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Brussels is an officially French-Dutch bilingual city, yet in reality, it is profoundly and increasingly multilingual. Earlier research on the linguistic situation in Brussels has predominantly focused on the competing dominant languages, resulting in very limited scholarly attention to smaller language communities. This paper addresses this blind spot by exploring the language repertoires, proficiencies and practices of members of the Chinese communities. Linking insights from language ecology to the study of language maintenance and shift, and informed by the questionnaire data, we discuss how the changing sociodemographic backgrounds of the participants affect the language maintenance and shift of the whole Chinese communities. Our results do not reveal a traditional pattern of shift toward the dominant majority languages, but rather hint at a community-level shift toward more complex multilingual repertoires with an increased role for English and Mandarin, in tune with Brussels’ increasingly international and multilingual context at large.

Background. By including individuals with atypical developmental profiles, this study adds to ongoing research that addresses the link between world and mind in (pre)adolescents’ acquisition of socially meaningful language variation (Nardy, Chevrot & Barbu 2013; Smith, Durham & Richards 2013; Van De Mieroop, Zenner & Marzo 2016). In particular, it harnesses the developmental profile of (pre)adolescents with Down Syndrome (DS) for a case study on Belgian Dutch pronouns of address. With strengths in social functioning on the one hand (Fidler et al. 2008; Næss et al. 2017) and challenges with language production on the other (see Abbeduto et al. 2020), these (pre)adolescents and their language use can provide unique insights into how social functioning and language production relate to the development of socially meaningful language variation. We attempt this here through a case study on Belgian Dutch pronouns of address; their two dimensions of socially meaningful variation (formal/informal and standard/colloquial) with patterned yet fuzzy distinctions require a speaker’s highly sophisticated sensitivity (Plevoets, Speelman & Geeraerts 2008). Research question. Against this background, the main question addressed in this study is to what extent (pre)adolescents with DS show variation in the production of Belgian Dutch pronouns of address, with special attention to the social context in question (i.e., the degree of formality and familiarity in the composition of speaker, hearer, and situation) and the degree of prior conceptual activation by priming. The attested variation is interpreted drawing from (pre)adolescents’ social functioning, language production, and their caregiver’s input. Method. As a proof of concept, four dyads consisting of (pre)adolescents with DS and their main caregiver take part in a discourse completion task in which stimuli depicting varied social contexts are aimed at eliciting Belgian Dutch pronouns of address. To assess the full linguistic repertoire, three phases with increasing degrees of priming are integrated. To illustrate, a phase 1 stimulus includes Wat zegt de man tegen de dokter? [‘What does the man say to the doctor?’]. In phase 2, this query is preceded by the sentence De man zegt: ‘ge moet me helpen’ [‘The man says: ‘you have to help me’]. Finally, phase 3 additionally introduces forced choice via predefined answer options, e.g., Kun(t) (u/je/gij) iets aan mijn buikpijn doen? [‘Can you do something about my stomachache?’]. The (pre)adolescents with DS’ social functioning and general language production are measured via well-established diagnostic assessments, and the role of the input is evaluated through a direct comparison of the caregiver’s responses with their child’s on the same task. Results are analyzed and compared per dyad using multifactorial statistics. Findings and implications. Through the innovations of including (pre)adolescents with DS as an understudied community and directly comparing their pronoun use to their caregivers’, this study overall contributes to disentangling how the link between social functioning, language production, and input is reflected in the development of socially meaningful language variation.

Juliane House hat zahlreiche grundlegende Arbeiten über das Übersetzen geschrieben. Später hat sie zudem viel über Fremdsprachenunterricht geschrieben und in den letzten Jahren einiges über Übersetzen im Fremdsprachenunterricht. Dabei geht es ihr vor allem um die Text- oder Diskursebene. Sie hat über interkulturelle Unterschiede geforscht, besonders in Bezug auf das Englische und das Deutsche (z.B. House 1998). Mit anregenden Beispielen hat sie gezeigt, wie man die Übersetzung zur Bewusstmachung solcher kulturellen Unterschiede im Unterricht einsetzen kann (z.B. House 2001). Im Folgenden geht es ebenfalls um Übersetzung und Fremdsprachen, doch in einem anderen Sinne. Es geht um einzelne Wörter, nicht um Texte oder Diskurse, es geht um die unteren Ebenen der Sprachverwendung und es geht um das Sprachwissen im Gedächtnis, nicht um das Weltwissen. In einem Text zum Thema Wortschatzerwerb schlägt House (1995) eine ganze Reihe von Forschungsfragen vor. Dazu gehören einige Fragen, auf die im Folgenden näher eingegangen wird, wie die Struktur des mentalen Lexikons oder die Art der „Verbindung zwischen lexikalischen Einheiten in L1 und L2“ (House 1995: 94). Lange wurde der Wortschatzerwerb in der Fremdsprachenerwerbsforschung vernachlässigt (House 1995: 92). Inzwischen hat sich die Lage zwar gebessert, doch es fehlt ein „führendes Theoriemodell“ (Schmidt 2002: 336). Im Falle der Mehrsprachigkeit sind unterschiedliche Beziehungen zwischen Wortform(en) und -bedeutung(en) möglich, wobei die Art des Spracherwerbs und des Einsatzes der Sprachkenntnisse vermutlich eine Rolle spielt. Auch bestimmte Worteigenschaften scheinen die Art der Wortrepräsentation zu beeinflussen. Darüber sind in der kognitionspsychologischen Literatur einige Daten gesammelt worden, die für die Rolle der Wortübersetzung beim Fremdsprachenerwerb aufschlussreich sein dürften. Zu dieser Rolle wurden auch DaF-Lernende befragt. Nach der Besprechung experimenteller Daten und Beobachtungen zum Verhältnis Ausgangssprache (L1)/Zielsprache (L2) auf der Ebene der Wortrepräsentationen wird die Befragung kurz vorgestellt. Sowohl bei den Daten aus der kognitionspsychologischen Literatur wie bei der Befragung geht es um Erwachsene.

Homophony avoidance is often cited as a motivation for certain patterns in language change. Throughout the history of Dutch, several instances of morphophonological change have been claimed to have occurred or been inhibited to avoid homophony between present and past tense (Van Bree 1987; Van Loon 2014). For example, the schwa apocope in Early Modern Dutch that affected nearly all Dutch words did not take place in weak preterites (hoopte PST-3SG ‘hope’), which would render them indistinguishable from the present (hoopt PRS-3SG). It did take place however in irregular preterites (kocht < kochte PST-3SG ‘buy’) which remained distinguishable from their present counterparts (koop PRS-3SG) without schwa. Yet, how plausible is this homophony avoidance explanation? Do language users actually take this into account? While the topic is not uncontroversial (King 1967, Lass 1987; 1997a; 1997b: 355-361, Sampson 2013), initial experimental research indeed suggests homophony avoidance to be a cognitively plausible explanation for certain patterns in language change (Kaplan 2011; Kaplan & Muratani 2015; Yin & White 2018). In this paper, we seek further experimental substantiation of homophony avoidance as a cognitive factor in language change. We specifically test whether language users avoid homophony between present and past tense. In a Wug-test, we focus on Dutch non-verbs ending in a dental which, when used in the preterite plural, become homophonous with the present plural (compare vatten PST-3PL to vatten PRS-3PL ‘understand’). Language users can avoid this homophony by switching to a perfect (ze hebben gevat PERF-3PL) which has become semantically interchangeable with the preterite in many contexts in present day Dutch. Participants (n=255) were presented with a forced-choice-task requiring them to choose between the perfect or preterite of non-verbs to fill a blank in a stimulus sentence. The non-verbs either showed a double dental, causing the preterite plural to be both homophonous and homonymous with the present plural (compare vatten PST-3PL to vatten PST-3PL), a single dental, causing the preterite plural to be homophonous, but not homonymous with the present plural (compare duldden PST-3PL to dulden PST-3PL ‘tolerate’) or no dental, causing no homophony. Two between-subject conditions were created: one with only singular verbs and one with only plural verbs. Half of stimuli sentences in each condition contained the explicit past tense marker gisteren ‘yesterday’, while the other half did not. We hypothesized that the presence of such marker would diminish the ambiguity in the sentence by rendering the homophony less problematic. Results show that avoidance of the preterite is indeed highest for verbs with a double dental. This effect is largest for plural verbs without explicit adverbial past tense marker, followed by plural verbs with explicit marker. For singular verbs the effect was not significant. This suggests that language users indeed try to avoid homophony. More generally, this paper contributes to a better understanding of the role of cognition in community wide processes of language change. References Kaplan, Abby. 2011. How much homophony is normal? Journal of Linguistics 47(3). 631–671. Kaplan, Abby & Yuka Muratani. 2015. Categorical and gradient homophony avoidance: Evidence from Japanese. Laboratory Phonology 6(2). 167–195. King, Robert D. 1967. Functional load and sound change. Language 43(4). 831-852 Lass, Roger. 1987. The shape of English. Londen: Dent. Lass, Roger. 1997a. Arse longa, vita brevis: last words on ‘harmful homophony’. Studia Anglica Posnaniensia 32. 21-31. Lass, Roger. 1997b. Historical linguistics and language change. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Sampson, Geoffrey. 2013. A counterexample to homophony avoidance. Diachronica 30(4). 579-591. Van Bree, Cor. 1987. Historische grammatica van het Nederlands. Dordrecht: Foris. Van Loon, Jozef. 2014. Historische fonologie van het Nederlands. Schoten: Universitas. Yin, Sora Heng & James White 2018. Neutralization and homophony avoidancein phonological learning. Cognition 179. 89–101.

International audience; Nearly 20 y ago, Jared Diamond and Peter Bellwood reviewed the evidence for the associated spread of farming and large language families by the demographic expansions of farmers. Since then, advances in obtaining and analyzing genomic data from modern and ancient populations have transformed our knowledge of human dispersals during the Holocene. Here, we provide an overview of Holocene dispersals in the light of genomic evidence and conclude that they have a complex history. Even when there is a demonstrated connection between a demographic expansion of people, the spread of agriculture, and the spread of a particular language family, the outcome in the results of contact between expanding and resident groups is highly variable. Further research is needed to identify the factors and social circumstances that have influenced this variation and complex history.

The question whether some second language (L2) features (forms, items, structures, patterns, rules) and, if so, which types of features, are more affected by instruction or are more effectively instructed than others has received increasing attention in applied linguistics and SLA research since the mid-1990s (VanPatten, 1994; Spada, 1997). For SLA researchers, knowing how the nature of the input stimulus interacts with the human cognitive processing and learning mechanisms is important for constructing a comprehensive theory of language acquisition. For theoretical, typological and psycho-linguists, knowing which types of features of language are hard to learn and teach can inform theories of language and processing complexity (Szmrecsanyi & Kortmann, 2012). For L2 teachers and curriculum and textbook developers, knowing which type of L2 features to select in the typically limited teaching time is important for optimizing L2 teaching and learning effectiveness (Doughty & Williams, 1998).

International audience; Alcohol intoxication is known to affect many aspects of human behavior and cognition; one of such affected systems is articulation during speech production. Although much research has revealed that alcohol negatively impacts pronunciation in a first language (L1), there is only initial evidence suggesting a potential beneficial effect of inebriation on articulation in a non-native language (L2). The aim of this study was thus to compare the effect of alcohol consumption on pronunciation in an L1 and an L2. Participants who had ingested different amounts of alcohol provided speech samples in their L1 (Dutch) and L2 (English), and native speakers of each language subsequently rated the pronunciation of these samples on their intelligibility (for the L1) and accent nativelikeness (for the L2). These data were analyzed with generalized additive mixed modeling. Participants’ blood alcohol concentration indeed negatively affected pronunciation in L1, but it produced no significant effect on the L2 accent ratings. The expected negative impact of alcohol on L1 articulation can be explained by reduction in fine motor control. We present two hypotheses to account for the absence of any effects of intoxication on L2 pronunciation: (1) there may be a reduction in L1 interference on L2 speech due to decreased motor control or (2) alcohol may produce a differential effect on each of the two linguistic subsystems.

This paper explores the role of a series of intercultural dialogues deployed as an intercultural intervention in scaffolding the development of interculturality of Chinese international students and Belgian undergraduates. The data highlight the fundamentally dynamic dialogic nature and process of intercultural engagement whereby the individuals actively seek to relate and construct meanings collaboratively. Drawing on a constructivist approach to interculturality and employing ethnographic methods, we contend that the efforts to connect play a pivotal role in mediating the process of developing the knowledge of cultural practices and that of becoming willing and prepared to challenge the self and familiar tropes.

Objective:This paper reports on an experiment conducted with 174 Flemish children in three age groups, namely first, third and fifth year of primary school, aiming to assess the social meaning children associate with English-sourced lexemes in Belgian Dutch.Method:The children were presented with 2 versions of a cartoon hero developed specifically for this study: Sterrenman, who only uses Dutch words, and Starman, who uses English alternatives for 17 content words in the cartoon’s script. Relying on extensive pretesting, we adapted standard designs and instrumentation from social psychology (the matched guise technique) and language acquisition research to gauge the children’s appreciation of the two heroes, their understanding of the English and Dutch vocabulary used in the script, and their level of language awareness.Findings:The key findings are: rather than an incremental increase in favorable social meaning for English from the first to the third age group under scrutiny, we see a decline of the prestige of Dutch in the oldest age group; the children’s level of language awareness, receptive vocabulary knowledge and age seem associated with their overall appreciation of Sterrenman and Starman; working with children from various age groups inevitably entails methodological risks.Originality:This is a first and hence exploratory study on the acquisition of the social meaning of English lexemes by EL2 children and their ensuing progressing bilingualism.Implications:Overall, the study helps us contribute to both the recent socio-pragmatic turn in anglicism research and to the upcoming field of developmental sociolinguistics, revealing the transition points in children’s acquisition of the social meaning of contact-induced variation and change.

The adaptive control hypothesis predicts adaptation of control mechanisms as a response to intensive language use in bilinguals. The present study aims to investigate this hypothesis in two memory experiments with professional and student interpreters. In experiment 1, we compared a group of interpreting students to translation students using a reading span task to test working memory (WM) and a digit span task to test short-term memory (STM). In experiment 2, we added a group of professional interpreters and compared them with the participants in experiment 1. Training-related improvement was found for WM but not for STM, with no differences between both student groups. Professional interpreters with over 20 years of interpreting experience showed better performance than translation students but not than interpreting students both on WM and STM. The results are discussed in light of the framework of interpreting as a type of extreme bilingualism.

Government and market are the two main factors that drive the practices of the Chinese media system and influence the news construction process. A dramatic, socially disruptive event like the 2014 Kunming terrorist attack has the potential both to damage the government image and to attract readers. Analyzing how different types of media, more specifically the state-sponsored and the market-oriented press, construct a terrorist attack may therefore reveal essential characteristics of the Chinese media system and its relationship with both government and market. In doing so, the present study makes a contribution in terms of methodology, resources, and empirical description. From a methodological perspective, drawing on a dataset of 275 news articles about the Kunming attack that was collected from 16 mainstream Chinese newspapers, we explore the possibilities of combining computer-assisted techniques (i.e. part-of-speech tagging, sentiment analysis, collocation, and concordance) and Discursive News Values Analysis (DNVA), based on which we identified 699 Chinese lexical indicators distributed across ten news values. The open-source wordlist produced by this procedure will facilitate future quantitative DNVA, but also fills a resource gap in non-English news values studies. After calculating the mean normalized frequency of indicators under each news value on a more empirical level, we found that the state-sponsored and the market-oriented press converge in foregrounding the news values of Eliteness and Personalization, in line with public expectations, while at the same time diverging in their use of the news values of Positivity, Negativity, and Superlativeness, which we can relate to the different aims and responsibilities of these two types of newspapers.

In the Germanic languages, two types of inflection exist. Some verbs take the strong inflection, where ablaut is used to form past tense and past participle (e.g. drive-drove-driven). Other verbs take the weak inflection, where a dental suffix is used (e.g. play-played-played). There are also verbs that vary in their preterite and past participle form (e.g. dive-dived or dive-dove). In a diachronic corpus study, De Smet & Van de Velde (2020) show that in Dutch this variation can be exapted to express aspect in an iconic manner. Their results indicate that the longer weak preterites (e.g. schuilde ‘hid’) are used more often in durative contexts, while the shorter strong variants (e.g. school ‘hid’) are used more often in punctual contexts. For the past participles, this image is reversed: the longer strong variants (e.g. gescholen ‘hidden’) are used more often in durative contexts, while the shorter weak variants (e.g. geschuild ‘hidden’) are used more often in punctual contexts. In this paper, we seek experimental validation for these results. Participants (N=664) were presented with a forced choice task where they had to choose between weak or strong preterites and past participles of nonce verbs in sentences suggesting either a durative or a punctual context. We worked with three different between-subject conditions, namely preterite singular, preterite plural and past participle. Each survey consisted of 20 target items and 10 filler items. The target items were 20 nonce verbs of the five most productive ablaut subclasses in Dutch (cf. Knooihuizen & Strik 2014). Every verb only appeared once in each survey to prevent priming effects. Half of the target items were presented in a durative context (which was suggested through the use of adverbials), the other half in a punctual context. Hence aspect was manipulated within subject. Results were analysed using a generalized linear mixed effects model with random effects for subject and item and random slopes for aspect by subject and by item. Though no overall effect of aspect on verb inflection was found, results indicate an iconic trend for verbs of one specific ablaut subclass that supports the corpus results from De Smet & Van de Velde (2020). Because this ablaut class shows the most variation in real language use (of the five subclasses selected for the experiment), it could be that language users need to be familiar with a certain amount of variation for a specific class in order to become routinized in exapting the variation to express aspect. Furthermore, the durative-punctual distinction was also found to be portrayed in yet another iconic manner: verb forms with vowels that are sound symbolically associated with long slow movements were used more often in durative contexts, while verb forms with vowels that are associated with quick, short movements were used more often in punctual contexts. References – De Smet, Isabeau & Freek Van de Velde. 2020. Semantic differences between strong and weak verb forms in Dutch. Cognitive Linguistics 31(3). 393-416. Knooihuizen, Remco & Oscar Strik. 2014. Relative productivity potentials of Dutch verbal inflection patterns. Folia Linguistica Historica 35. 173-200.

Spelling variation is abundant in written language use on social media platforms. Crucially, many of the non-conventional spellings that can be found there are not misspellings. Various studies have analyzed the patterns and functions of online spelling variation (e.g. Tatman, 2015 and Ilbury, 2020 for Twitter), and have suggested a strong connection between phonological and orthographic variation (Eisenstein, 2015). This suggests that spelling variation can be used like other forms of linguistic variation to express aspects of the language user’s social identity (Sebba, 2007). Yet, little quantitative research has been carried out on the social meanings of spelling variants. This study aims to contribute to tackling this descriptive lacuna in sociolinguistic research. We set out to do so by comparing the social meanings of spelling variants, elicited through human experiments, to data-driven meaning representations, automatically learnt from large corpora. As such, this study supplements its descriptive research aim with a methodological one: to what extent can traditional sociolinguistic ‘small data’ and recent NLP based ‘big data’ approaches complement each other? In this paper, we focus on spelling variation on the popular online platform Twitter. We look at two types of spelling variation phenomena in British English: (1) spelling variation representing phonetic variation (e.g. alveolar vs. velar pronunciation of ING as in workin vs. working), and (2) spelling variation restricted to the orthographic level (e.g. flooding of characters as in fun vs. funnnn). First, the social meaning of the linguistic variants is measured experimentally in a written version of the speaker evaluation paradigm (cf. Leigh 2018). Stimuli for this experiment are selected from a Twitter corpus controlled for region (i.e. the London metropolitan area). A sample of participants (N = 120) geographically matched to the producers of the corpus data is presented with a series of tweets containing the linguistic variants under study. Participants are asked to rate the personality of the writer on a series of semantic differential scales representing various social traits that have been shown to be potentially associated with the social meanings of the targeted linguistic variation. Second, we compare our experimental measurements of social meanings with word embeddings, i.e. automatically learnt mappings from words to high-dimensional vectors based on co-occurrences in the Twitter corpus (Mikolov et al. 2013; Smith 2020). We do so using a computational analysis of the linguistic variants in the embedding space, by measuring the distances between the variants and clustering them based on their embeddings. For example, are linguistic variants that received similar ratings in the human experiments clustered together in the embedding space? Our paper brings novel insights into the social meaning of spelling variation. It furthermore draws attention to opportunities and limitations of data-driven meaning representations for sociolinguistic research on language variation. References – Eisenstein, Jacob. 2015. Systematic patterning in phonologically-motivated orthographic variation. Journal of Sociolinguistics 19(2): 161-188. Ilbury, Christian. 2020. “Sassy Queens”: Stylistic orthographic variation in Twitter and the enregisterment of AAVE. Journal of Sociolinguistics 24(2): 245-264 Leigh, Daisy. 2018. Expecting a performance: Listener expectations of social meaning in social media. Paper presented at NWAV43 [New Ways of Analyzing Variation], New York, 20 October 2018. Mikolov, Tomas, Ilya Sutskever, Kai Chen, Greg S. Corrado & Jeff Dean. 2013. Distributed representations of words and phrases and their compositionality. Advances in neural information processing systems: 3111–3119. Tatman, Rachel. 2015. #go awn: Sociophonetic Variation in Variant Spellings on Twitter. Working Papers of the Linguistics Circle of the University of Victoria 25(2). Sebba, Mark. 2007. Spelling and society: The culture and politics of orthography around the world. Cambridge: CUP. Smith, Noah A. 2020. Contextual word representations: Putting words into computers. Communications of the ACM 63(6):66-74.

Research on language standardization witnessed remarkable progress over the past two decades. Building on the strong foundations laid by Einar Haugen, the scholarly canon on the topic was renewed, while also addressing a number of shortcomings of earlier theory building. As historical sociolinguistics gained momentum, standardization history faced the challenge of including ‘voices from below’ as they appeared in new and socially inclusive corpora of egodocuments from the past centuries. This implied an increased focus on the formerly overlooked role and presence of non-standard varieties, but also on the ideological driving factors behind many standardization efforts. The article makes a case for specific and ongoing attention to the implementation phase of standardization measures, as well as for the study of language conflicts from times past to help prevent imminent geopolitical struggles (or, for worse, to inform our understanding of these conflicts in the near future).

BACKGROUND AND RESEARCH QUESTIONS | This paper investigates the extent to which beliefs about the language use of speaker groups are shared within a speech community. Concretely, we experimentally uncover which speaker groups are associated with the use of a contact-induced lexical variable, namely the use English loanwords compared to native Dutch alternatives. The paper focuses on three research questions: (1) do language users have shared expectations about the use of English words in Dutch by different speaker age groups; (2) are there shared beliefs regarding the use of English by language users in different social roles (e.g. grandparent, mayor, TV personality); (3) does (unexpected) use of English by projected social role actors lead to negative evaluations? We answer these questions in a bid to better understand the link between language regards and linguistic change (Preston 2011), and the socio-cognitive processes that imbue linguistic variation with social meanings (Drager & Kirtley 2016). METHODOLOGY | Data was collected through a survey reaching 177 Belgian Dutch speakers. They reported their expectations on the use of English loanwords in a four tiered questionnaire targeting (1) expectations about English use for different age groups, (2) expectations about English use for different social roles, and (3) evaluations of that usage by various social roles through 7 point Likert scales, followed by (4) a basic demographic questionnaire collecting information on age, gender identity and language background. RESULTS | Results reveal shared expectations regarding the use of English loans by age, with a perceived peak in late adolescence carried through to early adulthood (see Fig. 1). Regarding the use of English by social role actors, factor analyses suggest three types of social roles with different perceived use of English loans: high use of English loans is associated with modern roles (e.g. rapper, gamer), whilst public (e.g. primary school teacher) and traditional roles’ (e.g. farmer) are perceivedto use significantly less English in their Dutch. Finally, our results indicate that role violation (i.e. use of English loans by groups who are perceived to use them infrequently) only seems to trigger negative evaluations when the role actor is a public figure with social responsibility (e.g. mayor). IMPLICATIONS | The discussion reflects on the implications of the results in two respects. First, we interpret results against the background of the tension between age grading (Labov 1994: 84; Eckert 1997) and incrementation (Labov 2001: 455) suggesting that different age groups tend to use different types of English loanwords: English exclamatives (e.g. what the hell) function as a youth language marker, while slightly older users tend to use English as jargon (e.g. bandwidth). Second, we consider the question of the origin of language regard contrasting the top-down or bottom-up emergence of shared beliefs on speaker groups and linguistic variations more broadly (Docherty and Foulkes 2014; Drager & Kirtley 2016). References Docherty, Gerard J. & Paul Foulkes. 2014. An evaluation of usage-based approaches to the modelling of sociophonetic variability. Lingua 142. 42-56. Drager, Katie, & Joelle M. Kirtley. 2016. Awareness, Salience, and Stereotypes in Exemplar Based Models of Speech Production and Perception. In Anna M. Babel (ed .), Awareness and control in sociolinguistic research, 1-24. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Eckert, Penelope. 1997. Age as a Sociolinguistic Variable. In Florian Coulmas (ed.), The Handbook of Sociolinguistics, 151-167. Oxford: Blackwell. Labov, William. 1994. Principles of Linguistic Change, Volume 1. Malden: Blackwell. Labov, William. 2001. Principles of Linguistic Change, Volume 2. Malden: Blackwell. Preston, Dennis R. 2011. The power of language regard — discrimination, classification, comprehension, & production. Dialectologia [Special Issue II], 9–33.

This paper gauges attitudes towards non-standard varieties in high standard expectancy contexts. Through a mixed methods approach, it specifically tests the conviction that speech-language therapists (SLT) are categorically opposed to the use of non-standard varieties in their professional practice. To this end, results are presented from a speaker evaluation experiment and from semi-structured interviews in the Belgian Dutch context, known for its standard language ideology and resulting diaglossic tension between an exocentric, ideologically foregrounded yet little used standard Dutch (SD) and the endogenous non-prestigious but broadly used non-standard variety Colloquial Belgian Dutch (CBD). In the experiment, Belgian Dutch SLT students (N = 77) and a control group (N = 54) evaluate the competence of a SLT who does (not) use standard language in relational client-oriented versus transactional therapy-oriented professional discourse. Results reveal (1) a more conservative versus a more dynamic conception of‘competence’; (2) penalization of standard language use in informal speech; (3) slightly higher sociolinguistic sensitivity for SLT respondents. The semi-structured interviews were conducted with 13 SLTs from the Flemish Brabant region, which were analyzed with thematic analysis (Braun & Clarke, 2006). Three themes emerged. (1) SLTs’ partial convergence with clients’ CBD was contingent on primary therapy goals and need for trust, (2) this convergence was a skill acquired through experience, and (3) authenticity outweighed propagating the norm. In line with the experimental results, the SLTs’ focus on therapeutic alliance justified converging with clients’ language use. A partial convergence allowed them to stay true to their professional identity. However, preservice education did not prepare them for register flexibility and authenticity. Overall, the attested tolerance towards non-standard speech in high standard expectancy contexts found through both direct and indirect methodologies begs a reconsideration of language ideology in professional communication.

Cerebellar mutism can be considered the hallmark feature of the cerebellar mutism syndrome (CMS), previously also frequently termed the posterior fossa syndrome (PFS). The syndrome consists of specific linguistic, cognitive, behavioral, and affective symptoms following acute posterior fossa damage in children and adults. Although the symptoms have been exceptionally associated with non-tumoral etiologies, CMS usually develops after a brief period of relatively normal functioning in the immediate postoperative phase following posterior fossa tumor surgery. The incidence of CMS in the pediatric population is estimated to range between 7% and 50%. Although similar symptoms have been occasionally reported in adults, CMS is typically viewed as a clinical condition affecting children. An international consensus as to the definition of CMS was recently reached. However, this accepted definition specifically addresses the pediatric variant of the syndrome associated with posterior fossa surgery (postoperative pediatric CMS, POPCMS). In this chapter, the more general term CMS (instead of POPCMS) will be used to denote similar symptoms also occurring in adults, and with non-tumoral etiologies. Although the semiology of CMS has extensively been described, the underlying pathophysiological mechanisms still remain largely unclear. This chapter presents a brief overview of the intriguing semiological combination of transient cerebellar mutism and cognitive, behavioral, and affective alterations following acute posterior fossa lesions. Furthermore, the most important pathophysiological hypotheses and the proposed therapeutic interventions will be briefly discussed.

This paper pressure tests the claim that professional speakers who use the standard language are perceived as more competent, by (1) unpacking ‘competence’; (2) disentangling the discursive complexity of ‘professional speech context’; (3) accounting for respondents' language socialization background. In our experiment, Belgian Dutch speech therapy students (N = 77) and a control group (N = 54) evaluate a speech therapist who does (not) use standard language in relational and transactional professional discourse. Results reveal (1) a more conservative versus a more dynamic conception of ‘competence’; (2) penalization of standard language use in informal speech; (3) slightly higher sociolinguistic sensitivity for speech therapy respondents. The perceived tolerance towards non-standard speech in high standard expectancy contexts begs a reconsideration of language ideology in professional communication.

Language standardization ‘from above’ occurs in situations in which language authorities seek to disseminate a standardized variety across a speech and writing community. Hence, the crucial aspect of language standardization ‘from above’ is implementation, in Haugen’s terminology. In the history of many European languages, standardization ‘from above’ is a Late Modern phenomenon, closely tied to the rise of standard language ideology in the eighteenth century. In this chapter, we first define language standardization ‘from above’, situating it in the sociohistorical context of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Arguing that the sociolinguistic situation at the time can be described as diaglossic, we claim that language standardization ‘from above’ is a top-down effort to reorganize the sociolinguistic condition in terms of standard and non-standard. We then discuss various instruments of implementation, encompassing both private and official language planning activities such as usage guides, language academies, professorships in ‘national’ languages, language laws and educational reforms. Finally, we zoom in on the effects of implementation, distinguishing between discursive and linguistic effects (i.e. changing patterns of language use under the influence of standardization ‘from above’). Our examples are mainly taken from the Dutch situation, while also incorporating examples from English, German, French and Spanish.

This paper examines the ways in which authentic conversation provides a sociocultural resource for developing the cultural competence of learners of Chinese as a heritage language in Australia. It draws upon language socialization as a theoretical framework to study the interconnected processes of linguistic and cultural learning in interactional discourse practices through an intergenerational interaction model. In this model, local community resources were effectively utilized when older speakers of Chinese as their first language and English Chinese heritage learners were paired and conducted naturalistic conversations. Building on discourse analysis of the linguistic exchange between three pairs of interactants, we illustrate how the older speakers, that is, expert users, socialize the novice learners of Chinese into acquiring Chinese cultural knowledge through the related lexical items. Our analysis shows that this interaction model proves beneficial for developing socially and culturally competent members within minority communities.

Recent research has revealed that the cerebellum plays a critical role in social reasoning and in particular in understanding false beliefs and making trait attributions. One hypothesis is that the cerebellum is responsible for the understanding of sequences of motions and actions, which may be a prerequisite for social understanding. To investigate the role of action sequencing in mentalizing, we tested patients with generalized cerebellar degenerative lesions on tests of social understanding and compared their performance with matched healthy volunteers. The tests involved understanding violations of social norms making trait and causal attributions on the basis of short behavioral sentences and generating the correct chronological order of social actions depicted in cartoons (picture sequencing task). Cerebellar patients showed clear deficits only on the picture sequencing task when generating the correct order of cartoons depicting false belief stories and showed at or close to normal performance for mechanical stories and overlearned social scripts. In addition, they performed marginally worse on trait attributions inferred from verbal behavioral descriptions. We conclude that inferring the mental state of others through understanding the correct sequences of their actions requires the support of the cerebellum., SCOPUS: ar.j, info:eu-repo/semantics/published

In this article, the first results of a large-scale survey on the use of technological bridging instruments in contexts of multilingual service provision will be presented. We will focus on answers given by respondents working as public service interpreters and translators, abbreviated as PSITs (N=188). No restriction was set on specific domains of public service in this study (e.g. education, health, etc.). The article focuses on the question how forms of prior training of PSITs relate to the frequency of use of technological tools in their professional practice, such as computer-assisted translation (CAT) technology, machine translation (MT) systems, Instant Messaging (IM) technology, video conferencing technology (VC), termbase management systems (TB), and combinations thereof., En este artículo, presentaremos los resultados preliminares de un estudio a gran escala sobre el uso de instrumentos tecnológicos utilizados para facilitar la comunicación para la provisión de servicios en entornos multilingües. Nos centraremos en las respuestas proporcionadas por sujetos que trabajan como traductores e intérpretes en los servicios públicos (PSITs, por sus siglas en inglés, N=188). No se realizó ninguna distinción entre los distintos dominios de los servicios públicos para este estudio (por ejemplo, educación, salud, etc.) Pretendemos averiguar la influencia del tipo de formación que los traductores e intérpretes han recibido sobre el uso de herramientas tecnológicas, como traducción asistida por ordenador, traducción automática, mensajería instantánea, videoconferencia y programas de gestión terminológica.

The field of NLP has made substantial progress in building meaning representations. However, an important aspect of linguistic meaning, social meaning, has been largely overlooked. We introduce the concept of social meaning to NLP and discuss how insights from sociolinguistics can inform work on representation learning in NLP. We also identify key challenges for this new line of research.

Background and objectives: We provide a case analysis for a 28-year-old, native Dutch-speaking lady who developed Foreign Accent Syndrome (FAS), a few weeks after falling down the staircase. In addition to FAS, which gave the impression she spoke with a German accent, German(-like) words and structures occurred. Speech symptoms were aggravated by increased stress, fatigue or emotional pressure, and this triggered jargon speech. It was hypothesized her FAS and jargon developed on a functional basis.Methods: In-depth analyses of the patient's medical background, neuropsychological and neurolinguistic tests and psychodiagnostic exams were done. The patient participated in an fMRI experiment. In a syllable repetition paradigm, motor speech activations were compared to those of healthy individuals, to see whether they were altered, which would be expected in case of a neurological etiology.Results: Medical history disclosed prior traumatic experiences for which she sought help, but no neurological incidents. Repeated neuropsychological and neurolinguistic tests showed deficits in recent memory and executive functioning. The patient demonstrated great difficulties with picture naming. Clinically, language switching and mixing as well as recurring jargon speech was found. Formal psychodiagnostic tests did not identify a clear disorder, but psychodiagnostic interviews were consistent with a DSM-5 conversion disorder. The fMRI study demonstrated that speech network activations corresponded to those found in healthy participants.Conclusion: The clinical neurolinguistic characteristics, outcome of the fMRI experiment, together with the clinical psychodiagnostic findings were strongly indicative for an underlying functional etiology for the FAS and jargon speech, presenting as symptoms of conversion disorder. (C) 2020 Asociacion Universitaria de Zaragoza para el Progreso de la Psiquiatria y la Salud Mental. Published by Elsevier Espana, S.L.U. All rights reserved.

This paper contains the experimental design of an empirical study that aims to assess the relative effectiveness of a number of pedagogical approaches designed to boost the comprehension of new L2 Spanish idioms and foster their retention. Building on a previous study (Ureña Tormo 2019), we suggest testing three pedagogical treatments, with two of them encouraging the participants to guess the meaning of the target idioms, before or after receiving information on their semantic motivation, and the other one focusing on meaning inference from context. The target units are 15 Spanish idioms related to a range of topics and the participants are 90 English speaking learners of Spanish. The results that we obtain will allow for the assessment of the effectiveness of each pedagogical proposal, and will be compared to the ones obtained in Ureña Tormo (2019). Este artículo presenta el diseño experimental de un estudio empírico para facilitar la comprensión de locuciones españolas nuevas y favorecer su retención. Con el objetivo de mejorar y ampliar el alcance de un estudio previo (Ureña Tormo 2019), proponemos evaluar tres tratamientos pedagógicos distintos: dos de ellos invitan a los participantes a que adivinen el significado de las locuciones, antes o después de recibir información sobre su motivación semántica, y el otro se centra en inferir el significado a partir del contexto. Las unidades objeto de aprendizaje son 15 locuciones españolas y los participantes se corresponden con 90 estudiantes de español cuya lengua materna es el inglés. Los resultados que se obtengan de este experimento permitirán evaluar la efectividad de cada propuesta didáctica y podrán compararse con los obtenidos en Ureña Tormo (2019).

This study focuses on the production of subject&ndash, verb (SV) agreement in number in L2 French and investigates the role of cross-linguistic influence (CLI) in this particular morphosyntactic domain. CLI is a well-known phenomenon in Second Language Acquisition (SLA) research but it has rarely been investigated systematically in relation to SV agreement in French. The participants of the study are 114 learners with Italian, German, Dutch and Swedish as L1. The source languages are all inflectional languages but they vary in terms of morphological richness in the verb paradigm, ranging from very poor (Swedish) to very rich (Italian). The participants performed an oral narrative task contrasting singular and plural contexts of SV agreement. Results indicate a significant difference between L1 groups in terms of correct SV agreement but they also show that the overall presence of rich verb morphology in the L1 does not, on its own, result in a more correct SV agreement. It is when comparing learners at two different proficiency levels that we observe differences in the rate of L2 development, which may be explained as an effect of CLI. Overall, results indicate a complex interplay of different factors, where the role of CLI must be further investigated in future studies in relation to L2 French.

The bouba/kiki effect—the association of the nonce word bouba with a roundshape and kiki with a spiky shape—is a type of correspondence betweenspeech sounds and visual properties with potentially deep implicationsfor the evolution of spoken language. However, there is debate over therobustness of the effect across cultures and the influence of orthography.We report an online experiment that tested the bouba/kiki effect acrossspeakers of 25 languages representing nine language families and 10 writing systems. Overall, we found strong evidence for the effect acrosslanguages, with bouba eliciting more congruent responses than kiki. Participants who spoke languages with Roman scripts were only marginallymore likely to show the effect, and analysis of the orthographic shape ofthe words in different scripts showed that the effect was no stronger forscripts that use rounder forms for bouba and spikier forms for kiki. Theseresults confirm that the bouba/kiki phenomenon is rooted in crossmodal correspondence between aspects of the voice and visual shape, largelyindependent of orthography. They provide the strongest demonstrationto date that the bouba/kiki effect is robust across cultures and writingsystems.This article is part of the theme issue ‘Voice modulation: from origin andmechanism to social impact (Part II)’. The bouba/kiki effect - the association of the nonce word bouba with a round shape and kiki with a spiky shape - is a type of correspondence between speech sounds and visual properties with potentially deep implications for the evolution of spoken language. However, there is debate over the robustness of the effect across cultures and the influence of orthography. We report an online experiment that tested the bouba/kiki effect across speakers of 25 languages representing nine language families and 10 writing systems. Overall, we found strong evidence for the effect across languages, with bouba eliciting more congruent responses than kiki. Participants who spoke languages with Roman scripts were only marginally more likely to show the effect, and analysis of the orthographic shape of the words in different scripts showed that the effect was no stronger for scripts that use rounder forms for bouba and spikier forms for kiki. These results confirm that the bouba/kiki phenomenon is rooted in crossmodal correspondence between aspects of the voice and visual shape, largely independent of orthography. They provide the strongest demonstration to date that the bouba/kiki effect is robust across cultures and writing systems. This article is part of the theme issue 'Voice modulation: from origin and mechanism to social impact (Part II)'.

This special issue brings together a collection of papers that highlight recent advances in the field of lectometry. Lectometric research measures distances between various types of language varieties, such as dialects or sociolects. In addition to briefly sketching the development of the field, this introductory paper surveys the theoretical, methodological, and practical contributions a lectometric approach to language has to offer. We furthermore identify blind spots within the current scope of lectometric work and lay out suggestions for future avenues the field could go down. The paper concludes by introducing the various contributions to this special issue of “Zeitschrift fur Dialektologie und Linguistik” and by outlining how each of those papers contributes to extending the scope of lectometry.

This special issue brings together a collection of papers that highlight recent advances in the field of lectometry. Lectometric research measures distances between various types of language varieties, such as dialects or sociolects. In addition to briefly sketching the development of the field, this introductory paper surveys the theoretical, methodological, and practical contributions a lectometric approach to language has to offer. We furthermore identify blind spots within the current scope of lectometric work and lay out suggestions for future avenues the field could go down. The paper concludes by introducing the various contributions to this special issue of “Zeitschrift für Dialektologie und Linguistik” and by outlining how each of those papers contributes to extending the scope of lectometry.

Individual Variation and the Bilingual Advantage—Factors that Modulate the Effect of Bilingualism on Cognitive Control and Cognitive Reserve

Purpose: The purpose of this study was to describe experiences of childhood brain tumor survivors (CBTS) and key figures in their environment after returning to school, using the International Classification of Functioning, Disability and Health - Children and Youth framework.Methods: We conducted semi-structured interviews with five children, nine parents, 28 teachers, and 14 health professionals at three predetermined times over a two-year period. A qualitative content analysis was performed by linking meaningful units from transcribed interviews to ICF codes.Results: Children experienced diverse body dysfunctions that could impede school participation, mostly related to knowledge acquisition and application, executive functioning and social life. Support at school and professional aftercare were essential to alleviate the child's difficulties. The teacher's attitude, parental involvement, and practices of collaboration belonging to the child's supportive network further influenced the reintegration process. Also, child-specific factors including emotional reactions to illness, age, and balance between school life and leisure time were considered to affect school readjustment.Conclusions: The International Classification of Functioning, Disability and Health framework is a useful instrument to systematically describe experiences of CBTS and key figures regarding school life, providing a common language to communicate for stakeholders in education and healthcare following the child's return.IMPLICATIONS FOR REHABILITATIONThe International Classification of Functioning, Disability and Health - Children and Youth framework is a useful instrument to describe experiences regarding school life of childhood brain tumor survivors (CBTS) and key figures in their environment.The ICF-CY model can be combined with a standardized assessment of neurocognition or performance to achieve a comprehensive view of the child's participation at school, by exploring both personal and environmental factors.Childhood brain tumor survivors mostly show impairments in acquiring and applying knowledge, executive functioning and social life, which may require increased support at school and professional aftercare.A positive attitude of school staff, high parental involvement in school life and adequate collaboration between parents, education and healthcare are important to prioritize in the context of reintegration into school of CBTS.

Language Policy Volume 19 · Number 2 · May 2020 Thematic Issue: Revisiting Haugen: Historical-Sociolinguistic Perspectives on Standardization Guest Editors: Gijsbert Rutten · Rik Vosters

This paper reports on an ongoing research project investigating the language use of Chinese immigrants as heritage language users in Antwerp and Brussels. Specifically, we study the linguistic landscape of three ethnic Chinese neighborhoods, comparing these areas in terms of the different languages and dialects used, and their visual presence in the public space. We map out the geographical spread of different languages in each locale and focus on language dominance, mutual translation in multilingual signs, and the use of different scripts and transliteration systems. By comparing the three ethnic Chinese neighborhoods and by thus relating their different linguistic landscapes to their distinct migration histories and demographic profiles, we attempt to show how a linguistic landscape study can be used as a way of gaining insight into the linguistic practices of relatively small minority groups, such as the Chinese community in Belgium, who often remain invisible in larger-scale sociolinguistic surveys., Este artículo informa del proyecto de investigación en curso en el que se estudia el uso de la lengua de los inmigrantes chinos como usuarios de su lengua heredada en Amberes y Bruselas. Específicamente, estudiamos el paisaje lingüístico de tres barrios étnicos chinos, comparando estas áreas en términos de los diferentes idiomas y dialectos utilizados, y su presencia visual en el espacio público. Mapeamos la propagación geográfica de los diferentes idiomas en cada localidad y nos centramos en el dominio del idioma, la traducción mutua en signos multilingües, y el uso de diferentes escrituras y sistemas de transliteración. Comparando los tres barrios y relacionando así sus diferentes paisajes lingüísticos con sus distintas historias de migración y perfiles demográficos, intentamos mostrar cómo un estudio del paisaje lingüístico puede ser utilizado como una forma de conocer las prácticas lingüísticas de grupos minoritarios relativamente pequeños, como la comunidad china en Bélgica, que a menudo permanecen invisibles en encuestas sociolingüísticas a gran escala

The aim of this systematic literature review was to answer the question of which executive function is most affected by interpreter training and experience. We used the ‘unity and diversity’ framework of executive functions to distinguish between three executive components: Response and Distractor Inhibition, Shifting, and Updating. Among the seventeen studies included in the review, we only found evidence for an interpreter advantage on Shifting and Updating, but with a different pattern for each of these. With regard to Updating, groups of interpreters scored better than comparison groups, but general trend in longitudinal studies did not show an improvement for interpreter trainees. In contrast, for Shifting, scores improved as a result of interpreting training. Our systematic review stresses the importance of understanding the diversity of executive processes when investigating the relationship between interpreting and cognitive performance.