Speakers Of Danish Research Articles

Danish Translation and Linguistic Validation of the U.S. National Cancer Institute's Patient-Reported Outcomes version of the Common Terminology Criteria for Adverse Events (PRO-CTCAE)

ContextThe Common Terminology Criteria for Adverse Events (CTCAE) is the basis for standardized clinician-based grading and reporting of adverse events in cancer clinical trials. The U.S. National Cancer Institute has developed the Patient-Reported Outcomes version of the CTCAE (PRO-CTCAE) to incorporate patient self-reporting of symptomatic adverse events. ObjectivesThe aim of the study was to translate and linguistically validate a Danish language version of PRO-CTCAE. MethodsThe U.S. English language PRO-CTCAE was translated into Danish using forward and backward procedures with reconciliation. The linguistic validity of the PRO-CTCAE Danish was examined in two successive rounds of semistructured cognitive interviews in a sample of 56 patients equally distributed by gender and cancer type (prostate, head and neck, lung, breast, gynecological, gastrointestinal, and hematological cancer), and who were currently undergoing cancer treatment. ResultsIn the first round of linguistic validation (n = 42), the phrasing of five symptomatic toxicities was adjusted, and the refined phrasing was retested in a second round of interviews (n = 14). Agreement about phrasing that was both culturally acceptable and semantically comprehensible was achieved in the second round. Statements from participants describing the meaning of the PRO-CTCAE symptomatic toxicities support conceptual equivalence to the U.S. English language version. ConclusionAvailability of the NCI PRO-CTCAE in languages beyond English will support international congruence in self-reporting of side effects of cancer treatment. A rigorous methodology was used to develop the Danish language version of PRO-CTCAE. Results provide preliminary support for the use of PRO-CTCAE in cancer clinical trials that include Danish speakers.

Lige, a Danish ‘magic word’?

The Danish word lige [ˈliːə] is a highly culture-specific discourse particle. English translations sometimes render it as “please,” but this kind of functional translation is motivated solely by the expectation that, in English, one has to ‘say please’. In the Danish universe of meaning, there is in fact no direct equivalent of anything like English please, German bitte, or similar constructs in other European languages. Consequently, Danish speakers cannot ‘say please’, and Danish children cannot ‘say the magic word’. However, lige is in its own way a magic word, performing a different kind of pragmatic magic that has almost been left unstudied because it does not correlate well with any of the major Anglo-international research questions such as “how to express politeness” or “how to make a request.” This paper analyzes the semantics of lige in order to shed light on the peculiarities of Danish ethnopragmatics. It is demonstrated not only that Danish lige does a different semantic job than English please, but also that please-based and lige-based interactions are bound to different interpretations of social life and interpersonal relations, and reflect differing cultural values.

Les guerres du Schleswig-Holstein, lieu de mémoire nationaliste dans l’Allemagne wilhelminienne

The present paper deals with German nationalist “lieux de mémoire” (sites of memory) related to the Schleswig-Holstein wars (1848-1851 and 1864) in the German Empire. Eight historical novels, published between 1881 and 1914, were used as primary sources for this article. These books played an important part in the popularization of the historical arguments justifying the annexation of both duchies by Prussia. Most novels were written either while Köller was Oberpräsident of the Prussian province of Schleswig-Holstein, or a little later, and they can only be understood in the light of the Germanization policy which was carried out in this province. In the case of Northern Schleswig, nationalist intellectuals were confronted with two difficulties. Firstly, even the champions of the German cause in Northern Schleswig spoke a Danish dialect as their mother tongue. Secondly, individual members of one and the same family sometimes declared their support for different national camps. So neither the mother tongue and the national-political opinions, nor the “lineage” and the national-political opinions could be automatically equated. Most authors payed attention to the national peculiarities of Northern Schleswig in their work, whilst at the same time supporting the Germanization policy. The detour via the German history allowed a legitimation of the Köllerian politics. Some radical völkisch novelists apparently promoted a German-Danish reconciliation. But this was not aimed at the “real” Danish speakers. An imagined union of all Germanic peoples was at stake, not the political rights of an ethnic minority.

Kan en dynamisk afkodningstekst i børnehaveklassen bidrage til at forudsige læsevanskeligheder i 1. klasse? Foreløbige resultater fra en langtidsundersøgelse

The aim of the research reported here was to examine the validity of a new dynamic test of the initial development of reading. In the dynamic test, participants are taught three novel letters and how to synthesize the letter sounds into new words. This test was administered along with traditional tests of reading, letter knowledge and phonological awareness to 176 children at the end of the kindergarten grade. Three months into Grade 1, traditional tests of reading were administered to the same children. It was found that performance on the dynamic test correlated highly with concurrent performance on traditional tests of reading, letter knowledge, and phonological awareness in the kindergarten grade. Importantly, the dynamic test contributed significantly to the prediction of reading abilities in Grade 1 even after controlling for traditional pre-school predictors: letter knowledge and phonological awareness. The dynamic test was found to contribute to the early identification of children at risk of poor reading abilities among native speakers of Danish as well as among children with Danish as a second language. These results provide preliminary support for the validity of the dynamic test of reading.

’Det er easy at tale engelsk også’. Amerikadansk i 1960’erne og 1970’erne

The conditions for the Danish language among Danish emigrants and their descendants in the United States in the first half of the 20th century were tough: The group of Danish speakers was relatively small, the Danes did not settle together as other immigrant groups did, and demographic circumstances led many young, unmarried Danish men to marry non-Danish speaking partners. These were all factors that prevented the formation of tight-knit Danish-speaking communities. Furthermore, US nationalistic propaganda in the wake of World War I and the melting-pot effect of post-war American society in the 1950s contributed to a rapid decline in the use of Danish among the emigrants. Analyses of recordings of 58 Danish-American speakers from the 1970s show, however, that the language did not decline in an unsystematic process of language loss, only to be replaced quickly and effectively by English. On the contrary, the recordings show contactinduced linguistic innovations in the Danish of the interviewees, which involve the creation of specific lexical and syntactical American Danish features that systematically differ from Continental Danish. The article describes and discusses these features, and gives a thorough account of the socioeconomic and linguistic conditions for this speaker group.

Excuse me, but can you tell me where the Nordic House is located? Linguistic strategies in inter-Nordic communication in Iceland illustrated through participant observation

AbstractIn Iceland, Danish is taught as a foreign language parallel to English. One purpose for this is to promote inter-Nordic communication, since Danish is generally held to be intercomprehensible for both Norwegian and Swedish speakers. Assuming the role of tourists, field workers who were native speakers of Danish, Norwegian or Swedish approached Icelandic adolescents (aged 15–20), asking in their native language for directions to the Nordic House in Reykjavík. The investigation was conducted at three different time periods (1983, 1999/2004 and 2006) and showed that the proportion of young people understanding the question thus posed to them decreased from two thirds (1983) to a little less than 40% (2006). At the same time, the number switching to English while answering the question increased. In 2006, a large majority (80%) was inclined to do so, while only one third did so in 1983, roughly 25 years earlier.

Semantic Categories in the Domain of Motion Verbs by Adult Speakers of Danish, German, and Turkish

Languages differ in the ways they divide the world. This study applies cluster analysis to understand how and why languages differ in the way they express motion events. It further lays out what the parameters of the structure of the semantic space of motion are, based on data collected from participants who were adult speakers of Danish, German, and Turkish. The participants described 37 video clips depicting a large variety of motion events. The results of the study show that the segmentation of the semantic space displays a great deal of variation across all three groups. Turkish differs from German and Danish with respect to the features used to segment the semantic space – namely by using vector orientation. German and Danish differ greatly with respect to (a) how fine-grained the distinctions made are, and (b) how motion verbs with a common Germanic root are distributed across the semantic space. Consequently, this study illustrates that the parameters applied for categorization by speakers are, to some degree, related to typological membership, in relation to Talmy's typological framework for the expression of motion events. Finally, the study shows that the features applied for categorization differ across languages and that typological membership is not necessarily a predictor of elaboration of the motion verb lexicon.

The dative alternation in Danish and Polish – A learners perspective

Three experiments investigating how two groups of adult Polish learners of Danish as a foreign language acquire the Danish dative alternation are reported. Experiment 1 is a speeded acceptability judgment task, which shows that Group 1 has the same pattern as native speakers i.e. slower responses to the dispreffered new-given NP-constructions, but no givenness effect with the PP-constructions. Experiment 2 shows that Group 2 also have acquired this pattern, even though earlier research suggests that the givenness asymmetry in the dative alternation is hard to learn. Experiment 3 shows that even in Polish there is a givenness asymmetry, such that the given–new order is clearly preferred in the NP-construction, but less so in the PP-construction. The rapid acquisition of the Danish pattern could thus be explained by Polish having the same pattern. In short: Both Polish and Danish have a givenness asymmetry in the dative alternation, which could explain why Polish learners of Danish in both groups behave almost like native Danish speakers.

Working Memory Capacity May Influence Perceived Effort during Aided Speech Recognition in Noise

Recently there has been interest in using subjective ratings as a measure of perceived effort during speech recognition in noise. Perceived effort may be an indicator of cognitive load. Thus, subjective effort ratings during speech recognition in noise may covary both with signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) and individual cognitive capacity. The present study investigated the relation between subjective ratings of the effort involved in listening to speech in noise, speech recognition performance, and individual working memory (WM) capacity in hearing impaired hearing aid users. In two experiments, participants with hearing loss rated perceived effort during aided speech perception in noise. Noise type and SNR were manipulated in both experiments, and in the second experiment hearing aid compression release settings were also manipulated. Speech recognition performance was measured along with WM capacity. There were 46 participants in all with bilateral mild to moderate sloping hearing loss. In Experiment 1 there were 16 native Danish speakers (eight women and eight men) with a mean age of 63.5 yr (SD = 12.1) and average pure tone (PT) threshold of 47. 6 dB (SD = 9.8). In Experiment 2 there were 30 native Swedish speakers (19 women and 11 men) with a mean age of 70 yr (SD = 7.8) and average PT threshold of 45.8 dB (SD = 6.6). A visual analog scale (VAS) was used for effort rating in both experiments. In Experiment 1, effort was rated at individually adapted SNRs while in Experiment 2 it was rated at fixed SNRs. Speech recognition in noise performance was measured using adaptive procedures in both experiments with Dantale II sentences in Experiment 1 and Hagerman sentences in Experiment 2. WM capacity was measured using a letter-monitoring task in Experiment 1 and the reading span task in Experiment 2. In both experiments, there was a strong and significant relation between rated effort and SNR that was independent of individual WM capacity, whereas the relation between rated effort and noise type seemed to be influenced by individual WM capacity. Experiment 2 showed that hearing aid compression setting influenced rated effort. Subjective ratings of the effort involved in speech recognition in noise reflect SNRs, and individual cognitive capacity seems to influence relative rating of noise type.

Native-language phonetic and phonological influences on perception of American English approximants by Danish and German listeners

Perception of non-native consonant contrasts may be influenced by phonetic, as well as phonological, properties of the listener's native language. The impact of both factors on perception of American English /r l w j/ was investigated with native speakers of Danish and German, which have /r l j/ but lack /w/, thus employing /r/-/l/ but lacking /w/-/j/ and /w/-/r/ as phonological contrasts. However, while the three languages realize /j/ identically, Danish/German “light” alveolar [l] differs modestly from English “dark” [ ▪] (velarized), Danish pharyngeal and labiodental approximant realizations of /r, v/ are more similar to English /r, w/ than are German uvular and labiodental fricative realizations, and Danish is richer in approximants than English or German. Phonetic similarities perceptually outweighed phonological correspondences: Danish listeners' performance on /w/-/r/ and /r/-/l/ approached that of English speakers, and discrimination of /w/-/j/ was remarkably higher than English speakers', all largely irrespective of spoken English experience. German listeners' identification of all contrasts was highly categorical, but discrimination was poorer than English and Danish listeners' for /w/-/r/ and /r/-/l/ and fell in between those two groups for /w/-/j/. Thus, cross-language phonetic relationships among corresponding (or neighboring) phonemes strongly influence perception. Together with systemic consideration of English, Danish, and German vowel and approximant subsystems, our results indicate that non-native speech perception is affected not only by the phonological contrastiveness and phonetic realizations of the target phonemes in the listeners' language, but also by broader systemic factors such as phonological subclasses.

The question–response system of Danish

This paper provides an overview of the question–response system of Danish, based on a collection of 350 questions (and responses) collected from video recordings of naturally occurring face-to-face interactions between native speakers of Danish. The paper identifies the lexico-grammatical options for formulating questions, the range of social actions that can be implemented through questions and the relationship between questions and responses. It further describes features where Danish questions differ from a range of other languages in terms of, for instance, distribution and the relationship between question format and social action. For instance, Danish has a high frequency of interrogatively formatted questions and questions that are negatively formulated, when compared to languages that have the same grammatical options. In terms of action, Danish shows a higher number of questions that are used for making suggestions, offers and requests and does not use repetition as a way of answering a question as often as other languages.

Word Searches in NNS–NS Interaction: Opportunities for Language Learning?

A substantial portion of second language acquisition research focuses on interactional practices in which nonnative speakers (NNSs) engage. From various theoretical viewpoints, it is assumed that certain types of interactional practices, specifically those in which participants focus on linguistic form, may promote language learning. The question of whether, and under which conditions, such sequences can be seen as providing the NNS with language learning opportunities, is considered in a purely data‐driven way, applying conversation analysis (CA) as a method. The article considers one specific type of interactional practice, “word search” sequences, and opportunities for language learning that they may provide for NNSs on the basis of naturally occurring interactions between native speakers of Danish and Dutch speakers of Danish. It is argued that in order to distinguish between “language learning opportunities” and other types of interactional practices, the researcher needs to analyze the data in detail.

Short-term immersion can change the location of a phonetic category boundary

In this study the effect of immersion in a second-language (L2) speaking environment on the perception and production of English sibilants by native (L1) speakers of Danish is examined. Three groups of subjects participated. Fourteen Danish au pairs or exchange students were tested before and after a 6–12 month immersion period. Eleven Danish control subjects were tested twice without immersion. Five native English baseline subjects were tested once. Danes tend to assimilate English /s/–/sh/ to two different Danish sound categories. However, the Danish /sh/ is palatalized and has more high frequency energy than English /sh/. If the immersed subjects changed their mental specifications for /sh/ after massive input of the more low frequency English /sh/ during immersion, one might expect a perceptual category boundary shift for /s/–sh/. This shift was indeed found, using an interpolated synthetic /s/–/sh/ continuum for the identification and discrimination in both an English and a Danish language set. Production was measured using spectral moments. However, there was no clear indication of a more authentic English pronunication of /sh/ after immersion than before. The results pertain to questions regarding the reorganization of phonetic categories after L2 experience, interactions between L1 and L2 phonetic systems, and the relation between perception and production.

Duration and rate effects on American English vowel identification by native Danish listeners

Native listeners alter their identification of American English vowel contrasts according to speaking rate, apparently making judgments about the relative duration of vowels. Berman et al. [J. Acoust. Soc. Am. 105, 1402 (1999)] created a series of spectral continua (varying F1 and F2) from ‘‘beat’’ to ‘‘bit,’’ ‘‘pat’’ to ‘‘pet,’’ and ‘‘cot’’ to ‘‘cut,’’ also varying syllable duration according to natural speech endpoints. These syllables were inserted into natural speech sentence contexts of two rates (normal and fast). Berman et al. found that longer syllable duration led to more long vowel (‘‘beat,’’ ‘‘pat,’’ ‘‘cot’’) responses; faster rate contexts also led to more long vowel responses. In the present research we tested native speakers of Danish on their use of duration and rate context in identifying these English vowels. Danish listeners were significantly affected by the duration of syllables in their vowel identification. However, despite vowel duration being phonemic in Danish, native Danish listeners were not significantly affected by rate context in their identification of these English vowels. This might be explained by perceived sufficiency of spectral information in these English vowel contrasts for Danish listeners, or by the lack of rate dependent vowel processing in their native language. [Work supported by Danish-American Fulbright Commission.]

Native Speakers' Judgements of Second Language Danish

L2 Danish is often negatively described in public discussions and the media in Denmark. This study examines native speakers' reactions to the L2 Danish of young bilingual Turkish-Danish school students. The respondents were asked to evaluate the quality of the Danish of the L2 speakers on the basis of tape-recorded excerpts each lasting one minute. They were also asked whether the speakers were L1 or L2 speakers of Danish. The respondents represented a wide range of ages, occupations, and places of residence, but one group of young boarding school students stood out in the data. This group evaluated the quality of the speakers' L2 Danish particularly harshly, but at the same time they were willing to accept more of the L2 speakers as native Danes. The respondents as a whole evaluated all the speakers more negatively when they considered them to be non-native Danes, but this tendency was not as strong among the young respondents. With some caution we conclude that among young people there is a measure of opposition to the attitude most often represented in public discussion and the media.

Acoustic studies comparing Danish vowels, British English vowels, and Danish-accented British English vowels

Few studies have examined the production of English vowels by native speakers of languages with vowel inventories as large as, or larger than, English. Danish is such a language, whose vowels are unevenly distributed in the vowel space, with a densely populated upper portion and a sparsely populated lower portion of the vowel space. This paper reports on acoustic comparisons of British English vowels as produced by ten native speakers of British English and of Danish, and of Danish vowels as produced by ten native speakers of Danish. Danish and English vowels were produced in CVC syllables in a variety of consonantal contexts. Acoustic analyses revealed temporal, spectral, and dynamic differences between the vowels produced by the speaker groups. The results of this study suggest that comparisons of vowels across languages, as well as analyses of the productions of non-native speakers, are incomplete and may even be misleading unless the effects of consonantal context are taken into account. The results of this study also provide an interesting test case for Flege’s speech learning model, which makes predictions concerning the learnability of foreign language vowels based on their degree of difference from native language categories.

The Activity of the Cricothyroid Muscle and the Intrinsic Fundamental Frequency in Danish Vowels

The relationship between the electromyographic (EMG) activity from the pars obliqua of the cricothyroid (CT) muscle (recorded with bipolar hook-wire electrodes) and the intrinsic fundamental frequency (IF0) in high and low vowels in Danish was investigated. The test material, which consisted of 306 randomized natural words of the type C'V(:)le, imbedded in carrier sentences, was recorded by 4 native speakers of Danish. The following vowel pairs were compared: ['i-'a,'i:-'ae:, 'u:-'ae:] and ['i:-'a]. The results, which are based on visual inspection of average EMG and fundamental frequency (F0) curves, show a positive correlation between the CT activity and IF0, more specifically that the CT activity rise related to the high vowels starts earlier and in most cases more steeply than the CT activity related to the low vowels. However, a drop in F0 at the beginning of the low vowels cannot be accounted for by CT activity. This F0 drop is believed to be the result of either tongue retraction during the articulation or influence from the preceding consonant. The following conclusion is drawn: The CT muscle is a major factor in controlling IF0 in stressed high and low vowels in Danish.

Intonation and text in Standard Danish

Acoustic analysis of recordings by four Standard Danish speakers reveals that each declarative sentence in a read text is associated with its own declining intonation contour, but together two or three such contours describe an overall falling slope. Individual sentence intonation contours are steeper, and demonstrate greater amounts of resetting between them, in a succession of declarative terminal sentences than in a corresponding string of coordinate main clauses. In other words, the closer relation between coordinate structures is reflected in a more coherent or less segregated intonational structure. The results are compared with other languages, and the implications for the abstract representation of Danish intonation are discussed.

Intonation and text in Standard Danish

Acoustic analysis of recordings by four Standard Danish speakers shows that each declarative sentence in a text is associated with its own declining intonation contour, but together two or three such contours describe an overall falling slope. Individual sentence intonation contours are steeper and demonstrate greater amounts of resetting between them in a succession of declarative terminal sentences than in a corresponding string of coordinate main clauses. In other words, the closer relation between coordinate structures is reflected in a more coherent or less segregated intonational structure. The results are compared with other languages, and the implications for the abstract representation of Danish intonation are discussed.

Internordisk språkförståelse: Föredrag och diskussioner vid ett symposium på Rungstedgaard utanför Köpenhamn den 24-26 mars 1980 Ed. by Claes-Christian Elert (review)

486 LANGUAGE, VOLUME 58, NUMBER 2 (1982) men, who maintain that correctness is absolute, and linguists, who argue that usage is relative. Citing e??ef?ß from the English journal, he points out that American educators long held to prescriptivism even though it was clearly in conflict with structuralist linguistics. D concludes with a brief discussion of how transformational -generative theory reinforced the relativity of usage. The dictionary debate over Webster's third (1961) is the subject of Chap. 5. A product of American structuralism, Webster's third presumed that speech is primary, that language changes constantly, that change is normal, that correctness is dependent upon usage, and that usage is relative. In outlining the controversy, D quotes an Episcopalian bishop who linked the permissiveness of Webster's third with Castro's revolution in Cuba. In Chap. 6, D provides a very useful summary ofthe history of popular and scholarly attitudes toward Black English. Drawing upon the research of Labov, D documents the movement away from the labeling of Black English as a remedial problem, and toward awareness that it is simply a dialect of English. Throughout this chapter, it is made clear that one cannot understand the history of the study of Black English without a broad consideration of social factors . Undoubtedly, moral and social responsibility have promoted scholarship on Black English. D's work is not exhaustive, nor is it intended to be the definitive study of American prescriptivism . It has its flaws: the material is often anecdotal, the editorial comments often detract from the scholarship, and many generalizations are unsupported. The work is more a collection of notes than a sustained theory. The treatment of material is often uneven; thus the chapter on Black English is probably the first survey ofthis growing research, but the account of Webster's third has been the subject of too many other studies. Yet the book is important because it represents a growing trend in linguistic historiography : it is strongly based on the notion that extra-linguistic values and events shape linguistic theory. The researcher cannot look at language scholarship as if it were isolated from a social context. [Joseph L. Subbiondo, University ofSanta Clara.] Internordisk sprâkforstâelse: Föredrag och diskussioner vid ett symposium pâ Rungstedgaard utanför Köpenhamn den 24-26 mars 1980. Ed. by Claes-Christian Elert. (Umeá studies in the humanities, 33.) Umeâ, Sweden: Acta Universitatis Umensis, 1981. Pp. 230. Speakers ofDanish, Norwegian, and Swedish form a dialect continuum, containing three (or four) standard languages that are close enough to each other so that mutual comprehension is possible between interlocutors using their native languages. But communication is not perfect : understanding is lowest between Danish and Swedish, although Danes understand Swedes better than vice versa; and the Bokmâl variety of Norwegian is the language best understood by speakers of neighboring languages . These are some ot the findings reported in this conference volume. Conference participants represent a broad spectrum of Scandinavian linguists: Jaakko Lehtonen, Kalevi Wiik, Robert Bannert, Bertil Molde, Sigurd Fries, UIf Teleman (who gave two papers and the concluding remarks), Einar Haugen, Tuomo Tevajärvi, Stig-Örjan Ohlsson, Sven-Gustaf Edqvist, Olaug Rekdal, and ClaesChristian Elert. All the papers are in Swedish— except Haugen's, which is in an orthographically Swedish-accented Norwegian. Topics range widely over experimental, sociolinguistic, psycholinguistic , and pedagogical aspects of the problem. The book concludes with a nine-page summary in English. This book will interest a far wider group than Scandinavian specialists. Anyone interested in problems of language variation and comprehensibility between closely-related languages should find something to spark interest in these pages. [John T. Jensen, University of Ottawa.] A nyelvek közötti kölcsönzes néhány kérdésérôl, különös tekintettel 'elangolosodó' orvosi nyelvünkre. ['On questions of interlingual borrowing , with special reference to the "Anglicization" of medical terminology .'] By Miklos Kontra. (Nyelvtudományi értekezések, 109.) Budapest: Akadémiai Kiadó, 1981. Pp. 65. Ft. 15.00. This is a revision of K's 1976 dissertation on interlingual borrowing. The 'Introduction', drawing on S. Ullmann's Principles of seman- ...