Pausing patterns: differences between L2 learners and native speakers

This paper reports on a comparative study of pauses made by L2 learners and native speakers of English while narrating picture stories. The comparison is based on the number of pauses and total amount of silence in themiddle and at the end of clauses in the performance of 40 native speakers and 40 L2 learners of English. The results of the quantitative analyses suggest that, although the L2 learners generally pausemore repeatedly and have longer periods of silence than the native speakers, the distinctive feature of their pausing pattern is that they pause frequently in the middle of clauses rather than at the end. The qualitative analysis of the data suggests that some of the L2 learners’mid-clause pauses are associated with processes such as replacement, reformulation, and online planning. Formulaic sequences, however, contain very few pauses and therefore appear to facilitate the learners’ fluency.

Backtracks: a devised performance

Backtracks aimed to investigate critical relationships between audio-visual technologies and live performance, emphasising technologies producing sound, contrasted with non-amplified bodily sound. Drawing on methodologies for studying avant garde theatre, live performance and the performing body, it was informed by work in critical and cultural theory by, for example, Steven Connor and Jonathan Rée, on the body's experience and interpretation of sound. The performance explored how shifting national boundaries, mobile workforces, complex family relationships, cultural pluralities and possibilities for bodily transformation have compelled a re-evaluation of what it means to feel 'at home' in modernity. Using montages of live and mediated images, disrupted narratives and sound, it evoked destablised identities which characterise contemporary lived experience, and enacted the displacement of certainties provided by family and nation, community and locality, body and selfhood. Homer's Odyssey framed the performance: elements could be traced in the mise-en-scène; in the physical presence of Athene, the narrator and Penelope weaving mementoes from the past into her loom; and in voice-overs from Homer's work. The performance drew on personal experiences and improvisations, structured around notions of journey. It presented incomplete narratives, memories, repressed anxieties and dreams through different combinations of sounds, music, mediated images, movement, voice and bodily sound. The theme of travel was intensified by performers carrying suitcases and umbrellas, by soundtracks incorporating travel effects, and by the distorted video images of forms of transport playing across 'screens' which proliferated across the space (sails, umbrellas, the loom, actors' bodies). The performance experimented with giving sound and silence performative dimensions, including presenting sound in visual and imagistic ways, for example by using signs from deaf sign language. Through-composed soundtracks of live and recorded song, music, voice-over, and noise exploited the viscerality of sound and disrupted cognitive interpretation by phenomenological, somatic experience, thereby displacing the impulse for closure/destination/home.

Keine romantische liebe in Africa? Mission, Manner, Monogamie

The sparse historical and anthropological research on romantic love in Africa south of the Sahara gives the impression that the phenomenon may merely be of marginal importance. Instead, the reasons for the apparent impossibility to write about love in Africa are largely rooted in its epistemology: Western stereotypes of a continent inhabited by tribal, atavistic people, barely modernised by colonialism or touched by globalisation which introduced romantic love to the world region have been in part responsible for this dearth of academic knowledge, as have recent identity politics and practical concerns that focused research in the area on sexuality. Here, the main argument is that the almost complete silence about love in Africa may be addressed by applying a more inclusive concept of love that embraces ideologies and practices hitherto neglected, such as polygyny, and that expands the one which has been developed by historians of the medieval and early modern periods. This, in turn, enriches the research on the history of love in Western societies.

Metacognitive control over memory processes under auditory distraction

Decades of research attest that memory processes suffer under conditions of auditory distraction. What is however less well understood is whether people are able to modify how their memory processes are deployed in order to compensate for disruptive effects of distraction. The metacognitive approach to memory describes a variety of ways people can exert control over their cognitive processes to optimize performance. Here we describe our recent investigations into how these control processes change under conditions of auditory distraction. We specifically looked at control of encoding in the form of decisions about how long to study a word when it is presented and control of memory reporting in the form of decisions whether to volunteer or withhold retrieved details. Regarding control of encoding, we expected that people would compensate for disruptive effects of distraction by extending study time under noise. Our results revealed, however, that when exposed to irrelevant speech, people curtail rather than extend study. Regarding control of memory reporting, we expected that people would compensate for the loss of access to memory records by volunteering responses held with lower confidence. Our results revealed, however, that people’s reporting strategies do not differ when memory task is performed in silence or under auditory distraction, although distraction seriously undermines people’s confidence in their own responses. Together, our studies reveal novel avenues for investigating the psychological effects of auditory distraction within a metacognitive framework.

The absent body: representations of dying early modern women in a selection of seventeenth-century diaries

This article seeks to explore the absence of the body in the depiction of dying women in a selection of seventeenth-century diaries. It considers the cultural forces that made this absence inevitable, and the means by which the physical body was replaced in death by a spiritual presence. The elevation of a dying woman from physical carer to spiritual nurturer in the days before death ensured that gender codes were not broken. The centrality of the body of the dying woman, within a female circle of care and support, was paradoxically juxtaposed with an effacement of the body in descriptions of a good death. In death, a woman might achieve the stillness, silence and compliance so essential to perfect early modern womanhood, and retrospective diary entries can achieve this ideal by replacing the body with images that deflect from the essential physicality of the woman.

Reconstructing copyright exhaustion in the online world

According to the principle of copyright exhaustion, once a copy of a work is placed on the market, the right holder’s control over further distribution of that copy is exhausted. Unlike the distribution of hard copies of copyright works, however, the electronic dissemination of content is not subject to the exhaustion principle. This means that second-hand markets of digital goods cannot exist. Traditionally, exhaustion is premised on four assumptions that cannot be safely assumed in the online context: it applies to tangible copies only; it covers goods and not services; the goods should be sold but not licensed; and the property entitlement should be alienated upon transfer. After long jurisprudential silence, courts at worldwide level have revisited these normative impediments to affirm that exhaustion can apply online in specific instances. The article discusses the doctrinal norms that underpin exhaustion and determines the conditions under which online copyright exhaustion can apply.

När tystnaden får tala : Lärares uppfattingar om och erfarenheter av tysta elever

Syftet med denna studie var att undersöka vilka uppfattningar och erfarenheter lärare har av tystaelever, vilka tankar de har kring hur dessa kan stödjas och hjälpas och hur de faktiskt arbetar meddetta. Med en tyst elev menas de som sällan, eller inte alls, deltar i den muntliga delen avundervisningen i klassen. Fyra lärare intervjuades och observerades i sina klassrum. Resultatetvisar att lärare menar att tysta elever är de som sällan eller aldrig vill tala i klassrummet, som interäcker upp handen eller vill läsa högt. Lärarna kategoriserar också gruppen tysta elever och angerolika elever som tysta. Lärarna försöker i sitt arbete att hjälpa eleverna genom öppna frågor,grupparbeten och genom att låta dem skriva. Vidare är lärarna väl medvetna om risken att tystaelever riskerar att inte nå kursplanernas kunskapskrav. I klassrumssituationen tvingas lärareprioritera mellan utagerande och tysta elever, vilket leder till att de riskerar att bli bortglömda ochövergivna.

"Amningen känns så skör på ett annat vis" : Hur kvinnor som ammar förskolebarn upplever bemötandet av förskolans pedagoger.

The aim of this study was to visualize in a pluralistic perspective how mothers of breastfed preschool children experience being treated by preschool teachers. Method: Qualitative interviews with 10 mothers and qualitative content analysis. The mothers experienced breastfeeding was surrounded by slience at preschool. The mothers were met with silence, felt vulnerable and did not want to be subject to criticizm. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first investigation on this subject. 

Violence and reproductive health preceding flight from war : accounts from Somali born women in Sweden

Background: Political violence and war are push factors for migration and social determinants of health among migrants. Somali migration to Sweden has increased threefold since 2004, and now comprises refugees with more than 20 years of war experiences. Health is influenced by earlier life experiences with adverse sexual and reproductive health, violence, and mental distress being linked. Adverse pregnancy outcomes are reported among Somali born refugees in high-income countries. The aim of this study was to explore experiences and perceptions on war, violence, and reproductive health before migration among Somali born women in Sweden. Method: Qualitative semi-structured individual interviews were conducted with 17 Somali born refugee women of fertile age living in Sweden. Thematic analysis was applied. Results: Before migration, widespread war-related violence in the community had created fear, separation, and interruption in daily life in Somalia, and power based restrictions limited access to reproductive health services. The lack of justice and support for women exposed to non-partner sexual violence or intimate partner violence reinforced the risk of shame, stigmatization, and silence. Social networks, stoicism, and faith constituted survival strategies in the context of war. Conclusions: Several factors reinforced non-disclosure of violence exposure among the Somali born women before migration. Therefore, violence-related illness might be overlooked in the health care system. Survival strategies shaped by war contain resources for resilience and enhancement of well-being and sexual and reproductive health and rights in receiving countries after migration.

Hjælp til selvcensur

Self-help and self-censorship: A self-help cultural perspective on organizational silence This paper seeks to explain silence in the workplace through an analytical perspective derived from Judith Butlers work on censorship, and in this way suggest an alternative to explanations in the existing literature on employee silence, which are often tied to the actions and motivations of the individual subject. It is thus argued that self-help books can be seen as indicative of a pervasive culture of self-improvement, which among other things promotes the absence of criticism in the workplace. The empirical point of departure for this argument is the two bestselling self-help books The secret by Rhonda Byrne and The 7 habits of highly effective people by Stephen Covey. Theoretically, the paper applies Butlers notion of ”implicit censorship” where censorship is understood as productive in the sense of being constitutive of language. Hence, in the analysis it is shown how discursive regimes in self-help literature tend to be constructed in such a way, that explicit criticism cannot emerge as a meaningful activity, and is thus implicitly censored.

Children's recall of words spoken in their first and second language : Effects of Signal-to-Noise Ratio and Reverberation Time

Speech perception runs smoothly and automatically when there is silence in the background, but when the speech signal is degraded by background noise or by reverberation, effortful cognitive processing is needed to compensate for the signal distortion. Previous research has typically investigated the effects of signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) and reverberation time in isolation, whilst few have looked at their interaction. In this study, we probed how reverberation time and SNR influence recall of words presented in participants' first- (L1) and second-language (L2). A total of 72 children (10 years old) participated in this study. The to-be-recalled wordlists were played back with two different reverberation times (0.3 and 1.2 s) crossed with two different SNRs (+3 dBA and +12 dBA). Children recalled fewer words when the spoken words were presented in L2 in comparison with recall of spoken words presented in L1. Words that were presented with a high SNR (+12 dBA) improved recall compared to a low SNR (+3 dBA). Reverberation time interacted with SNR to the effect that at +12 dB the shorter reverberation time improved recall, but at +3 dB it impaired recall. The effects of the physical sound variables (SNR and reverberation time) did not interact with language. © 2016 Hurtig, Keus van de Poll, Pekkola, Hygge, Ljung and Sörqvist.

Violence and reproductive health preceding flight from war : accounts from Somali born women in Sweden

Background: Political violence and war are push factors for migration and social determinants of health among migrants. Somali migration to Sweden has increased threefold since 2004, and now comprises refugees with more than 20 years of war experiences. Health is influenced by earlier life experiences with adverse sexual and reproductive health, violence, and mental distress being linked. Adverse pregnancy outcomes are reported among Somali born refugees in high-income countries. The aim of this study was to explore experiences and perceptions on war, violence, and reproductive health before migration among Somali born women in Sweden. Method: Qualitative semi-structured individual interviews were conducted with 17 Somali born refugee women of fertile age living in Sweden. Thematic analysis was applied. Results: Before migration, widespread war-related violence in the community had created fear, separation, and interruption in daily life in Somalia, and power based restrictions limited access to reproductive health services. The lack of justice and support for women exposed to non-partner sexual violence or intimate partner violence reinforced the risk of shame, stigmatization, and silence. Social networks, stoicism, and faith constituted survival strategies in the context of war. Conclusions: Several factors reinforced non-disclosure of violence exposure among the Somali born women before migration. Therefore, violence-related illness might be overlooked in the health care system. Survival strategies shaped by war contain resources for resilience and

Race as political strategy by US presidential candidates: a case study

Race has played an important part in US presidential politics in contemporary history. Different political parties and candidates have followed covert strategies playing on the prejudices of white voters both cognitively and emotionally by linking racerelated issues to the majority's individual and group interests. This elite discourse carried to the public by the mainstream media, along with media's practices of stereotyping, priming, framing and agenda setting, help to justify racial prejudice, discrimination against minorities and their marginalized status, while maintaining the status quo. Taking the social constructionist position, this case study examines the opinions expressed by a sample of undecided voters selected from different geographic locations at various stages of the 1992 US presidential campaign under the themes 'Candidates' racial prejudice' and 'Race is used as political strategy by candidates.'

Tales from camp Wilde: queer(y)ing environmental education research

This paper questions the relative silence of queer theory and theorizing in
environmental education research. We explore some possibilities for queering environmental education research by fabricating (and inviting colleagues to fabricate) stories of Camp Wilde, a fictional location that helps us to expose the facticity of the field’s heteronormative constructedness. These stories suggest alternative ways of (re)presenting and (re)producing both the subjects/objects of our inquiries and our identities as researchers. The contributors draw on a variety of theoretical resources from art history, deconstruction, ecofeminism, literary criticism, popular cultural studies, and feminist poststructuralism to perform an orientation to environmental education research that we hope will never be arrested by its categorization as a “new genre.”

Human carrying capacity and human health

The silence around overpopulation prevents the global health community from making the necessary link between the planner's limited ability to support its people and health and development crises. The author describes how popular thinking on population control has been shaped over the last 200 years and how out failure to address the population explosion may be one cause of recent epidemics and social unrest.