01), suggesting a common mechanism for the enhancement of memory. However, unlike protein levels of BDNF, the regional enhancement of BDNF mRNA expression in the hippocampus appeared to be predominantly enhanced by anthocyanins. Our data support the claim that flavonoids are likely causal agents in mediating the cognitive effects of flavonoid-rich foods.