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Objective:To identify factors that increase the microbial load in the operating room (OR) and recommend solutions to minimize the effect of these factors.Design:Observation and sampling study.Setting:Academic health center, public hospitals.Methods:We analyzed 4 videotaped orthopedic surgeries (15 hours in total) for door openings and staff movement. The data were translated into a script denoting a representative frequency and location of movements for each OR team member. These activities were then simulated for 30 minutes per trial in a functional operating room by the researchers re-enacting OR staff-member roles, while collecting bacteria and fungi using settle plates. To test the hypotheses on the influence of activity on microbial load, an experimental design was created in which each factor was tested at higher (and lower) than normal activity settings for a 30-minute period. These trials were conducted in 2 phases.Results:The frequency of door opening did not independently affect the microbial load in the OR. However, a longer duration and greater width of door opening led to increased microbial load in the OR. Increased staff movement also increased the microbial load. There was a significantly higher microbial load on the floor than at waist level.Conclusions:Movement of staff and the duration and width of door opening definitely affects the OR microbial load. However, further investigation is needed to determine how the number of staff affects the microbial load and how to reduce the microbial load at the surgical table.

The present study aims to document the developmental profile of static and dynamic acoustic features of vowel productions in monolingual Mandarin-speaking children aged between three and six years in comparison to adults. Twenty-nine monolingual Mandarin children and 12 native Mandarin adults were recorded producing ten Mandarin disyllabic words containing five monophthongal vowel phonemes /a i u yɤ/. F1 and F2 values were measured at five equidistant temporal locations (the 20–35–50–65–80% points of the vowel's duration) and normalized. Scatter plots showed clear separations between vowel categories although the size of individual vowel categories exhibited a decreasing trend as the age increased. This indicates that speakers as young as three years old could separate these five Mandarin vowels in the acoustic space but they were still refining the acoustic properties of their vowel production as they matured. Although the tested vowels were monophthongs, they were still characterized by distinctive formant movement patterns. Mandarin children generally demonstrated formant movement patterns comparable to those of adult speakers. However, children still showed positional variation and differed from adults in the magnitudes of spectral change for certain vowels. This indicates that vowel development is a long-term process which extends beyond three years of age.

Speech intelligibility in a multitalker background can be affected by the language of both the talker and the interfering speech. This study investigated whether this interaction is modulated by dialect variations of the same language. American English listeners were presented with target sentences in either their own General American English (GAE) or a different accent (Southern American English [SAE]) masked by either GAE or SAE two-talker babble at three sound to noise ratios (SNRs): +3, 0, and –3 dB. All speech materials were produced by male talkers. Across all conditions, SAE target was more intelligible than GAE. Intelligibility of either target decreased as the level of the interfering babble noise increased. Target accent interacted with masking accent: at +3 dB SNR, GAE (and not SAE) was the more effective masker. The target-masker interaction was different as listening conditions deteriorated: at 0 and –3 dB SNR, masking accent did not affect GAE target, but when the target was SAE, the SAE masker (and not GAE) was more effective. Thus, at increased noise levels, listeners benefited from the mismatch between the target and masking accents only when the target was in a nonnative accent. These results demonstrate that dialect variation can influence listeners’ performance in a multitalker environment. The apparent asymmetry in intelligibility of accents may be in part related to dialect-specific prosodic and phonetic features.

Whether some languages or dialects are spoken faster or slower than others constitutes a gap in the understanding of sociolinguistic variation. Speech tempo is interconnected with the social, physical and psychological marking of speech. This study examines regional variation in articulation rate and its manifestations across speaker age, gender, and speaking situations (reading vs. informal talk). The results of an experimental investigation show that articulation rate differs significantly between two regional varieties of American English examined here. A group of Northern speakers (from Wisconsin) spoke significantly faster than a group of Southern speakers (from North Carolina). With regard to age and gender, young adults read faster than older adults in both regions; in informal talks, however, only Northern young adults spoke faster than older adults. Effects of gender were smaller and less consistent; men generally spoke slightly faster than women did. As the body of work on the sociophonetics of American English continues to grow in scope and depth, we argue that it is important to include fundamental phonetic information as part of our catalog of regional differences and patterns of change in American English.

‘Proverbs and idioms are never used by people of education,’ Mrs Gaskell makes Molly Gibson's genteel stepmother say towards the end of Wives and Daughters (1866), in shocked response to Molly's description of the Squire's son as ‘the apple of his eye’. Nonetheless, proverbs abound in the pages of 19th-century literature (including Mrs Gaskell herself), providing a convenient way of identifying characters' attitudes and feelings concisely and colourfully.

Two detailed reviews of four key publications in the EFL world in 1995, the first by a British lexicographer, the second by a Belgian language teacher

‘Who are these Fowlers?’ wrote a reviewer in the New York Times, quoted on page 56 of this much-needed biography of the more famous of the brothers, Henry Watson Fowler. The review was not of Modern English Usage or any of their other well-known books, but of an earlier work they wrote for Oxford University Press, a translation of the Syrian Greek writer Lucian of Samosata, published in 1905, the work that first brought them into contact with the strange world of academic publishing.

Review of Brewer's Dictionary of Phrase and Fable; Brewer's Dictionary of Modern Phrase and Fable; The Oxford Dictionary of Phrase and Fable

This study examines synchronic variation in vowels in an effort to advance our understanding of the “transmission problem” in language change, in particular, the cross-generational perseverance of vowel shifts. Seeking a connection to patterns anddirectionsofshiftsinvowelsystemsovertime,weexaminetheroleofalargely neglectedparameterofstructuredheterogeneity:prosodicprominence.ExperimentaldatafromtwoMidwesterndialectsofAmericanEnglish—centralOhioandsouthcentral Wisconsin—show that, for the vowels studied here, the changes in vowel characteristics observed under higher degrees of prosodic prominence (or greater emphasis) correspond to the changes predicted by well-established principles of chainshifting.Anacousticstudyassessesvariationinprosodicprominencebyexamining formant frequencies at multiple locations in the course of vowel duration, whichprovidesinformationaboutvowelqualitydynamics.Aperceptualstudydetermines listeners’sensitivity to the obtained acoustic variation, as manifested in specific patterns of vowel identification, confusions, and category goodness ratings. Finally, a prosodically based explanation of the transmission of sound change is described, which offers new connections between structural and social factors in sound change, notably the roles of “social affect” and speaker gender.