Cross-language influences on new second language vocabulary acquisition: the effect of learning method

Dissertação de mestrado integrado em Psicologia

Spousal support and satisfaction with healthcare services as moderators between psychological morbidity and adherence to diet in Type 2 Diabetes patients

Objectives: This study analyzed the moderating role of partners’ support and satisfaction with healthcare services in the relationship between psychological morbidity and adherence to diet in patients with type 2 diabetes (T2DM). Methods: Participants were 387 recently diagnosed T2DM patients that answered the following instruments: Revised Summary of Diabetes Self- Care Activities Measure, Hospital Anxiety and Depression Scales, Multidimensional Diabetes Questionnaire and Patient Satisfaction Questionnaire. Results: Partners’ positive and negative support moderated the relationship between psychological morbidity and adherence to diet. Satisfaction with healthcare services also moderated the relationship between psychological morbidity and adherence to diet. Conclusions: Intervention programs to promote adherence to diet in patients with type 2 diabetes should focus on partners’ support and patient satisfaction with healthcare services.

Digital manipulatives as scaffolds for preschoolers’ language development

The study reported here aims at contributing to a deeper understanding of the educational possibilities offered by digital manipulatives in preschool contexts. It presents a study carried with a digital manipulative to enhance the development of lexical knowledge and language awareness, which are relevant language abilities for formal literacy learning. The study took place in a Portuguese preschool, with a class of 20 five-year-olds in collaboration with the teacher. The digital manipulative supported the construction of multiple fictional worlds, motivating children's verbal interactions, and the playing of words and sound games, thus contextualizing the learning of an extensive collection of vocabulary and language awareness abilities. The degree of engagement and involvement that the manipulative provided in supporting children’s imaginative play as well as the imitation, in their own play, of the playful pedagogical interventions that the teacher had designed, shows the importance of well- designed materials that support a child-centered learning model. As such, it sustains a discussion on the potential of digital manipulatives to enhance fundamental language development in the preschool years. Further, the study highlights the importance of multidisciplinary teams in the creation of innovative pedagogical materials.

The music of language: an ERP investigation of the effects of musical training on emotional prosody processing

Recent studies have demonstrated the positive effects of musical training on the perception of vocally expressed emotion. This study investigated the effects of musical training on event-related potential (ERP) correlates of emotional prosody processing. Fourteen musicians and fourteen control subjects listened to 228 sentences with neutral semantic content, differing in prosody (one third with neutral, one third with happy and one third with angry intonation), with intelligible semantic content (semantic content condition--SCC) and unintelligible semantic content (pure prosody condition--PPC). Reduced P50 amplitude was found in musicians. A difference between SCC and PPC conditions was found in P50 and N100 amplitude in non-musicians only, and in P200 amplitude in musicians only. Furthermore, musicians were more accurate in recognizing angry prosody in PPC sentences. These findings suggest that auditory expertise characterizing extensive musical training may impact different stages of vocal emotional processing.

The Portuguese language version of social phobia and Anxiety Inventory: analysis of items and internal consistency in a Brazilian sample of 1,014 undergraduate students

OBJECTIVE: Theoretical and empirical analysis of items and internal consistency of the Portuguese-language version of Social Phobia and Anxiety Inventory (SPAI-Portuguese). METHODS: Social phobia experts conducted a 45-item content analysis of the SPAI-Portuguese administered to a sample of 1,014 university students. Item discrimination was evaluated by Student's t test; interitem, mean and item-to-total correlations, by Pearson coefficient; reliability was estimated by Cronbach's alpha. RESULTS: There was 100% agreement among experts concerning the 45 items. On the SPAI-Portuguese 43 items were discriminative (p < 0.05). A few inter-item correlations between both subscales were below 0.2. The mean inter-item correlations were: 0.41 on social phobia subscale; 0.32 on agoraphobia subscale and 0.32 on the SPAI-Portuguese. Item-to-total correlations were all higher then 0.3 (p < 0.001). Cronbach's alphas were: 0.95 on the SPAI-Portuguese; 0.96 on social phobia subscale; 0.85 on agoraphobia subscale. CONCLUSION: The 45-item content analysis revealed appropriateness concerning the underlying construct of the SPAI-Portuguese (social phobia, agoraphobia) with good discriminative capacity on 43 items. The mean inter-item correlations and reliability coefficients demonstrated the SPAI-Portuguese and subscales internal consistency and multidimensionality. No item was suppressed in the SPAI-Portuguese but the authors suggest that a shortened SPAI, in its different versions, could be an even more useful tool for research settings in social phobia.

Modelling and verifying smell-free architectures with the Archery language

Architectural (bad) smells are design decisions found in software architectures that degrade the ability of systems to evolve. This paper presents an approach to verify that a software architecture is smellfree using the Archery architectural description language. The language provides a core for modelling software architectures and an extension for specifying constraints. The approach consists in precisely specifying architectural smells as constraints, and then verifying that software architectures do not satisfy any of them. The constraint language is based on a propositional modal logic with recursion that includes: a converse operator for relations among architectural concepts, graded modalities for describing the cardinality in such relations, and nominals referencing architectural elements. Four architectural smells illustrate the approach.

Stage at presentation of breast cancer in Luanda, Angola - a retrospective study

Background: It is expected that, by 2020, 15 million new cases of cancer will occur every year in the world, one million of them in Africa. Knowledge of cancer trends in African countries is far from adequate, and improvements in cancer prevention efforts are urgently needed. The aim of this study was to characterize breast cancer clinically and pathologically at presentation in Luanda, Angola; we additionally provide quality information that will be useful for breast cancer care planning in the country. Methods: Data on breast cancer cases were retrieved from the Angolan Institute of Cancer Control, from 2006 to 2014. For women diagnosed in 2009 (5-years of follow-up), demographic, clinical and pathological information, at presentation, was collected, namely age at diagnosis, parity, methods used for pathological diagnoses, tumor pathological characteristics, stage of disease and treatment. Descriptive statistics were performed. Results: The median age of women diagnosed with breast cancer in 2009 was 47 years old (range 25–89). The most frequent clinical presentation was breast swelling with axillary lymph nodes metastasis (44.9 %), followed by a mass larger than 5 cm (14.2 %) and lump (12.9 %). Invasive ductal carcinoma was the main histologic type (81.8 %). Only 10.1 % of cancer cases had a well differentiated histological grade. Cancers were diagnosed mostly at advanced stages (66.7 % in stage III and 11.1 % in stage IV). Discussion: In this study, breast cancer was diagnosed at a very advanced stage. Although it reports data from a single cancer center in Luanda, Angola it reinforces the need for early diagnosis and increasing awareness. According to the main challenges related to breast cancer diagnosis and treatment herein presented, we propose a realistic framework that would allow for the implementation of a breast cancer care program, built under a strong network based on cooperation, teaching, audit, good practices and the organization of health services. Conclusion: Angola needs urgently a program for early diagnosis of breast cancer.

A comunicação online: a página Web como o BIO Empresarial: estratégias de comunicação visual e web design

Dissertação de mestrado em Ciências da Comunicação (área de especialização em Audiovisuais e Multimédia)

Tradução: língua e comunicação no contexto diplomático

Relatório de estágio de mestrado em Tradução e Comunicação Multilingue

Desarrollo sustentable de Productos y Servicios de Camélidos orientados al mercado en la región andina (DECAM). Sustainable Development Products and Services Marketed oriented in Andean Region

Este proyecto cuenta con el financiamiento del sistema INCO de la Unión Europea e incluye 5 contrapartes europeas, y Bolivia y Perú como contrapartes americanos. Consta de cuatro paquetes: producto, mercado, difusión y coordinación. En el primer paquete se desarrollan fundamentalmente los aspectos relacionados con la carne fresca y los productos cárnicos tanto tradicionales como nuevos a desarrollar. Se realizan faenas protocolizadas y espontáneas comparando animales con distintos tratamientos nutricionales de edades entre 19-21 meses. Se realizan análisis de calidad de carne y paneles de degustación. Los productos tradicionales como el charqui se evalúan en su forma tradicional y se implementan sistemas mejorados como desecadores solares. Los chacinados no son tradicionales en el altiplano por eso se realizan en La Pampa con la idea de transferir la tecnología desarrollada. La evaluación de calidad de la carne incluye técnicas de evaluación del animal en pié como la conservación morfológica y la ecografía para predecir calidad de res en el animal vivo. Estas observaciones se corroboran a la faena donde se realiza toda la batería de evaluaciones de calidad de la res.

REVISANDO LOS CONTENIDOS EN LENGUA: Hacia una semántica integradora. Transferencia y capacitación. REVIEWING CONTENTS IN LANGUAGE: Toward an integrative semantics. Transference and training.

En el trabajo se sistematiza la información semántica a fin de que ella sea la articuladora y eje de otros contenidos abordados en la enseñanza de la lengua materna. Así, en primer lugar se sistematizarán conceptos y perspectivas semánticas, para luego establecer relaciones con otros niveles lingüísticos, como lo son la Morfología y la Sintaxis, sin descuidar los aportes de la semántica a los procesos de producción y comprensión textuales. Realizaremos estudios para sistematizar y asignar al contenido un lugar dominante e integrador en el proceso de enseñanza-aprendizaje de la lengua materna, sin pretender desdibujar otras temáticas. Planteamos tareas cuyo punto culminante es la capacitación de docentes y experimentación de las propuestas didácticas en tres cursos de lengua en una institución educativa de la ciudad de Córdoba, cuyo examen, de ser positivo, permitirá la replicación y transferencia de esas prácticas a otras instituciones. Como objetivos generales, destacamos colaborar con la integración de los contenidos que se dictan en Lengua Materna, tomando como eje la naturaleza semántica del lenguaje; contribuir con la formación de los estudiantes en las dimensiones de la comprensión y producción textuales; promover la reflexión y el incremento del caudal léxico -y del lenguaje en general-, por parte de los estudiantes; contribuir con la capacitación y formación de los docentes en las temáticas abordadas, a través de acciones concretas; corroborar que la formación de los alumnos podrá tornarse más significativa en la medida en que se trabajen 'formas' lingüísticas atravesadas por contenidos. El marco teórico está constituido por los aportes de diferentes líneas, los que, compatibilizados, permitirán acceder a un abordaje integral del 'contenido' lingüístico. Más precisamente, consideramos las conceptualizaciones de autores tales como Coseriu (1986) para la delimitación semántica, sus conceptos y operaciones, al que completamos con la perspectiva de Lyons (1986, 1997); para las relaciones entre Morfología, seguimos a Ramírez Sáinz (2008) ; el vínculo sintaxis- semántica será abordado desde la perspectiva de la Gramática Generativa (Demonte,V. 1991; D'Introno, 2001; Fernández Lagunilla, M y Anula Rebollo,A, 1995; los aportes de la comprensión serán considerados desde De Beaugrande-Dresller (1997). Otros autores de referencia son Lakoff y Jhonsson (1998).

In search of a language textile and text in contemporary women's art

This research uses the textile/text axis concept as a conceptual tool to investigate the role of textile and text in contemporary women’s art practice and theorizing, investigating textile as a largely hitherto unacknowledged element in women’s art practice of the late 20th and early 21st centuries. Textile and text share a common etymological root, from the Latin textere to weave, textus a fabric. The thesis illuminates the pathways whereby textile and text played an important role in women reclaiming a speaking voice as creators of culture and signification during a revolutionary period of renewal in women’s cultural contribution and positioning. The methodological approach used in the research consisted of a comprehensive literature review, the compilation of an inventory of relevant women artists, developing a classificatory system differentiating types of approaches, concerns and concepts underpinning women’s art practice vis a vis the textile/text axis and a series of three in-depth case studies of artists Tracey Emin, Louise Bourgeois and Faith Ringgold. The thesis points to the fact that contemporary women artists and theorists have rounded their art practice and aesthetic discourse in textile as prime visual metaphor and signifier, turning towards the ancient language of textile not merely to reclaim a speaking voice but to occupy a ground breaking locus of signification and representation in contemporary culture. The textile/text axis facilitated women artists in powerfully countering a culturally inscribed status of Lacanian ‘no-woman’ (a position of abjection, absence and lack in the phallocentric symbolic). Turning towards a language of aeons, textile as fertile wellspring, the thesis identifies the methodologies and strategies whereby women artists have inserted their webs of subjectivities and deepest concerns into the records and discourses of contemporary culture. Presenting an anatomy of the textile/text axis, the thesis identifies nine component elements manifesting in contemporary women’s aesthetic practice and discourse. In this cultural renaissance, the textile/text axis, the thesis suggests, served as a complex lexicon, a system of labyrinthine references and signification, a site of layered meanings and ambiguities, a body proxy and a corporeal cartography, facilitating a revolution in women’s aesthetic praxis.

The Word Brain - A Short Guide to Fast Language Learning

How long does it take to learn another language? How many words do you need to learn? Are languages within the reach of everybody? Which teachers would you choose and which teachers should you avoid? These are some of the questions you ask yourself when you start learning a new language.The Word Brain provides the answers. If you have learned foreign languages in the past, consider reading it. If you or your children need to learn languages in the future, you must read it. What you will discover in two hours will change for ever the way you see languages and language learning. The principles of The Word Brain are timeless. Our children’s grandchildren will follow them when they discover the people of our planet.

On privacy-awareness in social networking services

Magdeburg, Univ., Fak. für Informatik, Diss., 2011

Neural processes underlying conceptualization in language production

Conceptualization, speech production, ERPs, fMRI