Linguistic Limitations Research Articles

The Other Latin@: writing against a singular identity

The Other Latin@: Writing Against a Singular Identity Edited by Blas Falconer and Lorraine M. Lopez Tucson: The University of Arizona Press, 2011 ISBN: 978-0-8165-2867-7 184 pages; $22.00 [paper] Reviewer: Ignacio Rodeno, The University of AlabamaThis anthology, edited by Blas Falconer and Lorraine M. Lopez, consists of a collection of twenty essays that center on the question of identity. The aim of the volume is to showcase the lack of an essential Latino identity and the presence of a plurality of experiences that undermines the idea that Latinos are a monolithic group. It is only fitting, then, that these pieces are written in the first person narrative. The volume opens with a foreword by William Luis, and ends with an afterword by the same critic, where he discusses the labels Latino and Hispanic in relation to culture and identity, as well as the use of one or another through history. Such labels are problematic, as Luis notes, since they try to fix a concept that is, in itself, multifaceted, fluid, subject to alteration by means of its diasporic nature.By employing the first person narrative, The Other Latin@ contributes to the body of work that strives for the creation of a collective memory through the personal. The autobiographical voice, where the self reflects on a significant moment or event in his or her life, has been widely used in the so-called ethnic literatures to present such experience as something that can be read as representative of the community precisely because of its significance and relation to it. In doing so, the particular experience becomes the voice of the community, a voice that has not been regularly acknowledged by the mainstream culture in the case of Latinos. It is through reading narratives of the self as collective memory that non-hegemonic communities seek to achieve a better understanding of their origins, their history-in sum their identity. One might argue that narratives in which the particular experience is recognized as communal would result in cementing identity as fixed, homogeneous, monolithic, and this is even more the case with an anthology, which inclines us to read them as a unit. However, because of this anthology's pursuit of the opposite, it is particularly valuableIn order to start dismantling the monolithic, stereotypical image of Latinos, the anthology starts with Lisa Chavez's account of the experience of a Latina growing up in an unexpected location: Alaska. In the same vein, Joy Castro and Teresa Dovalpage illustrate experiences of Cubans who immigrated to the U.S. at different times than the ones that dominate Cuban-American narratives. Other authors reflect the linguistic limitation of Latinos who have lost their Spanish and are leftto wrestle with the notion that being Latino means having a link to the Spanish language. Precisely by describing this experience of exclusion, U.S. Puerto Rican Judith Ortiz Cofer redefines Latino to include alternative identities. Taking issue with the notion that Latinos are fundamentally immigrants, Carla Trujillo and Lorraine Lopez remind us that some Chicanos did not cross the border, but rather the border crossed them. Trujillo further illustrates the frictions between groups of Chicanos, stressing the erroneous idea that they share a homogeneous identity, contrary to common belief. Blas Falconer, Erasmo Guerra, and Steven Cordova link their Latino identity to sexual orientation, questioning the idea of machismo as an essential aspect of Latino masculinity. …

Reinvestigating the Noticing Function of Output

A conceptual replication of Izumi and Bigelow's research, this study used multiple measures to investigate second language (L2) learners’ processes in output‐input‐output sequences. Specifically, it examined whether producing the target language impacts learners’ attention to L2 structures in subsequent input. Thirty learners of English as a second language were randomly assigned to two experimental groups (EGs) and a control group (CG). The EGs were given opportunities for written output that elicited either the past or the present hypothetical‐conditional (more complex vs. less complex structures) while the CG was not prompted to produce output requiring the use of the target structures. All groups engaged in follow‐up reading and underlining activities. The input text modeled targetlike use of the relevant structure for the EGs. Subsequently, all participants produced a second essay and participated in a stimulated recall interview. While the quantitative underlining and test data did not support an effect of output (EGs vs. CG) on specific attention to grammar in subsequent text, the qualitative stimulated‐recall data revealed how output influences learners’ subsequent noticing of vocabulary and/or awareness of their linguistic limitations concerning grammar structures. Learning was greater with the more complex structure, which is discussed in light of the noticing hypothesis and information processing theory.

Digging Deeper into Text Mining: Academics and Agencies Look Toward Unstructured Data

In an effort to help government officials anticipate significant events such as political unrest, disease outbreaks, or natural disasters, the US government's Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Agency is launching a mass dataset mining effort, hoping to develop technologies that can mine disparate sources such as blogs, search engine results, Internet traffic, webcams, and many others. Researchers in the natural and social sciences have long been doing similar work, however, which might serve to show the current limitations of computational linguistics, especially in trying to discern, on the fly, events that could have significant policy implications.

Implementierung von Maßnahmen zur Tabakentwöhnung im Krankenhaus

Hospitals have a unique key role in promoting smoking cessation. However, cessation interventions are uncommon in clinical routine despite their proven effectiveness. For planning a tailored intervention for hospitalised patients we examined the characteristics of smokers in our department for lung diseases. From July to September 2009 we evaluated the smoking status of all admitted patients. The smoking status was validated by measuring the CO-Hb. Smokers admitted for the first time on one of our regular wards received a comprehensive questionnaire. Patients with a duration of stay of 2 days or less and patients with substantial cognitive or linguistic limitations were excluded. Clinical data was collected from the participating smokers. 25% of all admitted patients were smokers. The participation rate was almost 90% of the eligible smokers. Our questionnaire was very well accepted und provided multitude helpful information for a following cessation counselling. Up to 3 or 4 smokers per day should be anticipated for a cessation intervention at an 80-bed-hospital. At least one counselling contact could be enabled. Although 75% of participants had experienced at least one unsuccessful quit attempt, only a minority used any support or help for cessation so far. Specific questionnaires to evaluate the smoking history of patients in hospitals are very suitable and facilitate a subsequent bedside-counseling. To come up with their key role in promoting smoking cessation more hospitals as yet should implement cessation interventions.

Taming Textual Data: The Contribution of Corpus Linguistics to Computer-Aided Text Analysis

Corpus linguistics studies real-life language use on the basis of a text corpus, drawing on both quantitative and qualitative text analysis techniques. This article seeks to bridge the gap between the social sciences and linguistics by introducing the techniques of corpus linguistics to the field of computer-aided text analysis. The article first discusses the differences between corpus linguistics and computer-aided text analysis, which is divided into computer-aided content analysis and computer-aided interpretive textual analysis. It then outlines the techniques of corpus linguistics for exploring textual data. In an exemplary analysis of letters to shareholders, the article demonstrates how these techniques can be applied to compare letters to shareholders from two different years. The article concludes with a discussion of the strengths and limitations of corpus linguistics for management and organization studies.

Responsiveness of children with specific language impairment and maternal repairs during shared book reading

Previous studies indicate that (1) children with specific language impairment (SLI) produce a high number of problematic answers during shared book reading, and that (2) adult communicative input has a key role in supporting child responsiveness. However, little is known about the strategies used by parents to repair children's inadequate answers and their effectiveness in supporting appropriate responses. Repairs (any utterance aimed to correct a child's problematic answer) produced by mothers of children with SLI and mothers of typically developing children during shared reading conversation were compared: (1) to examine whether there are significant differences in their features, and to what extent these differences (if any) are accounted for by limitations in child responsiveness and language abilities; and (2) to assess whether-and in which cases-maternal repairs are effective in eliciting appropriate answers from children with SLI. Ten preschool-aged children with SLI, ten age-matched typically developing children, and ten mean length of utterance-matched typically developing children with their mothers participated in the study. Each mother-child dyad was videotaped during four sessions of shared book reading at home. Each maternal repair was coded according to the level of support (i.e., presence of crucial information and familiar topic) provided to elicit the child's correct answer. Each child's answer following a maternal repair was coded on the basis of both linguistic production and content appropriateness. Mothers of children with SLI produced significantly more high-supportive repairs than mothers of age-matched children, but not more than mothers of mean length of utterance-matched younger children. Sequential analysis applied to maternal repairs and children's answers showed that supportive repairs significantly affected the occurrence of minimally acceptable answers produced by children with SLI, while non-supportive repairs affected significantly the occurrence of inadequate answers. Children with SLI behaved in a similar way to mean length of utterance-matched younger children, showing spontaneous motivation to imitate crucial information included in high-supportive repairs. The findings suggest that mothers of children with SLI adjust their repairs to their children's linguistic limitations. The use of supportive repairs is functional to model the children's answers, enables them to practise new words, and contributes to the children's experience of being an active interlocutor. These findings have a potential clinical value that can be used in language intervention programmes based on shared book reading.

Information tracking and encoding in early L1: linguistic competence vs. cognitive limitations

This study provides experimental evidence for preschool children's competence in basic information structure, with particular attention to the notions of topic and focus. It investigates their mastery of structural and definiteness distinctions to encode the information status of discourse referents, and seeks to distinguish linguistic competence from cognitive development as the source for children's 'errors'. Evidence comes from a story-telling experiment performed on 45 children acquiring French (between the ages of 2;6·22 and 5;6·15). The article demonstrates continuity between the child and adult systems of basic discourse representation. It further argues that children's definiteness errors are not due to a lack of knowledge of the adult rules of information encoding. Rather, such errors stem from cognitive limitations and from assuming a wider common ground than adults would.

Reflecting upon the linguistic limitations of marketing managerial practice

Reflecting upon the linguistic limitations of marketing managerial practice

Articulating a deficit perspective: a survey of the attitudes of post-primary English language support teachers and coordinators

Issues related to supporting the language of schooling have become important social and educational policy concerns in Ireland. This article reports on a three-year investigation of the micro-climate of English language support provision in 70 post-primary schools since 2007 and highlights potential points of leverage in the educational system for improving language minority migrant student achievement. It argues that language minority migrant students have equality of presence in our classrooms but this is not securing equality of participation or achievement. While fundamentally challenging a prevailing political credo that Ireland has a unique moral, intellectual and practical capability to adapt to the experience of inward migration, the views of language support teachers at the ‘chalkface’ also reveal a lack of engagement with wider issues of power, language and identity in the classroom as well as with the important role of parental involvement in migrant student education. Contrary to best intercultural and inclusive paradigms, a monolingual deficit model which emphasises the child's linguistic limitations is widely established in our post-primary schools.

TagClusters

Many online communities use TagClouds, an aesthetic and easy to understand visualization, to represent popular tags collaboratively generated by their users. However, due to the free nature of tagging, such collaborative tags have linguistic problems and limitations, such as high semantic density. Moreover, the alphabetical order of TagClouds poorly supports a hierarchical exploration among tags. This paper presents an exploration to support semantic understanding of collaborative tags beyond TagClouds. Based on the results of the authors’ survey of practical usages of collaborative tags, they developed a visualization named TagClusters, in which tags are clustered into different groups, with font size representing tag popularity and the spatial distance indicating the semantic similarity between tags. The subgroups in each group and the overlap between groups are highlighted, illustrating the underlying hierarchical structure and semantic relations between groups. The authors conducted a comparative evaluation with TagClouds and TagClusters based on the same tag set. The results confirmed the advantage of TagClusters in facilitating browsing, comparing and comprehending semantic relations between tags.

Linguistic and cultural strategies in ELT dictionaries

There are three main types of ELT dictionaries: monolingual, bilingual, and bilingualized. Each type of dictionary, while having its own advantages, also hinders the learning of English as a foreign language and culture in so far as it is written from a homogenizing (linguistic- and culture-centric) perspective. This paper presents a new type of dictionary that tries to overcome the linguistic and cultural limitations of its predecessors. This is achieved by means of a series of strategies that have to do with localization, delocalization, globalization, and glocalization of language and/or culture. It is hoped that the presentation of the linguistic and cultural strategies underlying this new kind of dictionary will (1) help the ELT community to improve students’ linguistic and cultural competencies, (2) help teachers evaluate the efficacy of different ELT dictionaries, and (3) promote the creation of more effective ELT dictionaries.

Zooming In, Coming Out: Languages in Olivier Ducastel and Jacques Martineau's Ma vraie vie à Rouen/The True Story of My Life in Rouen (2003)

Over the past 20–25 years, cinematic representations of homosexualities have become more numerous and diversified than ever. Key figures of an emerging French gay cinema, Olivier Ducastel and Jacques Martineau have developed a rich and original body of work combining an interest in contemporary social issues with non-miserabilist depictions of gay characters/experiences and a lightness of tone reminiscent of the films of Jacques Demy. This article focuses on Olivier Ducastel and Martineau's least discussed work, the second film of their gay trilogy: the fake home movie/video diary Ma vraie vie à Rouen/My True Story of My Life in Rouen (2003). Particular attention will be paid to the interaction between two distinct types of language: on the one hand, the alternative film language developed by this mock amateur film and, on the other hand, the young protagonist's own language usages which are inadequate for the expression of same-sex desires. I will also discuss the ways that the film language (developed thanks to the use of an obsessive and intrusive camcorder) partly succeeds in compensating for the protagonist's linguistic limitations.

Shugendo: Japanese Mountain Religion – State of the Field and Bibliographic Review

AbstractShugendo is a fascinating subject that crosses conceptual and scholarly boundaries. This is a cause of its richness, but also has led to a great deal of misunderstanding. A major concern remains its definition; if this article brings readers to a greater awareness of its parameters, the author will be well‐satisfied. My purpose here is not so much a description of Shugendo history and rituals, important as they are, as to introduce contemporary scholarship regarding them, primarily in English, but also to a lesser extent in French and German, to an English readership. It has been impossible to do this without reference to the Japanese scholarship upon which much of that work is indebted, since knowledge of this scholarship is crucial in dispelling Western misconceptions about Shugendo. Therefore, at the risk of excluding scholars of religion who cannot access the work directly because of the linguistic limitations, I have attempted to draw the attention of readers to the most significant works written in Japanese on the subject as well. At the same time, bearing in mind that this article is not intended simply for historians of religion already in the Japanese field, I have felt it to be important to provide the broadest possible selection of works in English that relate to the theme, to allow English language readers a wide access to monographs and articles about Shugendo or Shugendo‐related subjects. Space considerations have circumscribed detailed discussion of the research history, but every effort has been made to refer to the main issues involved.

Editorial: A Natural Balance: Communications and Full Papers

As we have witnessed over the past several years, research in Asia is growing at an exciting pace and is making an ever-increasing impact in the global scientific community. This is evidenced, for example, by the astonishing increase in published articles from Asia in top international journals such as Angewandte Chemie, Chemistry—A European Journal, Journal of the American Chemical Society, and, of course, Chemistry—An Asian Journal. I am pleased to see that the initial vision of Chemistry—An Asian Journal has come to fruition. Thanks to the joint efforts of its Editorial Board, International Advisory Board, and editorial staff, as well as the individual Asian Chemical Editorial Society (ACES) members and the publisher Wiley-VCH, Chemistry—An Asian Journal has quickly established itself as a leading “full paper venue” for disseminating the best of both Asian and international research. Over its first two years, our journal has published a constant flow of high-quality Full Papers and timely Focus Reviews while maintaining the highest scientific standards with a rejection rate of about 60%. Submissions to Chemistry—An Asian Journal have been steadily climbing over the journal's first two years, particularly from ACES member countries, and ever more authors in general are opting to publish their results as Communications with Supporting Information. In response to these upward trends as well as considerable feedback from the chemistry community and unified support from the owner societies, it is time for the journal to take the next step and offer a broader range of article types. In January 2009, Chemistry—An Asian Journal will launch a Communication section in addition to its Full Paper and Focus Review sections. Submissions of Communications are already being accepted, and guidelines for the preparation of manuscripts can be found at the journal homepage (www.chemasianj.org). The combination of a Communication and Full Paper section is a natural balance: Chemistry—A European Journal, our sister journal, began publishing Communications in January 2008 to complement its highly successful Full Paper section, and the Journal of the American Chemical Society also has a combination of Full Papers and Communications. With this new addition, Chemistry—An Asian Journal will be able to offer rapid dissemination of urgent results while still publishing comprehensive original articles. Everyone would surely agree that Communications in general are crucial for the scientific literature to keep pace with rapid developments in research, but I would like to take this opportunity to emphasize the vital importance of also writing Full Papers particularly for Asian chemists. From my own personal observations, I would say that although the Asian chemical community has recently made tremendous strides, it is still not yet fully matured as a whole. In some countries, under the pressure of governmental or other evaluation agencies, young researchers often concentrate too much on publishing papers that are too easy, just for the purpose of “scoring points” on their publication list. I am very much disappointed at this situation. Their papers are too technical and do not offer enough conceptual insight or detail. Such robotic production of cheap, technical notes should be avoided. Furthermore, no benefit is gained by the overuse of catchy titles and self-promotional buzz terms such as “new paradigm”, “strategy”, “innovation”, “novel”, or “remarkably efficient”. Scientific journals should be attractive for researchers, but they should also be readable. These days, far too many journals exist only for the sake of their authors and publishers and seem to have lost sight of the real target of their publishing activities: their readers who are engaged in serious scientific research! Chemistry—An Asian Journal has a role to play in nurturing talented chemists in Asia, but this can only be achieved through the cooperation of our scientific community and the publishing house. There is an overriding tendency for Asian chemists to submit Communications rather than Full Papers, owing in part to linguistic limitations. But with the availability of editing services as well as assistance from multinational colleagues and the help of editorial staff at the publisher, language should not be used as an excuse. I strongly encourage young Asians to make a habit of writing well-thought-out scholarly Full Papers that tell a scientific “story”. Only by providing such depth in conveying their results will young researchers ever gain a solid reputation and become influential in the community. A short Communication with tables, figures, schemes, and a few brief sentences is not sufficient to disclose an author's important scientific philosophy. Supporting Information does not help either. For the sake of their own professional development, researchers should be judicious in deciding which results to publish as short Communications, and it is essential to keep these in a proper balance with more-comprehensive Full Paper submissions. I am encouraged that Chemistry – An Asian Journal is continuing in its role as the best arena for nurturing thoughtful young chemists. 1 1

Zen sourcebook: traditional documents from China, Korea, and Japan

Featuring a carefully selected collection of source documents, this tome includes traditional teaching tools from the Zen Buddhist traditions of China (Ch'an), Korea (Son), and Japan (Zen), including texts created by women. The selections provide both a good feel for the varieties of Zen and an experience of its common core...The texts are experiential teachings and include storytelling, poetry, autobiographies, catechisms, calligraphy, paintings, and koans (paradoxical meditation questions that are intended to help aspirants transcend logical, linguistic limitations). Contextual commentary prefaces each text. Wade-Giles transliteration is used, although Pinyin, Korean, Japanese, and Sanskrit terms are linked in appendixes. An insightful introduction by Arai contributes a religious studies perspective. The bibliography references full translations of the selections. A thought-provoking discussion about the problems of translation is included...Summing Up: Highly recommended. All levels. -- Choice

Perfil comunicativo de indivíduos com a síndrome de Williams-Beuren

OBJETIVO: Descrever o perfil comunicativo de indivíduos com a síndrome de Williams-Beuren. MÉTODOS: A casuística foi composta por 12 indivíduos com a síndrome com idade cronológica entre 6;6 a 23;6 (Grupo 1) que foram comparados a outros 12 sem a síndrome e com idade mental semelhante e sem dificuldades de linguagem/aprendizagem (Grupo 2). Os indivíduos foram avaliados em situação de conversação para classificação dos comportamentos verbais e não-verbais, segundo critérios pragmáticos, levantamento do número de turnos por minuto, enunciados por turno, Extensão Média de Enunciados, levantamento quanto à freqüência e tipologia de disfluências da fala e classificação quanto ao tipo de pausas plenas do discurso. RESULTADOS: O perfil comunicativo do Grupo 1 mostrou facilidade para interagirem em situação de comunicação com a presença de limitações lingüísticas estruturais e funcionais variáveis, quando comparados aos indivíduos do Grupo 2. Os indivíduos do Grupo 1 freqüentemente utilizaram estratégias comunicativas, na tentativa de preencherem o espaço comunicativo, como o uso de clichês, efeitos sonoros, recursos entonacionais e as pausas plenas que mostraram ser favoráveis do ponto de vista sócio-comunicativo, enquanto que os comportamentos verbais ecolálicos e perseverativos prejudicam o desempenho comunicativo desses indivíduos. CONCLUSÃO: O desempenho comunicativo mais prejudicado do Grupo 1 permitiu especular que comprometimentos lingüísticos nesta condição podem estar presentes, independente da diferença entre idade cronológica e mental. Estudos mais abrangentes poderão responder ao questionamento da dissociação de habilidades cognitivas e lingüísticas nesta síndrome e também no que diz respeito à complexa esta correlação em meio aos distúrbios da comunicação humana.

Lost and Found

American ????G Williamson continuedfrom previous page uncensored bray of a Penthouse letter? Are we so narcissistic that we believe post-WWII American letters to be better, more interesting, more enduring, more relevant than our literature of a hundred years before, than Hawthorne, Melville, Poe, Whitman, Emerson, and Thoreau, authors who had to find ways to be angry without saying "fuck you," to be sexy without describing clapping genitals, authors who wrote with linguistic limits imposed by a "repressive " culture? Do we think David Mamet a better playwright than Euripides or Brecht? The best way to squash dissent is to institutionalize it, to condone it, to package and market it. Ginsberg himself writes about this in his essay, "Poetry, Violence, and the Trembling Lambs." Bemoaning the commercialization of the scene in San Francisco, he writes, "Those ofthe general populace whose individual perception is sufficiently weak to be formed by stereotypes of mass communication disapprove and deny the insight. The police and newspapers have moved in, mad movie manufacturers from Hollywood are at this moment preparing bestial stereotypes of the scene." And we get the movie Easy Rider (1969). We get Shaft, 1971 (sex machine—that's John Shaft to you, whitey). We get the three record set of Woodstock, complete with antiwar chants in case you can't make up your own. Instead of Coltrane and Billie Holiday and Bessie Mae Smith, we get Snoop Doggy Dogg. The question, finally, is not whether we should censor our artists and our speech or not. The question is this: given that it's better to have freedom of expression than repression of expression, what do we say? And how the fuck do we say it? Eric Miles Williamson is an associate editor of American Book Review. His latest book, Oakland, Jack London, and Me, will bepublished this summer by Texas Review Press. Lost and Found Davis Schneiderman The Lost Years of William S. Burroughs: Beats in South Texas Rob Johnson Texas A&M University Press http://www.tamu.edu/upress 208 pages; cloth, $40.00; paper, $19.95 The trouble with titling a book The Lost Years ofWilliam S. Burroughs is the implication that other years, in other scholarly tomes, have been already mapped, traced, located, examined — in another word: found. Much recent criticism of the work of William S. Burroughs would certainly disagree, focusing instead (in the case of the most prolific Burroughs scholar, Oliver Harris, as well as my own recent essays) on a complicated manuscript history that does as much to puncture the overripened Burroughsian mythos as it does to deflate the heretofore chronologies ofhis production. Even so, the game is never so simple. For every scholar intent on tracing the origin of a cut-up phrase and its labyrinthine permutations through Burroughs's texts, there are ten, maybe one hundred, persons who are equally (if not more) enthused by the rehash of Burroughs as junkie, Burroughs as wife killer, Burroughs as. . . well...Burroughs. So, despite the implied conclusion of its title, Rob Johnson's study of Burroughs's noncontiguous years in the South Texas "Valley" (1946-1949) contributes to the myth-busting trend ofthe criticism while still attending, precisely, to the nuances of Burroughsian "fascination" (Harris's term) in a way that actually adds substance rather than sizzle to the long-repeated narratives ofEl Hombre Invisible. No doubt, this is due to the paucity ofprevious information used in Johnson's study. Much is already detailed and endlessly documented about Burroughs's stays in New York, Mexico City, Tangier, Paris, and London, but little has been said in the official critical corpus about these Texas years. Johnson tells us how Barry Miles, author of the smaller of the two Burroughs biographies, William Burroughs: El Hombre Invisible (1993), finds the Valley located in East Texas (in his Ginsberg biography); Ted Morgan, author of the earlier biography, Literary Outlaw: The Life and Times ofWilliam S. Burroughs (1988), does the same. It is all the harder to find, Johnson relates, because the Valley—"120 miles ofthe Texas border from Brownsville on the coast all the way up the river to Rio Grande City"—is no valley at all, "only a landscape described today in the...

LIVER REGENERATION: MECHANISMS, MYSTERIES AND MORE

Liver regeneration remains a fascinating topic, still partly clouded to many as to the exact cellular and molecular mechanisms that bring about this phenomenon. It is an area, therefore, of active research today. This review looks at the recent published reports that have led to a greater understanding of this process. A database search was carried out on Medline search using the terms liver regeneration with no linguistic limitations from 1966 to 2006. There are two randomized controlled trials on the topic and most data and information have come from experimental studies in animals. Liver regeneration is a complex, tightly controlled process involving many inflammatory cells growth factors and hormones. More information about it is awaited in studies on humans.

Managing linguistic incompetence as a delicate issue in aphasic talk-in-interaction: On the use of laughter in prolonged repair sequences

While problems of understandability have been well documented as one consequence of aphasia in talk-in-interaction, the fact that the linguistic limitations associated with aphasia can lead to a speaker producing displays of linguistic incompetence which are treated as delicate and potentially embarrassing has been less investigated. In this paper two methods by which aphasic speakers can be seen to treat their displays of incompetence as delicate are analysed. Both involve treating the non-competence as laughable and are produced within self-initiated repair sequences at a point where the speaker has failed to produce a self-repair despite a prolonged attempt which has markedly delayed the ongoing progressivity of the turn. One method involves the aphasic speaker producing laughter which alone or with a verbal account marks his/her self-repair attempt at that point as having failed. In response, the conversation partners recurrently do not respond to this laughter with laughter of their own. The second method involves the aphasic speaker producing a ‘humorous noticing’ of a repair try which has been produced as an error. In response to these humorous noticings conversation partners regularly laugh. These methods of managing delicate displays of linguistic incompetence are discussed, along with some methods of turn construction used by aphasic speakers which result in such displays of linguistic incompetence being less likely to occur.

Language as a barrier to care for Xhosa-speaking patients at a South African paediatric teaching hospital.

Disease is closely linked to the social context in which we live. Difficulty with communication, cultural incompatibility between patients and health care providers and socioeconomic obstacles are important barriers to quality care when doctors and patients come from different backgrounds and speak different languages. Red Cross War Memorial Children's Hospital (RCH) is a paediatric teaching hospital in Cape Town where staff members communicate mainly in English or Afrikaans, while many patients speak Xhosa as their first language. The study aimed to identify barriers to optimal care for Xhosa-speaking parents of patients at RCH. The contribution of language difficulties was assessed as a possible barrier to health care for this group. A questionnaire was developed and administered to 53 Xhosa-speaking parents of children admitted to the short-stay ward at RCH. The questionnaire examined parents' perceptions of barriers to their children's care, using openended questions, closed-ended questions and selection from lists. Parents experienced significant structural and socioeconomic barriers to access of health care for their children. Language and cultural barriers were cited by more parents as a major barrier to health care than structural and socioeconomic barriers. Parents did not have access to same-language practitioners, as only 6% of medical interviews were conducted partly or wholly in the patient's home language. Of the 94% of interviews where no Xhosa was spoken by medical staff, 21% were conducted with the aid of an interpreter (formal or ad hoc) and in 79% no interpreter was used. Parents experienced difficulties with understanding the doctors (64%), making themselves understood (54%) and asking questions (38%). Sixty-nine per cent of parents were dissatisfied with communication between themselves and their doctors and 45% were concerned about negative effects of poor communication on them or their children. Parents tended to blame their own linguistic limitation rather than those of the doctors.