Uma análise do grau comparativo nos materiais didáticos de língua inglesa via teoria das operações predicativas e enunciativas

Pós-graduação em Linguística e Língua Portuguesa - FCLAR

Uma investigação funcional do verbo modal deber no espanhol falado peninsular

Coordenação de Aperfeiçoamento de Pessoal de Nível Superior (CAPES)

Uma investigação discursivo-funcional das orações concessivas introduzidas por aunque em dados do espanhol peninsular

Coordenação de Aperfeiçoamento de Pessoal de Nível Superior (CAPES)

Investigation of auditory processing disorder and language impairment using the speech-evoked auditory brainstem response

This study investigated whether there are differences in the Speech-Evoked Auditory Brainstem Response among children with Typical Development (TD), (Central) Auditory Processing Disorder (C) APD, and Language Impairment (LI). The speech-evoked Auditory Brainstem Response was tested in 57 children (ages 6-12). The children were placed into three groups: TD (n = 18), (C)APD (n = 18) and LI (n = 21). Speech-evoked ABR were elicited using the five-formant syllable/da/. Three dimensions were defined for analysis, including timing, harmonics, and pitch. A comparative analysis of the responses between the typical development children and children with (C)APD and LI revealed abnormal encoding of the speech acoustic features that are characteristics of speech perception in children with (C)APD and LI, although the two groups differed in their abnormalities. While the children with (C)APD might had a greater difficulty distinguishing stimuli based on timing cues, the children with LI had the additional difficulty of distinguishing speech harmonics, which are important to the identification of speech sounds. These data suggested that an inefficient representation of crucial components of speech sounds may contribute to the difficulties with language processing found in children with LI. Furthermore, these findings may indicate that the neural processes mediated by the auditory brainstem differ among children with auditory processing and speech-language disorders. (C) 2012 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

Mini-Mental State Examination sentence writing among community-dwelling elderly adults in Brazil: text fluency and grammar complexity

Background: In normal aging, the decrease in the syntactic complexity of written production is usually associated with cognitive deficits. This study was aimed to analyze the quality of older adults' textual production indicated by verbal fluency (number of words) and grammatical complexity (number of ideas) in relation to gender, age, schooling, and cognitive status. Methods: From a probabilistic sample of community-dwelling people aged 65 years and above (n = 900), 577 were selected on basis of their responses to the Mini-Mental State Examination (MMSE) sentence writing, which were submitted to content analysis; 323 were excluded as they left the item blank or performed illegible or not meaningful responses. Education adjusted cut-off scores for the MMSE were used to classify the participants as cognitively impaired or unimpaired. Total and subdomain MMSE scores were computed. Results: 40.56% of participants whose answers to the MMSE sentence were excluded from the analyses had cognitive impairment compared to 13.86% among those whose answers were included. The excluded participants were older and less educated. Women and those older than 80 years had the lowest scores in the MMSE. There was no statistically significant relationship between gender, age, schooling, and textual performance. There was a modest but significant correlation between number of words written and the scores in the Language subdomain. Conclusions: Results suggest the strong influence of schooling and age over MMSE sentence performance. Failing to write a sentence may suggest cognitive impairment, yet, instructions for the MMSE sentence, i.e. to produce a simple sentence, may limit its clinical interpretation.

Methodological proposal for elaboration of learning materials in sing language in university teaching

[EN] Hearing impairment may constitute a barrier for accessing to information and communication in public places. Since the oral communication forms the basis of the learning process, this problem becomes of particular relevance at schools and universities. To cope with this situation is not enough to provide a textual translation for people with hearing disabilities, society via educational authorities must facilitate alternatives that improve access to information and education to this collective. According to this reality, the possibility of having an alternative tool of communication based in the Spanish Sign Language (SSL) emerges as a contribution to help overcoming the communication obstacles that the students with this difficulty usually find.

Lexical Development in Adult Beginning Second Language Learners

This research tests the hypothesis that knowledge of derivational morphology facilitates vocabulary acquisition in beginning adult second language learners. Participants were mono-lingual English-speaking college students aged 18 years and older enrolled inintroductory Spanish courses. Knowledge of Spanish derivational morphology was tested through the use of a forced-choice translation task. Spanish lexical knowledge was measured by a translation task using direct translation (English word) primes and conceptual (picture) primes. A 2x2x2 mixed factor ANOVA examined the relationships between morphological knowledge (strong, moderate), error type (form-based, conceptual), and prime type (direct translation, picture). The results are consistent with the existence of a relationship between knowledge of derivational morphology andacquisition of second language vocabulary. Participants made more conceptually-based errors than form-based errors F (1,22)=7.744, p=.011. This result is consistent with Clahsen & Felser’s (2006) and Ullman’s (2004) models of second language processing. Additionally, participants with Strong morphological knowledge made fewer errors onthe lexical knowledge task than participants with Moderate morphological knowledge t(23)=-2.656, p=.014. I suggest future directions to clarify the relationship between morphological knowledge and lexical development in adult second language learners.

The Persistence of Shattered Dreams: a Comparative Study of the Audacity of the American Dream

In my thesis, I use historical and literary analysis to study how the concept of the American Dream was popularized during the Great Depression and how cultural understanding of the term has changed following the 2008 Recession. By comparing popular media, literature, and political documents within a historical framework from the 1930s and after 2008 through the present day, I analyze how the term ¿American Dream¿ has persisted as an element of the United States¿ national ethos. I explore why the language of the American Dream does not appear to carry the same resonance in American society as in the 1930s, even though the post-2008 economic environment is somewhat comparable to conditions created by the Great Depression and associated reform measures. This comparative historical approach in scholarly studies of the American Dream is unique because the two periods have not previously been discussed in relation to one another in order to show transformations in cultural understanding of the Dream. The American Dream, both embodying a dual identity as an aspiration to aspire to and also as a delusional fantasy which can lead to cynicism, is a highly complex idea in lived experience. The concept¿s ambiguous nature allows for individuals to interpret it differently, allowing for the term to remain resilient throughout different periods in United States history. While the meaning of the term has been subject to change, it is grounded upon an idealistic concept of American individualism and hope that through one¿s merit, one will be able to achieve one¿s vision of success. Through interdisciplinary analysis, I show that the American Dream will alter to suit the needs of contemporary society and the term¿s power will continue to endure in society despite evidence of rising cynicism since 2008.

Comparative Analysis of Russian and French Prosodies: Theoretical, Experimental and Applied Aspects"

Experience shows that in teaching the pronunciation of a foreign language, it is the native syllable stereotype that resists correction most strongly. This is because the syllable is the basic unit of the perception and production of speech, and syllabic production is highly automatic and to some degree determines the prosody of speech at all levels: accent, rhythm, phrase, etc. The results of psycho-physiological studies show that the human acoustic analyser is a typical contemplator organ and new acoustic qualities are perceived through their inclusion into the already existing system of values characteristic to the mother tongue. This results in the adaptation of the perception and so production of foreign speech to native patterns. The less conscious the perception of the unit and the more 'primitive' its status, the greater the degree of its auditory assimilation, and the syllable is certainly among the less controllable linguistic units. The group carried out a complex investigation of the French and Russian languages at the level of syllable realisation, focusing on the stressed syllable of both open and closed types. The useful acoustic characteristics of the French/Russian syllable pattern were determined through identifying a typical syllable pattern within the system of each of the two languages, comparing these patterns to establish their contrasting features, and observing and systematising deviations from the pattern typical of the French/Russian language teaching situation. The components of the syllable pattern shown to need particular attention in teaching French pronunciation to Russian native speakers were intensity, fundamental frequency, and duration. The group then developed a method of correction which combines the auditory and visual canals of sound signal perception and tested this method with groups of Russian students of different levels.

A Comparative Study of Central and Eastern European Social Policy Concernig Mental Disability

The main goal of this project was to identity whether an imported system of social policy can be suitable for a host country, and if not why not. Romanian social policy concerning the mentally disabled represents a paradoxical situation in that while social policy is designed to ensure both an institutional structure and a juridical environment, in practice it is far from successful. The central question which Ms. Ciumageanu asked therefore was whether this failure was due to systemic factors, or whether the problem lay in reworking an imported social policy system to meet local needs. She took a comparative approach, also considering both the Scandinavian model of social policy, particularly the Danish model which has been adopted in Romania, and the Hungarian system, which has inherited a similar universal welfare system and perpetuated it to some extent. In order to verify her hypothesis, she also studied the transformation of the welfare system in Great Britain, which meant a shift from state responsibility towards community care. In all these she concentrated on two major aspects: the structural design within the different countries and, at a micro level, the societal response. Following her analyses of the various in the other countries concerned, Ms. Ciumageanu concluded that the major differences lie first in the difference between the stages of policy design. Here Denmark is the most advanced and Romania the most backwards. Denmark has a fairly elaborate infrastructure, Britain a system with may gaps to bridge, and Hungary and Romania are struggling with severe difficulties owing both to the inherited structure and the limits imposed by an inadequate GDP. While in Denmark and Britain, mental patients are integrated into an elaborate system of care, designed and administered by the state (in Denmark) or communities (in Britain), in Hungary and Romania, the state designs and fails to implement the policy and community support is minimal, partly due to the lack of a fully developed civil society. At the micro level the differences are similar. While in Denmark and Britain there is a consensus about the roles of the state and of civil societies (although at different levels in the two countries, with the state being more supportive in Denmark), in Romania and to a considerable extent in Hungary, civil society tends to expect too much from the state, which in its turn is withdrawing faster from its social roles than from its economic ones, generating a gap between the welfare state and the market economy and disadvantaging the expected transition from a welfare state to a welfare society and, implicitly, the societal response towards those mentally disabled persons in it. On an intermediate level, the factors influencing social policy as a whole were much the same for Hungary and Romania. Economic factors include the accumulated economic resources of both state and citizens, and the inherited pattern of redistribution, as well as the infrastructure; institutional resources include the role of the state and the efficiency of the state bureaucracy, the strength and efficiency of the state apparatus, political stability and the complexity of political democratisation, the introduction of market institutions, the strength of civil society and civic sector institutions. From the standpoint of the societal response, some factors were common to all countries, particularly the historical context, the collective and institutional memories and established patterns of behaviour. In the specific case of Romania, general structural and environmental factors - industrialisation and forced urbanisation - have had a definite influence on family structure, values and behavioural patterns. The analysis of Romanian social policy revealed several causes for failure to date. The first was the instability of the policy and the failure to consider the structural network involved in developing it, rather than just the results obtained. The second was the failure to take into account the relationship between the individual and the group in all its aspects, followed by the lack of active assistance for prevention, re-socialisation or professional integration of persons with mental disabilities. Finally, the state fails to recognise its inability to support an expensive psychiatric enterprise and does not provide any incentive to the private sector. This creates tremendous social costs for both the state and the individual. NGOs working in the field in Romania have been somewhat more successful but are still limited by their lack of funding and personnel and the idea of a combined system is as yet utopian in the circumstances in the country.

A Comparative Study of English Word Order Acquisition by Elementary and Secondary School Pupils - Native Speakers of Serbian and Hungarian

Kitic investigated the phenomenon of English word order acquisition by Serbian and Hungarian speakers, examining both the theoretical and empirical aspects of this phenomenon. She began by looking at language learning and language acquisition, viewing word order acquisition in the context of relevant linguistic and psycholinguistic knowledge. The main hypothesis of her empirical investigation was that the majority of word order mistakes in the language production of Serbian and Hungarian speakers of English is due to mother tongue interference. Three supporting hypotheses were introduced to specify the phenomenon of interference in its correlation to (1) language proficiency, (2) sentence patterns, and (3) optional adverbials. The conclusions were based on error analysis of 9280 sentences of 464 elementary and high school learners. The results showed that a learner's level of proficiency seems to be a relevant factor in mother tongue interference as this decreases with increased proficiency. Word order errors are however fossilised at the highest levels. The causes of interference errors, which increase with the number of sentence elements, are either absent sentence patterns or similar ones. In the case of adverbials, word order errors have two forms: interrelation (with canonical elements) and mixed adverbials.

A Comparative Study of Two Semantic Systems: Body Russian and Russian Phraseology

Grigorij Kreidlin (Russia). A Comparative Study of Two Semantic Systems: Body Russian and Russian Phraseology. Mr. Kreidlin teaches in the Department of Theoretical and Applied Linguistics of the State University of Humanities in Moscow and worked on this project from August 1996 to July 1998. The classical approach to non-verbal and verbal oral communication is based on a traditional separation of body and mind. Linguists studied words and phrasemes, the products of mind activities, while gestures, facial expressions, postures and other forms of body language were left to anthropologists, psychologists, physiologists, and indeed to anyone but linguists. Only recently have linguists begun to turn their attention to gestures and semiotic and cognitive paradigms are now appearing that raise the question of designing an integral model for the unified description of non-verbal and verbal communicative behaviour. This project attempted to elaborate lexical and semantic fragments of such a model, producing a co-ordinated semantic description of the main Russian gestures (including gestures proper, postures and facial expressions) and their natural language analogues. The concept of emblematic gestures and gestural phrasemes and of their semantic links permitted an appropriate description of the transformation of a body as a purely physical substance into a body as a carrier of essential attributes of Russian culture - the semiotic process called the culturalisation of the human body. Here the human body embodies a system of cultural values and displays them in a text within the area of phraseology and some other important language domains. The goal of this research was to develop a theory that would account for the fundamental peculiarities of the process. The model proposed is based on the unified lexicographic representation of verbal and non-verbal units in the Dictionary of Russian Gestures, which the Mr. Kreidlin had earlier complied in collaboration with a group of his students. The Dictionary was originally oriented only towards reflecting how the lexical competence of Russian body language is represented in the Russian mind. Now a special type of phraseological zone has been designed to reflect explicitly semantic relationships between the gestures in the entries and phrasemes and to provide the necessary information for a detailed description of these. All the definitions, rules of usage and the established correlations are written in a semantic meta-language. Several classes of Russian gestural phrasemes were identified, including those phrasemes and idioms with semantic definitions close to those of the corresponding gestures, those phraseological units that have lost touch with the related gestures (although etymologically they are derived from gestures that have gone out of use), and phrasemes and idioms which have semantic traces or reflexes inherited from the meaning of the related gestures. The basic assumptions and practical considerations underlying the work were as follows. (1) To compare meanings one has to be able to state them. To state the meaning of a gesture or a phraseological expression, one needs a formal semantic meta-language of propositional character that represents the cognitive and mental aspects of the codes. (2) The semantic contrastive analysis of any semiotic codes used in person-to-person communication also requires a single semantic meta-language, i.e. a formal semantic language of description,. This language must be as linguistically and culturally independent as possible and yet must be open to interpretation through any culture and code. Another possible method of conducting comparative verbal-non-verbal semantic research is to work with different semantic meta-languages and semantic nets and to learn how to combine them, translate from one to another, etc. in order to reach a common basis for the subsequent comparison of units. (3) The practical work in defining phraseological units and organising the phraseological zone in the Dictionary of Russian Gestures unexpectedly showed that semantic links between gestures and gestural phrasemes are reflected not only in common semantic elements and syntactic structure of semantic propositions, but also in general and partial cognitive operations that are made over semantic definitions. (4) In comparative semantic analysis one should take into account different values and roles of inner form and image components in the semantic representation of non-verbal and verbal units. (5) For the most part, gestural phrasemes are direct semantic derivatives of gestures. The cognitive and formal techniques can be regarded as typological features for the future functional-semantic classification of gestural phrasemes: two phrasemes whose meaning can be obtained by the same cognitive or purely syntactic operations (or types of operations) over the meanings of the corresponding gestures, belong by definition to one and the same class. The nature of many cognitive operations has not been studied well so far, but the first steps towards its comprehension and description have been taken. The research identified 25 logically possible classes of relationships between a gesture and a gestural phraseme. The calculation is based on theoretically possible formal (set-theory) correlations between signifiers and signified of the non-verbal and verbal units. However, in order to examine which of them are realised in practice a complete semantic and lexicographic description of all (not only central) everyday emblems and gestural phrasemes is required and this unfortunately does not yet exist. Mr. Kreidlin suggests that the results of the comparative analysis of verbal and non-verbal units could also be used in other research areas such as the lexicography of emotions.

Placebo-controlled trials of Chinese herbal medicine and conventional medicine - comparative study

BACKGROUND: Chinese herbal medicine (CHM) is increasingly used in the West, but the evidence on its effectiveness is a matter of debate. We compared the characteristics, study quality and results of clinical trials of CHM and conventional medicine. METHODS: Comparative study of placebo-controlled trials of CHM and conventional medicine. Eleven bibliographic databases and searches by hand of 48 Chinese-language journals. Conventional medicine trials matched for condition and type of outcome were randomly selected from the Cochrane Controlled Trials Register (issue 1, 2003). Trials described as double-blind, with adequate generation of allocation sequence and adequate concealment of allocation, were assumed to be of high quality. Data were analysed using funnel plots and multivariable meta-regression models. RESULTS: 136 CHM trials (119 published in Chinese, 17 published in English) and 136 matched conventional medicine trials (125 published in English) were analysed. The quality of Chinese-language CHM trials tended to be lower than that of English-language CHM trials and conventional medicine trials. Three (2%) CHM trials and 10 (7%) conventional medicine trials were of high quality. In all groups, smaller trials showed more beneficial treatment effects than larger trials. CHM trials published in Chinese showed considerably larger effects than CHM trials published in English (adjusted ratio of ORs 0.29, 95% confidence intervals 0.17-0.52). CONCLUSIONS: Biases are present both in placebo-controlled trials of CHM and conventional medicine, but may be most pronounced in CHM trials published in Chinese-language journals. Only few CHM trials of adequate methodology exist and the effectiveness of CHM therefore remains poorly documented.