US English Research Articles

A multidimensional study of interactive registers in Pakistani and US English

AbstractThe present study is a multidimensional analysis of spoken and interactive online registers—comments, Facebook groups, Facebook status updates, and tweets—of Pakistani English in comparison to U.S. English. Four dimensions of variation are identified, namely oral narrative, abstract informational versus first person focus, interactive focus on mental activities and feelings, and present and future activities. Dimension 1 and 2 are the most prominent indicators of regional variation, while some registers also show variation on dimensions 3 and 4. The results suggest that conveying abstract and other kind of information is the most prominent general communicative purpose in Pakistani registers. US English, in contrast, also has communicative purposes like the expression of feelings and narration, in addition to conveying information. It is also suggested that the Internet is providing new avenues of communication for non‐native speakers of English, which demands further study and inclusion of these registers in corpora of varieties of English around the world.

Burden of albinism: development and validation of a burden assessment tool

BackgroundAlbinism comprises a group of autosomal recessive diseases that are characterized by poor vision and a variable hypopigmentation phenotype. A comprehensive literature review showed that no tool can assess the burden experienced by individuals who present with albinism, although such a tool is needed and would be beneficial for clinicians and patients alike.MethodThe questionnaire was devised using standardized methodology for developing and validating questionnaires on the quality of life of subjects according to the following chronological structure: conceptual phase, development phase, and then validation phase. A multidisciplinary working group was assembled, including experts on questionnaire design and development, dermatologists specializing in care for patients with albinism, and representatives of the Genespoir association.ResultsBased on an initial verbatim report, the workgroup compiled a list of items that were transcribed and reformulated into questions. During the validation phase, principal component analysis (PCA) was conducted on the 24 items, which allowed the questionnaire to be reduced to 20 questions [Q]. The standardized regression coefficients were all greater than 0.5 for their corresponding factors. Based on their normalized regression coefficients, each group of questions was linked to one of the following four dimensions, with each dimension consisting of at least three questions: “Live with” (8 Q), “Daily life” (3 Q), “Resignation” (3 Q), and “Fear of the future” (6 Q). All dimensions correlated well with the overall BoA score. Cronbach’s α was 0.92 for the entire BoA scale, confirming excellent internal coherence. Intradimensional coherences all demonstrated excellent reliability (α > 0.65). The BoA questionnaire was highly correlated with the SF12, RSES and DLQI validated questionnaires. This outcome confirmed the external validity.ConclusionThis questionnaire represents the first specific assessment tool for evaluating the burden of albinism. It is easy to use and relatively quick to complete, which will allow the burden to be evaluated over time with a reproducible questionnaire. To ensure that this questionnaire can be used by as many people as possible, cultural and linguistic validation in US English was conducted with the original French version.

CORRELATION OF NORTH AMERICAN ENGLISH AND BRITISH ENGLISH DIVERGENCIES IN LEXIS

The article focuses on the description of a special type of relationship that arises between lexical units within the corpus of English words in the framework of the sociolinguistic approach. Various ways of correlation between North American and British usages emerge in present-day English due to the action of two processes of the language development favoured by a set of historical, linguistic and sociolinguistic factors: divergence and convergence.
 The paper describes the most frequent forms of lexical correlation between North American English usage and British English usage. The research states that the semantic structure of the lexical unit or its register of usage can undergo changes under influences of the other variety. The lexemes, common to both national varieties with partial coincidence of the semantic structure and, sometimes, with shifts in the register of usage, are more affected by the process of convergence. The part of the English lexis less affected by convergent processes comprises common lexemes with the split in the semantic structure, the components of which are different or antonymic. The part of the present-day English lexis likely to be involved in the process of internal borrowing mostly includes lexemes specific to US English or British English with, or without lexical equivalents in the other variety.
 A special kind of correlation between lexical units of common origin can bring about usages functionally confined only to one variety. The functional predominance can contribute to the formation of different chains of synonyms actualized in each of the varieties. When lexemes have lexical equivalents specific to one of the national varieties of English, the so-called ''pseudo-synonymous relations” within the English lexical system can arise

Murderbot pronouns: A snapshot of changing gender conventions in the United States

Abstract The ways in which US English speakers use third person personal pronouns for agentive beings require gendering the person based on the gender binary (he or she). In recent years, activism by transgender and non-binary individuals has accelerated a shift in this requirement, building on scholarly debate in the 1970s–90s that unseated he as a gender-neutral (epicene) pronoun. This has laid the groundwork for the gradual acceptance of singular they and the idea of preferred pronouns. In 2017, reviewers of the popular novella All Systems Red (Wells) addressed the dilemma of choosing an epicene pronoun for a genderless, cyborg protagonist called Murderbot. Of 667 reviews collected in December 2017 that describe Murderbot, almost 85 per cent attempt to respect Murderbot’s pronouns (it, its) despite discomfort with using it for agentive beings. This suggests an increase in US public culture awareness that the gender binary does not include everyone and may warrant optimism for improved conditions for gender non-conforming individuals.

Assessment of pruritus in atopic dermatitis: validation of the Severity of Pruritus Scale (SPS)

Introduction: Pruritus, or itch, is a central feature of atopic dermatitis (AD) and is often cited as the most bothersome symptom. The Severity of Pruritus Scale (SPS) is a 4-point rating scale adapted from the Atopic Dermatitis Severity Index to provide a measure of pruritus severity within a 24-hour recall period. The objective of this analysis was to assess the qualitative and quantitative validity of the SPS in AD. Methods: Content validity of the SPS was evaluated qualitatively in US patients with AD. Psychometric properties of the SPS were evaluated using data from 2 phase 3 trials conducted to investigate crisaborole in mild to moderate AD (study AD-301: NCT02118766; study AD-302: NCT02118792). Results: Fourteen patients were included in the qualitative analysis, considered adequate because of the single-item, single-concept nature of the SPS. Itch was the most prevalent symptom, and the SPS was easily understood and completed in US English (n=9) and US Spanish (n=5). The psychometric analysis used data from 1344 patients. Test-retest reliability analysis identified an intraclass correlation coefficient of 0.54 for a single SPS observation, and at least 0.70 when at least 2 SPS observations were averaged. SPS scores correlated with Investigator’s Static Global Assessment (ISGA) scores, measures of quality of life, and 4 of 5 signs of AD (Pearson correlations, ≥0.40 at day 29). The difference in score between the no disease group/clear (ISGA 0) and the severe disease group (ISGA 4) was 0.80. The clinically important difference was estimated to be 0.20 and the clinically important response was estimated to be at least a 0.19-point reduction from baseline. Discussion: The SPS is an appropriate tool to assess itch in patients with AD and is a valid and reliable measure of pruritus severity.

Contrasting attention to mutual knowledge in English and Mopan Mayan conversation: Schooling, orality, and cultural cosmology

AbstractClassroom training for attention to utterance recipients’ likely states of knowledge is useful in order to compensate for the situations of reduced co-presence that characterize literate communication at a distance. But many aspects of the Mopan (Mayan) philosophy of language resonate instead with non-schooled practices of Mopan socialization that support oral and not literate transmission of knowledge. In Mopan, everyday speech and action are evaluated with reference to a more-than-human moral order in which what counts is fidelity to ancestral prescriptions rather than to one’s own or others’ momentary mental states. Such cultural differences in beliefs about the (non-)importance of mental states are known to enter into institutionalized moralities such as those governing legal decisions or religious obligations. At the same time, many unconscious and embodied aspects of meaning-making in interaction are clearly conducted without apparent input from differing cultural beliefs. The present study shows how cultural attitudes about meaning-making play out at a level intermediate between these two apparently contradictory extremes. Mopan farmers and US English university students engaged with an interactional matching task in which visual common ground is occluded and speakers must describe a photograph in such a way that the listener succeeds in picking out that very photograph from among a set of similar ones. Schooled US English participants rarely describe any attributes of the photos other than their minimum distinguishing features, and they almost always mention those features. In contrast, Mopan participants often construe the interactional task as one that requires accurate and complete description of single items one at a time, rather than requiring identification of key attributes that will uniquely identify the target referent in its current context to a particular listener. Significant differences in strategic approaches to real-time construction of conversational reference is thus shown to correspond to contrasting cultural belief systems about the making of meaning, themselves related to literate versus oral modes of knowledge transmission.

NORTH AMERICAN ENGLISH AND BRITISH ENGLISH: TWO ASPECTS OF DEVELOPMENT

The article brings into focus the idea of the divergent and convergent development revealed in the interrelations between US English usage and British English usage in the framework of the theoretical problem of the genetic тand functional status of the North American variety of English in the sociolinguistic contexts of today. The paper deals with the evolution in the relations between these varieties of English that have experienced the effects of reciprocal influences. The article also raises the problem of divergent and convergent developments of the тtransplanted variety and its mainland source in the contemporary word.
 The study particularly focuses on US English influences on British English caused by the extension of social functions of North American English worldwide. The paper gives some information that sheds light on the development of the North American English divergences in lexis and morphology. The research also provides some evidence on the nature of the convergent processes between US English usage and British English usage of today and defines basic forms of the relationship of linguistic units in the common lexis. The article points out the main tendencies of language changes caused by the process of convergence in present-day British English usage.

Negative Inversion: Camouflage and Style across Two Varieties of US English

Negative Inversion: Camouflage and Style across Two Varieties of US English

Negative Inversion: Camouflage and Style across Two Varieties of US English

Negative Inversion: Camouflage and Style across Two Varieties of US English

The Burden Of Albinism: Creation Of A Questionnaire

No specific tool currently exists for assessing the burden placed upon persons suffering from albinism. FIMARAD (Rare Diseases in Dermatology) group began an initiative to create a specific questionnaire. The questionnaire was devised using standardized methodology for developing and validating QoL ‘questionnaires: according to the following chronological structure: 3 phases/ conceptual-development-validation. A multidisciplinary working group was assembled, including PRO’experts, dermatologists and representatives of the Genespoir association. Validated questionnaires SF12), MetraPVC, Body-Image-States-Scale-(BISS) and Daily-Life -Quality-Index(DLQI)) were also administered in order to ensure external validity. Based on an initial verbatim report, the workgroup compiled a list of items, which were transcribed and reformulated into questions. In this phase, 65 items were defined, reorganized and regrouped according to content, then reduced to 24.This questionnaire was proposed to 87 subjects with albinism during the development phase. 63 responded. During the validation phase, Principal Component Analysis (PCA) was conducted on the 24 items, which allowed the questionnaire to be reduced to 20 questions [Q]. The standardized regression coefficients were all greater than 0.5 on their corresponding factors. Based on their normalized regression coefficients, each group of questions was linked to one of the following four dimensions: "living with the disease"(8Q), "daily life"(3Q), "resignation"(3Q), and "fear of the future"(6Q). To verify external validity, the correlation coefficients of the questionnaire were also calculated with the following validated questionnaires: SF12, Metra-PVC, BISS, and DLQI. Strong correlation was found and so external validity was confirmed This questionnaire represents the first specific assessment tool for evaluating the burden of albinism. It is easy to use and relatively quick to complete, which will allow the burden over time to be evaluated with a reproducible questionnaire. To ensure that this questionnaire can be used by as many people as possible, cultural and linguistic validation in US English was conducted with the original French version.

English focus prosody processing and production by Mandarin speakers

Our study compared the processing and production of English focus prosody by native speakers of English and Mandarin. Twenty-one Mandarin speakers living in the US and 21 English speakers participated in two tasks. In the processing task, participants responded to instructions that contained natural or unnatural contrastive prosody (Click on the purple sweater; Now click on the SCARLET sweater/Now click on the PURPLE jacket.) In the production task, participants guided an experimenter to place colored objects on a white board, with some contexts designed to elicit contrastive focus (Put the yellow arrow over the ORANGE arrow/yellow DIAMOND, please). All adjectives and nouns were bisyllabic trochees. The two groups differed in their realization of focus, with English speakers tending to align the pitch peak with the stressed syllable and Mandarin speakers with the right edge of the focused word. However, comparison of reaction times for the processing task indicated that both groups responded more quickly to instructions with natural than unnatural prosody, although English speakers’ response times were significantly faster in both conditions. We argue that although Mandarin speakers show Mandarin-like realization of focus in their production, they can nonetheless use the English prosodic patterns in their processing.

Who Counts?

ABSTRACTThis article recovers a 1972 essay from James Moffett entitled ‘Who Counts?’ that the National Council of Teachers of English commissioned at the onset of US standards and accountability reforms. The essay historicises NCTE’s positions on teacher accountability by comparing its recent positions on teacher evaluation and the Common Core Standards with Moffett’s opposition to behavioural measurement and business-federal collusion in education reform. These historical juxtapositions highlight how NCTE’s recent policy agenda has reconfigured ‘who counts’ in US English education: its positions now hedge NCTE’s longstanding critiques of behavioural measurement in English, mix quality assurance with professional development, and adopt the educational priorities of federal grants, corporate philanthropy and private sector partners. The article de-naturalises NCTE’s political realignment and considers how Moffett’s prescient critiques of ‘who counts’ in English education might inform individuals’ and organisations’ positions on standards and accountability reforms.

Change and stability ingoose,goatandfoot:back vowel dynamics in Carlisle English

In this article, I demonstrate thatgoose-fronting is taking place in Carlisle, a city in the north-west of England, and I provide detailed information about this change. The results show that similarly strong linguistic constraints are found in this variety and other varieties. A second point of discussion is the dynamics betweengooseand other back vowels, i.e.goatandfoot, in this community. I argue that we also need to study the most adjacent back vowels in order to understand the complexity of this vowel change and the influence on nearby vowels. The data stem from interviews conducted in Carlisle between 2007 and 2010 and show that whilegooseis fronting across apparent time, forgoatandfootno change in progress is observable. These dynamics seem to be geographically restricted to the north-west of England. While a parallel shift ofgooseandgoatis very common in US and southern English varieties, the fronting ofgoatis not found in this northern variety. This lack of change is due to the monophthongal realisation of thegoatvowel which prevents a parallel shift. Similarly, the fronting offootseems to be blocked due to the lack of thefoot–strutsplit.

Adaptation of the Activity Measure Post-Acute Care (AM-PAC) from English to Mandarin using the dual-panel translation approach

Purpose: The aims of this study were to translate and adapt the Activity Measure Post-Acute Care (AM-PAC) from US English to Mandarin using the dual-panel method, and to assess its psychometric properties in an outpatient rehabilitation setting.Methods: The AM-PAC outpatient short forms were translated using the dual-panel method. The translated AM-PAC was tested in 550 Chinese-speaking rehabilitation outpatients. Floor and ceiling effects were evaluated and internal consistency was assessed using Cronbach’s alpha. Spearman correlation was used to assess the concurrent validity of the AM-PAC with the Barthel Index and the Mini-Mental State Examination. Test–retest reliability was determined by administering the AM-PAC twice to 57 participants within a 2–7 day interval.Results: Some ceiling effects (>20%) were observed in the Applied Cognition subscale. All subscales exhibited good internal consistency (α > 0.70). Supportive evidence for concurrent validity was found in strong correlations between Basic Mobility subscale and Barthel Index (r = 0.68), and Daily Activity subscale and Barthel Index (r = 0.70); and moderate correlations between Applied Cognition subscale and Mini-Mental State Examination (r = 0.50). Test–retest reliability for all subscales was high (intraclass correlation coefficient =0.89–0.98).Conclusions: The dual-panel approach was successfully used to translate the AM-PAC from English to Mandarin. Adequate reliability and validity in rehabilitation outpatients in Taiwan were established.Implications for RehabilitationThe dual-panel method is a modern translation technique, which was successfully used to adapt the Activity Measure Post-Acute Care from English to Mandarin.The Mandarin version of Activity Measure Post-Acute Care demonstrates adequate internal consistency, concurrent validity, and test–retest reliability in rehabilitation outpatients.The Activity Measure Post-Acute Care is superior to existing functional measures used to monitor activity performance for rehabilitation patients in Taiwan.

Opportunity to Teach: Push-In and Pull-Out Models of English Learner Instruction

<p><em>As the number of US English Language Learners (ELLs) increases, elementary educators struggle to make decisions related to curriculum and instruction. This research fills an important gap in the research on program models for ELLs by presenting a two-part investigation of push-in and pull-out English Language Development (ELD) instruction from the vantage point of English as a Second Language (ESL) teachers. The first part of the investigation uses nationally administered surveys to capture the practices, beliefs, and challenges of ESL professionals working in these models. The second part highlights the concerns raised by those ESL teachers regarding the extent to which a cohort of 175 ELL students received their ELD instruction. We explore the implications for the academic achievement of ELLs in the primary grades when their access to consistent ELD instruction is curtailed. We illuminate the problematic aspects of both models and call for greater attention to the implementation and monitoring of services for young ELLs.</em></p>

The use of ultrasound in the study of articulatory properties of vowels in clear speech

ABSTRACTAlthough the acoustic properties of clear speech have been extensively studied, its underlying articulatory details have not been well understood. The purpose of the present study is twofold: To examine the specific articulatory processes of clear speech using ultrasound and to investigate whether and how the type of listener (hard of hearing, normal hearing) and the lexical property of words (frequency) interact in the production of clear speech. To this end, we examined productions of /ɑ/, /æ/ and /u/ from 16 speakers of US English. Overall, our ultrasound results suggested that the tongue’s highest point moved in a direction that exaggerated the three vowels’ phonological features, resulting in an expanded articulatory vowel space for the hard-of-hearing listener and low-frequency words. No interaction was found between the listener and word frequency, suggesting that the effects of word frequency hold constant across the two types of listeners.

A process-oriented approach for documenting and gauging intercultural competence in translation

ABSTRACTThis article describes and contextualises how intercultural competence in translation can be empirically documented and assessed using a process-oriented dual methodology consisting of juxtaposed screen recording and think-aloud data. A discussion of how Byram’s (1997) triadic intercultural communicative competence model of knowledge, skills and attitudes maps onto directly observable translator behaviours is followed by the results of a small-scale pilot study, which exemplify how various facets of intercultural competence are manifest in contexts involving MA-level student translation of German culturemes into US English. Continuing in the spirit of previous behaviour-oriented approaches to empirically document intercultural competence in translation, this article foregrounds process-oriented training as a means by which to glean insight into learner strengths and weaknesses with the objective of fostering growth in this domain, thereby optimising a still largely elusive area within translation pedagogy.

Migration Decisions, Acculturation, and Overweight among Asian and Latino Immigrant Adults in the United States

Using the 2002–2003 National Latino and Asian American Study (NLAAS), we examine relationships between acculturation, migration decisions, and overweight among Latino and Asian immigrants. Pooled logistic regression models showed no evidence that acculturation and migration decisions were related to overweight among Asians, but models for Latinos indicated that aspects of acculturation (duration of US residence and English proficiency) and migration decisions (moving to find a job) were significantly associated with overweight status. However, interaction models also highlighted the gendered nature of the acculturation–weight relationship, such that country-of-origin ties can have different implications for the overweight status of male and female immigrants.

Two Efficient Lattice Rescoring Methods Using Recurrent Neural Network Language Models

An important part of the language modelling problem for automatic speech recognition (ASR) systems, and many other related applications, is to appropriately model long-distance context dependencies in natural languages. Hence, statistical language models (LMs) that can model longer span history contexts, for example, recurrent neural network language models (RNNLMs), have become increasingly popular for state-of-the-art ASR systems. As RNNLMs use a vector representation of complete history contexts, they are normally used to rescore N-best lists. Motivated by their intrinsic characteristics, two efficient lattice rescoring methods for RNNLMs are proposed in this paper. The first method uses an $n$ -gram style clustering of history contexts. The second approach directly exploits the distance measure between recurrent hidden history vectors. Both methods produced 1-best performance comparable to a 10 k-best rescoring baseline RNNLM system on two large vocabulary conversational telephone speech recognition tasks for US English and Mandarin Chinese. Consistent lattice size compression and recognition performance improvements after confusion network (CN) decoding were also obtained over the prefix tree structured N-best rescoring approach.

Cultural adaptation: translatability assessment and linguistic validation of the patient-reported outcome instrument for irritable bowel syndrome with diarrhea.

Background and objectiveFollowing a 2009 US Food and Drug Administration guidance, a new patient-reported outcome (PRO) instrument was developed to support end points in multinational clinical trials assessing irritable bowel syndrome with diarrhea (IBS-D) symptom severity. Our objective was to assess the translatability of the IBS-D PRO instrument into ten languages, and subsequently perform a cultural adaptation/linguistic validation of the questionnaire into Japanese and US Spanish.Materials and methodsTranslatability assessments of the US English version of the IBS-D PRO were performed by experienced PRO translators who were native speakers of each target language and currently residing in target-language countries. Languages were Chinese (People’s Republic of China), Dutch (the Netherlands), French (Belgium), German (Germany), Japanese (Japan), Polish (Poland), Portuguese (Brazil), Russian (Russia), Spanish (Mexico), and Spanish (US). The project team assessed the instrument to identify potential linguistic and/or cultural adaptation issues. After the issues identified were resolved, the instrument was translated into Spanish (US) and Japanese through a process of two forward translations, one reconciled translation, and one backward translation. The project team reviewed the translated versions before the instruments were evaluated by cognitive debriefing interviews with samples of five Spanish (US) and five Japanese IBS-D patients.ResultsLinguistic and cultural adaptation concerns identified during the translatability assessment required minor revisions, mainly the presentation of dates/times and word structure. During the cognitive debriefing interviews, two of five Spanish respondents misunderstood the term “bowel movement” to mean only diarrhea in the Spanish version. Consequently, the term was changed from “movimiento intestinal” to “evacuaciones”. None of the Japanese respondents identified issues with the Japanese version.ConclusionThe translatability of the IBS-D PRO instrument into ten target languages was confirmed, with only minor changes made to the translations of the instrument. The translation and linguistic validation into Spanish (US) and Japanese provide evidence that this instrument can be used in multinational trials and clinical settings.