Language transmission in the family in Wales: an example of innovative language planning.

This paper examines the achievements to date of Twf (“Growth”) — a project initiated as part of language planning efforts in Wales to encourage families to bring up their children to be bilingual. Evidence is presented of the ways in which the project has succeeded in raising awareness of the advantages of bilingualism amongst parents, prospective parents and the public at large by working strategically with health professionals and Early Years organizations, and by developing a range of highly innovative promotional materials. Given the central importance of the family as a site of intergenerational language transmission, the achievements of this project are likely to be of interest to those concerned with language planning in other minority communities in many other parts of the world. The lessons for language planning both in Wales and in other settings are discussed.

Changing Standards? Children's awareness and knowledge of features of written standard English at ages 10-11

This paper reports the findings of a small-scale research project, which investigated the levels of awareness and knowledge of written standard English of 10- and 11-year-old children in two English primary schools over a six-year period, coinciding with the implementation in the schools of the National Literacy Strategy (NLS). A questionnaire was used to provide quantitative and qualitative data relating to: features of writing which were recognised as standard or non-standard; children's understanding of technical terminology; variations between boys' and girls' performance; and the impact of the NLS over time. The findings reveal variations in levels of recognition of different non-standard features, differences between girls' and boys' recognition, possible examples of language change, but no evidence of a positive impact of the NLS. The implications of these findings are discussed both in terms of changes in educational standards and changes to standard English.

The integration of figurative language and static depictions: an eye movement study of fictive motion

Do we view the world differently if it is described to us in figurative rather than literal terms? An answer to this question would reveal something about both the conceptual representation of figurative language and the scope of top-down influences oil scene perception. Previous work has shown that participants will look longer at a path region of a picture when it is described with a type of figurative language called fictive motion (The road goes through the desert) rather than without (The road is in the desert). The current experiment provided evidence that such fictive motion descriptions affect eye movements by evoking mental representations of motion. If participants heard contextual information that would hinder actual motion, it influenced how they viewed a picture when it was described with fictive motion. Inspection times and eye movements scanning along the path increased during fictive motion descriptions when the terrain was first described as difficult (The desert is hilly) as compared to easy (The desert is flat); there were no such effects for descriptions without fictive motion. It is argued that fictive motion evokes a mental simulation of motion that is immediately integrated with visual processing, and hence figurative language can have a distinct effect on perception. (c) 2005 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

Knowledge, attitudes and practices of farmers on rodent pests and their management in the lowlands of the Sierra Madre Biodiversity Corridor, Philippines

A survey of the knowledge, attitudes and practices (KAP) of 100 rice farmers and 50 coconut farmers was conducted in the coastal lowland agro-ecosystems of the Sierra Madre Biodiversity Corridor, Luzon, Philippines to identify current rodent management practices and to understand the extent of rat damage and the attitudes of farmers to community actions for rodent management. Pests were most commonly listed as one of the three most important rice and coconut production constraints. Other major crop production constraints were typhoons and insufficient water. Farmers consider rats to be the major pest of coconut and of rice during the wet season rice crop, with average yield losses of 3.0% and 13.2%, respectively. Rice and coconut farmers practised a wide range of rodent management techniques. These included scrub clearance, hunting and trapping. Of the 42 rice farmers and 3 coconut farmers that applied rodenticides to control rodents, all used the acute rodenticide, zinc phosphide. However, only ten rice farmers (23.8%) applied rodenticides prior to the booting stage and only seven farmers (15.6%) conducted pre-baiting before applying zinc phosphide. The majority of farmers belonged to farmer organisations and believed that rat control can only be done by farmers working together. However, during the last cropping season, less than a third of rice farmers (31.2%) applied rodent management as a group. In order to reduce the impact of rodents on the farmers of the coastal lowlands of the Sierra Madre Biodiversity Corridor, integrated management strategies need to be developed that specifically target the pest rodents in a sustainable manner, and community actions for rodent management should be promoted.

On the nature and cause of Specific Language Impairment: a view from sentence processing and infant research

This paper addresses the nature and cause of Specific Language Impairment (SLI) by reviewing recent research in sentence processing of children with SLI compared to typically developing (TD) children and research in infant speech perception. These studies have revealed that children with SLI are sensitive to syntactic, semantic, and real-world information, but do not show sensitivity to grammatical morphemes with low phonetic saliency, and they show longer reaction times than age-matched controls. TD children from the age of 4 show trace reactivation, but some children with SLI fail to show this effect, which resembles the pattern of adults and TD children with low working memory. Finally, findings from the German Language Development (GLAD) Project have revealed that a group of children at risk for SLI had a history of an auditory delay and impaired processing of prosodic information in the first months of their life, which is not detectable later in life. Although this is a single project that needs to be replicated with a larger group of children, it provides preliminary support for accounts of SLI which make an explicit link between an early deficit in the processing of phonology and later language deficits, and the Computational Complexity Hypothesis that argues that the language deficit in children with SLI lies in difficulties integrating different types of information at the interfaces.

POP-11 comes of age: the advancement of an AI programming language

In 1989, the computer programming language POP-11 is 21 years old. This book looks at the reasons behind its invention, and traces its rise from an experimental language to a major AI language, playing a major part in many innovating projects. There is a chapter on the inventor of the language, Robin Popplestone, and a discussion of the applications of POP-11 in a variety of areas. The efficiency of AI programming is covered, along with a comparison between POP-11 and other programming languages. The book concludes by reviewing the standardization of POP-11 into POP91.