A neural marker for social bias toward in-group accents

Accents provide information about the speaker's geographical, socio-economic, and ethnic background. Research in applied psychology and sociolinguistics suggests that we generally prefer our own accent to other varieties of our native language and attribute more positive traits to it. Despite the widespread influence of accents on social interactions, educational and work settings the neural underpinnings of this social bias toward our own accent and, what may drive this bias, are unexplored. We measured brain activity while participants from two different geographical backgrounds listened passively to 3 English accent types embedded in an adaptation design. Cerebral activity in several regions, including bilateral amygdalae, revealed a significant interaction between the participants' own accent and the accent they listened to: while repetition of own accents elicited an enhanced neural response, repetition of the other group's accent resulted in reduced responses classically associated with adaptation. Our findings suggest that increased social relevance of, or greater emotional sensitivity to in-group accents, may underlie the own-accent bias. Our results provide a neural marker for the bias associated with accents, and show, for the first time, that the neural response to speech is partly shaped by the geographical background of the listener

Notions and subnotions in information structure

Three dimensions can be distinguished in a cross-linguistic account of information structure. First, there is the definition of the focus constituent, the part of the linguistic expression which is subject to some focus meaning. Second and third, there are the focus meanings and the array of structural devices that encode them. In a given language, the expression of focus is facilitated as well as constrained by the grammar within which the focus devices operate. The prevalence of focus ambiguity, the structural inability to make focus distinctions, will thus vary across languages, and within a language, across focus meanings

Communications Biophysics

Contains reports on five research projects.National Institutes of Health (Grant 5 P01 GM14940-03)National Institutes of Health (Grant 5 TOl GM01555-03)National Aeronautics and Space Administration (Grant NGL 22-009-304

Genome-wide association study identifies peanut allergy-specific loci and evidence of epigenetic mediation in US children

Food allergy (FA) affects 2%-10% of US children and is a growing clinical and public health problem. Here we conduct the first genome-wide association study of well-defined FA, including specific subtypes (peanut, milk and egg) in 2,759 US participants (1,315 children and 1,444 parents) from the Chicago Food Allergy Study, and identify peanut allergy (PA)-specific loci in the HLA-DR and -DQ gene region at 6p21.32, tagged by rs7192 (P=5.5 × 10 -8) and rs9275596 (P=6.8 × 10 -10), in 2,197 participants of European ancestry. We replicate these associations in an independent sample of European ancestry. These associations are further supported by meta-analyses across the discovery and replication samples. Both single-nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) are associated with differential DNA methylation levels at multiple CpG sites (

L1 Attrition vis-à-vis L2 Acquisition: Lexicon, Syntax-Pragmatics Interface, and Prosody in L1-English L2-Italian Late Bilinguals

Late bilingual speakers immersed in a second language (L2) environment often experience the non-pathological attrition of their first language (L1), exhibiting selective and reversible changes in L1 processing and production. While attrition research has largely focused on long-term residents in anglophone countries, examining changes primarily within a single L1 domain, the present study employs a novel experimental design to investigate L1 attrition, alongside L2 acquisition, across three domains (i.e., the lexicon, syntax-pragmatics interface, and prosody) in two groups of L1-English L2-Italian late bilinguals: long-term residents in Italy vs. university students in the UK. A total of 112 participants completed online tasks assessing lexical retrieval, anaphora resolution, and sentence stress patterns in both languages. First, both bilingual groups showed comparable levels of semantic interference in lexical retrieval. Second, at the syntax-pragmatics interface, only residents in Italy showed signs of L1 attrition in real-time processing of anaphora, while resolution preferences were similar between groups; in the L2, both bilingual groups demonstrated target-like preferences, despite some slowdown in processing. Third, while both groups showed some evidence of target-like L2 prosody, with residents in Italy matching L1-Italian sentence stress patterns closely, prosodic attrition was only reported for residents in Italy in exploratory analyses. Overall, this study supports the notion of L1 attrition as a natural consequence of bilingualism-one that is domain-and experience-dependent, unfolds along a continuum, and involves a complex (and possibly inverse) relationship between L1 and L2 performance that warrants further investigation

O que é prosódia?

Trata-se do capítulo 3 de Simultaneous structure in phonology, composto de seis capítulos: (1) Gesto, traços e autossegmentos, (2) Fonética na fonologia, (3) Definindo prosódia, (4) Modulações, (5) Sobre a dualidade da padronização e (6) Eventos fonológicos (segmentação, eventos simultâneos e paralelos)

The dimensions of academic scholarship: Faculty and administrator views

Faculty and administrators responded to 32 activity statements related to “scholarship” on a frequency basis and on the characteristicness of the role. Approximately 1,000 faculty members in 24 colleges and universities and 55 administrators from 5 of the schools participated. Factor analysis revealed 6 dimensions of scholarship — professional activity, research (publishing), teaching, service, artistic endeavor, and “engagement with the novel,” the last being a new conception, one valued highly by both faculty and administrators in all types of colleges and universities. Significant differences appeared with respect to faculty and administrative views on the importance of research in regional universities.Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/43591/1/11162_2004_Article_BF00992038.pd

William Garang

The songs in this collection were recorded and annotated as part of the project ‘Metre and Melody in Dinka Speech and Song’, a project carried out by researchers from the University of Edinburgh and the School of Oriental and African Studies in London, and funded by the UK Arts and Humanities Research Council as part of their ‘Beyond Text’ programme. The project aimed to understand the interplay between traditional Dinka musical forms and the Dinka language (which distinguishes words not just by different consonants and vowels but also by means of rhythm, pitch and voice quality), and to learn more about the way the song tradition responded to the disruptions of the long Sudanese civil war. In this context, we aimed to record a large collection of Dinka songs for preservation in a long-term sound archive. This collection is the result of that effort. It presents song material from 36 Dinka singers and groups of singers. Further details can be found in the readme file. The collection is accompanied by an index, which is explained in the readme file.The description of the data collection is to be found in ACollectionofDinkaSongs_readme. The index of songs is to be found in ACollectionofDinkaSongs_index