Search

Decreased walking speed is associated with impaired physical performance and function in older adults. Following total ankle arthroplasty (TAA), walking speed continues to be slower than age matched controls. The purpose of this study was to determine if patients 1 year post-TAA can achieve walking speed benchmarks and investigate if gait metrics are predictive of achieved benchmarks. 191 TAA patients were recruited and assessed pre-TAA and 1 year post-TAA. Kinetic and kinematic data were collected during seven self-selected speed barefoot walking trials along a 30-m walkway. Receiver operator curves were generated for each variable to determine threshold values needed to achieve walking speeds of 0.8, 0.9, 1.1, and 1.3 m/s. Each variable's predictive ability was classified according to the area under the curve. Ninety one percent of participants achieved a walking speed 0.8 m/s, 85.3% achieved ≥0.9 m/s, 64.9% walked at ≥1.1 m/s, and 24.1% achieved a walking speed of 1.3 m/s by 1 year post-TAA. Walking speed pre-TAA was the strongest predictor with ankle moment, power and GRF data showing mixed results. Clinical Significance: 75.9% of participants were unable to walk at 1.3 m/s-a speed indicative of safely crossing a street. Variables predictive of postoperative walking speed benchmarks could be useful in developing interventions for the TAA population. The strongest predictor across all walking speed benchmarks was preoperative walking speed. A walking speed 0.71 m/s was predictive of achieving 0.8 m/s 1 year post-TAA, while1.09 m/s predicted 1.3 m/s 1 year post-TAA.

While the use of they as a singular pronoun with an indefinite antecedent has been available for centuries, singular they is increasingly being used to refer to specific individuals. Here, we present two experiments investigating the factors underlying oral and written production of this newer usage. We asked participants to create narratives about different individuals of varying gender presentation. The presence of a description containing a pronoun—they, she, or he—was also varied. We examined the role of familiarity with individuals whose personal pronoun is they and with LGBTQ+ communities broadly in the production of singular they. We found that familiarity was a better predictor of variation than age or gender, two variables traditionally associated with language change. Furthermore, modeling the use of they significantly increased its production. Thus, singular specific they can be—and is—acquired both through familiarity with LGBTQ+ individuals, as well as through direct exposure to a textual prompt.

This tribute considers the work of linguist and novelist, Anna Livia (1955–2007). Anna was a noted fiction writer before becoming a linguist and much of her work considered language play in literature. Anna brought her experience as a lesbian activist to queer linguistics, where she played an important role in establishing the field. Her work continues to be an important example of linguistic research on lesbians, an area that continues to be underrepresented in the field.

Humans are remarkably efficient at parsing basic linguistic cues and show an equally impressive ability to produce and parse socially indexed cues from the language(s) they encounter. In this review, we focus on the ways in which questions of justice and equality are linked to these two abilities. We discuss how social and linguistic cues are theorized to become correlated with each other, describe listeners' perceptual abilities regarding linguistic and social cognition, and address how, in the context of these abilities, language mediates individuals’ negotiations with institutions and their agents—negotiations that often lead to discrimination or linguistic injustice. We review research that reports inequitable outcomes as a function of language use across education, employment, media, justice systems, housing markets, and health care institutions. Finally, we present paths forward for linguists to help fight against these discriminatory realities.

BACKGROUND: Orthopaedic walking boots are commonly prescribed following injury and surgery. The boot creates a leg length discrepancy which is thought to affect limb symmetry and gait mechanics. This study aimed to examine the effects of a corrective heel lift for the contralateral limb on the mechanics and symmetry of walking with an orthopaedic walking boot. RESEARCH QUESTION: Does a corrective heel lift reduce biomechanical alterations and asymmetries caused by an orthopaedic boot during gait? METHODS: Healthy males (n=17) walked with normal shoes (Shod), an orthopaedic boot (Boot), and a corrective heel lift on the contralateral limb to the boot (Lift). A 10-camera motion capture system (Vicon, 100Hz) and four force platforms (AMTI, 1000 Hz) recorded lower extremity biomechanics. Pairwise statistics tested for differences in hip and knee kinematics and kinetics, and a symmetry index quantified limb symmetry. FINDINGS: The Boot affected the sagittal and frontal plane hip mechanics and transverse plane knee mechanics (P

Two experiments explored reader reaction to written errors that were either typographic or grammatical. Errors were embedded in short texts presented as email responses to a housemate ad. In the first experiment, readers evaluated the writer and message on several dimensions (e.g., Was the writer trustworthy? Did the email flow smoothly?). Those dimensions were divided into a “social” scale (e.g. “This student seems similar to me”) and an “academic” scale (e.g. “This email reads well”). Both kinds of error correlated with lower ratings on the academic scale while only grammatical errors correlated with lower ratings on the social scale. In the second experiment, readers were asked to edit the emails. In Experiment 1, paragraphs with either typographical or grammatical errors were both evaluated more negatively than fully correct paragraphs and the cost was mitigated by high levels of electronic communication, such as texting and using Facebook. In Experiment 2, typos were more likely to be corrected than either homophonous grammatical forms or hypercorrected forms. These results suggest that written errors, when they are salient, contribute to the social meaning of text. Furthermore, this contribution is modulated by at least some characteristics of the reader.

In this article, I discuss the results of a small case study of one daytime serial drama in the United States and show that it links the macro-social category of gender to desire for upward social mobility through the use of linguistic tropes that conventionally index both gender and social class. This connection is critical to the more general commercial imperative inherent in the daytime drama to connect consumers with advertised products. In the case of this daytime drama, male characters are shown to disrupt stereotypical norms of masculinity at least in part through a sociolinguistic package that includes linguistic strategies stereotypically associated with upward social mobility and wealthy lifestyles. In so doing, male characters become critical to the entailment of wealth and social privilege as normative values while female characters reinforce the same normativity through their own sociolinguistic patterns.

In this article, I focus on the intonation patterns of Turkish-German bilinguals to discuss intonation within the context of language contact and language variation. The intonational variance involves the realization of terminal rises as produced by second- and third-generation Turkish-German bilinguals living in Germany. These speakers produce two phonetically, phonologically, and pragmatically distinct rises, which differ from what is typically reported for German monolinguals. The primary phonetic differences between the two rises include the relative alignment and slope of the rise, with one rise aligning on the final syllable of the word regardless of the stress pattern and showing a significantly steeper slope than the other. Although the source of these two rises is likely the two languages used by the speakers, this is not a case of intonational code-switching. Rather, the two rises, along with other edge phenomena, form an intonational system in which the rises are in contrast with one another as well as with falls and level edge contours and as such play different pragmatic roles relative to one another.

In the wake of the considerable cultural changes and societal shifts that the United States and all advanced industrial democracies have experienced since the late 1960s and early 1970s, one can also observe a dramatic change in how humans in these societies have come to relate to nonhuman animals, dogs in particular. One of the new institutions created by this change in attitude and behavior toward dogs is the canine rescue organization, examples of which have arisen all over the United States beginning in the 1980s. While the growing scholarship on the changed dimension of the human-animal relationship attests to its social, political, and intellectual salience to our contemporary world, the work presented here constitutes the first academic research on the particularly important institution of dog rescue. This paper presents some key findings from a survey of canine rescue workers in the state of Michigan, with a concentration on the dynamics of gender within canine rescue work.

The increasing prevalence of social media means that we often encounter written language characterized by both stylistic variation and outright errors. How does the personality of the reader modulate reactions to non-standard text? Experimental participants read ‘email responses’ to an ad for a housemate that either contained no errors or had been altered to include either typos (e.g., teh) or homophonous grammar errors (grammos, e.g., to/too, it’s/its). Participants completed a 10-item evaluation scale for each message, which measured their impressions of the writer. In addition participants completed a Big Five personality assessment and answered demographic and language attitude questions. Both typos and grammos had a negative impact on the evaluation scale. This negative impact was not modulated by age, education, electronic communication frequency, or pleasure reading time. In contrast, personality traits did modulate assessments, and did so in distinct ways for grammos and typos.

In this study, I examine how three preadolescent, Turkish-German bilingual girls use intonational resources from both of their languages as one strategy for organizing monologic narratives. In so doing, I show that the bilingual narrators make strategic use of phrase-final tunes that have their origins in the speakers' (and their community's) bilingualism. In particular, these speakers utilize two phrase-final rises that differ in their frequency of occurrence, acoustic, phonological and functional characteristics. The contrasts in the rises taken in conjunction with the contrasts between rises, levels and falls provide the speakers with conventionalized strategies for cueing specific narrative contexts. These conventionalized strategies represent a fusion of Turkish and German intonational patterns into a single intonational grammar and form part of the bilingual linguistic and discursive repertoire. As such they also represent one locus of contact-related language change.

This article examines how women in two different social networks, a lesbian feminist network and a recreational softball team, embed formulaic jokes and teasing within larger interactions in order to stake out a stance with respect to culturally salient stereotypes about lesbians. The women balance the competing and complex demands of an orientation to social similarity and social differentiation.

This paper explores the translation of sociolinguistic variation by examining the ways that African American English (AAE) is dubbed into German. In discussing this ubiquitous yet poorly studied area of language use, I show that ideas about language as an index to social groupings are transferable to the degree that the ideas overlap in the cultures in question. In the case of German, if the character being dubbed is young, male and tied to the street cultures of the urban inner city, then AAE is dubbed using a form of German that has links to the urban youth cultures of north-central Germany. The transferability of sociolinguistic variation is important to issues related to cross-cultural communication and the ideologies that may play a role in the outcomes of that communication as well as to linguistic creativity and language style more generally.

This article discusses Turkish-German bilingual children's intonation patterns as they relate to processes of contact-induced language change. Bilingual speakers use two distinct rises in both Turkish and German. One rise (L*HH%) resembles a characteristic German rise, while the other (L%H%) resembles a characteristic Turkish rise. The rises pattern pragmatically in ways that are non-normative for both Turkish and German. Although this pattern is not clearly attributable to language interference (either borrowing or shift-induced language change), it is certainly the result of language contact. Fusion is proposed to account for the two-way influence between the two languages.

In this paper, I present evidence in support of the hypothesis that gay men and lesbians may use similar linguistics strategies in order to build and maintain queer social networks. Such social networks rely on an assumption of shared queerness that goes beyond gender-exclusive groups. The primary strategies discussed here are the incorporation of cultural understandings that are assumed to be shared, the appropriation of gender stereotypes for humorous effect, the use of covert communication strategies, and the use of co-narration. Taken together, these strategies help index both unique social networks as well as a broader sense of queer community.