Language Use

Statistical machine translation (SMT) models require bilingual corpora for training, and these corpora are often multilingual with parallel text in multiple languages simultaneously. We introduce an active learning task of adding a new language to an existing multilingual set of parallel text and constructing high quality MT systems, from each language in the collection into this new target language. We show that adding a new language using active learning to the EuroParl corpus provides a significant improvement compared to a random sentence selection baseline. We also provide new highly effective sentence selection methods that improve AL for phrase-based SMT in the multilingual and single language pair setting. * Thanks to James Peltier for systems support for our experiments.

Advancements in modern CAD tools enable students to design hardware, simulate their designs, synthesize them, and study common low-level issues such as timing, glitches, power consumption, and space requirements. Rather than emphasizing logic and gates to ...

Objectif.-Mise à jour des connaissances sur les différentes méthodes de prise en charge de l'hémorragie du post-partum réfractaire au traitement médical et obstétrical. Patientes et méthode.-Les sources de données qui sont informatiques sont celles de PubMed, Medline ® limitées aux publications en langues anglaise et française. L'atonie utérine et les anomalies d'insertion placentaire (placenta praevia ou accreta) sont les causes les plus couramment impliquées dans cette situation. Pour préserver l'utérus, nous disposons soit de la radiologie interventionnelle avec l'embolisation soit de la chirurgie avec les ligatures vasculaires. L'embolisation est une méthode peu invasive réalisable par simple cathétérisme sous anesthésie locale. Les ligatures vasculaires nécessitent le plus souvent une laparotomie. Elles intéressent les pédicules utérins ou les artères iliaques internes. Les plicatures et les cloisonnements utérins sont des méthodes chirurgicales récentes, faciles à réaliser mais pour lesquelles nous manquons de recul. Résultats.-Sur l'atonie, la réussite de l'embolisation et des ligatures des pédicules utérins est proche de 100 %. La ligature des artères iliaques internes est sans doute un peu moins efficace et plus difficile, sur le plan technique, à réaliser. Elle demeure intéressante dans les lésions traumatiques obstétricales qui ne concernent pas l'utérus. Sur les hémorragies provenant du segment inférieur lors d'une césarienne, la ligature basse des artères utérines s'impose. Toutes ces méthodes sont d'autant plus efficaces qu'elles sont réalisées précocement avant la survenue de troubles majeurs de la coagulation. Auquel cas, la dévascularisation utérine doit également s'appliquer aux pédicules lomboovariens. En présence d'un placenta accreta, la portion adhérente du placenta peut être laissée en place et l'embolisation ou les ligatures vasculaires effectuées. Néanmoins, quelle que soit la technique, la principale cause d'échec du traitement conservateur est liée au placenta accreta. Conclusion.-Les méthodes les plus simples et les moins morbides doivent être retenues. Après un accouchement par voie naturelle, il s'agira de l'embolisation, sous réserve que l'état hémodynamique de la patiente soit stable et que le centre de radiologie interventionnelle soit proche. En cours de césarienne, il s'agira de la ligature progressive des pédicules utérins adaptée à l'étiologie de l'hémorragie. En cas d'échec d'un traitement conservateur, il serait dangereux de multiplier les techniques. L'hystérectomie d'hémostase doit alors garder sa place.

Understanding how hostility may affect health risk is predicated on articulating its core physiological, psychological and social features. . Developments in the measurement of hostility. In: Friedman, H.S. (Ed.), Hostility, Coping and Health, pp. 13-31. American Psychological Association, Washington, D.C] emphasized the importance of cognitive, affective and behavioural components. The present study examined whether hostile people differ from non-hostile people on measures of emotional verbal behaviour. Forty participants were interviewed about an anger-eliciting experience. Interviews were transcribed and evaluated for the use of emotional language using the Dictionary of Affect in Language . The dictionary of affect in language. In: Plutchik, R. and Kellerman, H. (Eds.), The Measurement of Emotions. Emotion: Theory, Research and Experience. Vol. 4. Academic, San Diego]. Independent judges read the transcripts and rated the amount of anger experienced by the participants. Participants' use of activation and evaluation words, subjective reports of anger and judges' ratings of their anger were examined as a function of gender, social desirability and hostility subcomponents: cynicism, hostile attributions, aggressive responding and hostile affect. Cognitive/attitudinal components were related to the use of more positive language in the anger interview, while behavioural and affective components were related to judged anger. The findings suggest that there are complex differences in emotional communication associated with hostility components. While supporting transactional models, they underscore the multidimensional nature of the affective repertoires associated with hostility. The findings suggest that further study of emotional behaviour associated with hostility components would be fruitful.

Although global migration is a complex transnational issue, media and policy discussions in wealthy regions often isolate immigration discourse within national frameworks. Using a Special Report on the BBC Online as a case study (and a ‘best case’ example of immigration reporting), this article illustrates the problems that are masked by ‘objective’ language used within the realm of national identity, and calls for media and policy researchers dealing with immigration to take a transnational view of societal transformations related to migration. In conducting a qualitative analysis that tests media frames against an established goal, this case study suggests the value of adding a normative aspect to framing research.

In this paper, we propose a hybrid approach of Arabic scripts web page language identification based on decision tree and ARTMAP approaches. We use the decision tree approach to find the general identities of a web document, be it an Arabic script-based or a non-Arabic-based. Then, we use the selected representations of identified pages from the decision tree approach as

La documentación lingüística lleva más de un siglo de existencia y tiene una antigua tradición de series monográficas y revistas que fueron locales para la publicación de textos, diccionarios, gramáticas, vocabularios, entre otros. En la última década, sin embargo, la documentación, o ya, la lingüística de la documentación, cambió su perspectiva e incorporó como elementos centrales la diversidad, en cuanto a tipos de lenguas y a tipos de materiales que se registran, la diversidad social y de ideologías sobre la lengua y las prácticas lingüísticas. El activismo de la comunidad de habla ha tenido un profundo efecto en esta nueva perspectiva de la documentación. Este trabajo se enmarca en esta última tendencia de la lingüística de la documentación y se propone presentar experiencias nuevas de documentación y activismo en comunidades wichí del río Bermejo en la provincia de Formosa (Argentina), a fin de discutir y reflexionar sobre sus contribuciones a la práctica lingüística y a la lingüística de la documentación.

A student learning how to program learns best when the programming language and programming environment cater to her specific needs. These needs are different from the requirements of a professional programmer. Consequently, the design of teaching languages poses challenges different from the design of "professional" languages. Using a functional language by itself gives advantages over more popular, professional languages, but fully exploiting these advantages requires careful adaptation to the needs of the studentsas-is, these languages do not support the students nearly as well as they could. This paper describes our experience adopting the didactic approach of How to Design Programs, focussing on the design process for our own set of teaching languages. We have observed students as they try to program as part of our introductory course, and used these observations to significantly improve the design of these languages. This paper describes the changes we have made, and the journey we took to get there. 1 We were wrong about the course on other aspects as well .

Organizational knowledge and discourse of diversity in employment Abstract Purpose Evidence suggests that the notion of diversity in employment has failed to meet expectations of increased inclusion and organizational competitiveness in an ever-changing and globalizing economic context. In this paper we consider the use of language of diversity in an organizational context. Methodology/Approach Using discourse analysis, we examine data obtained from semi-structured interviews conducted with Human Resources Managers and Personnel Managers. Participants' descriptions of diversity in relation to one particular group of (potential) employees, namely older jobseekers, are analysed for their function and effects in relation to organizational knowledge and practices.

In a Model Driven Architecture (MDA) software development process, models are repeatedly transformed to other models in order to finally achieve a set of models with enough details to implement a system. Generally, there are multiple ways to transform one model into another model. Alternative target models differ in their quality properties and the selection of a particular model is determined on the basis of specific requirements. Software engineers must be able to identify, compare and select the appropriate transformations within the given set of requirements. The current transformation languages used for describing and executing model transformations only provide means to specify the transformations but do not help to identify and select from the alternative transformations. In this paper we propose a process and a set of techniques for constructing a transformation space for a given transformation problem. The process uses a source model, its meta-model and the meta-model of the target as input and generates a transformation space. Every element in that space represents a transformation that produces a result that is an instance of the target meta-model. The requirements that must be fulfilled by the result are captured and represented in a quality model. We explain our approach using an illustrative example for transforming a platform independent model expressed in UML into platform specific models that represent XML schemas. A particular quality model of extensibility is presented in the paper.

One of the most noticeable problems in autism involves the social use of language such as metaphor and metonymy, both of which are very common in daily language use. The present study is the first to investigate the development of metaphor and metonymy comprehension in autism. Eleven children with autism were compared to 17 typically developing children in a metaphor-metonymy comprehension task. Cross-sectional trajectory analyses were used to compare the development of metaphor and metonymy comprehension using a child-friendly story picture task. Trajectories were constructed linking task performance either to chronological age or to measures of mental age. Children with autism showed an impaired metaphor comprehension in relation to both chronological and mental age, whereas performance on metonymy was delayed and in line with their receptive vocabulary. Our results suggest that understanding of metaphors and metonyms are severely affected at all ages examined in the current study.

Little data exist on dating violence experienced by immigrant Hispanic adolescents. The present study examined the relationships between immigration status, language spoken at home, and dating violence experienced by Hispanic adolescent girls in New Mexico. Data from the 2007 New Mexico Youth Risk and Resiliency Surveys were analyzed. Adjusted logistic regression analyses were conducted among the full sample of Hispanic females (N = 3,412) and among strata based on immigration status. Immigrant Hispanic girls were as likely as non-immigrant Hispanic girls to have experienced dating violence in the prior year (P = 0.93). Among immigrant Hispanic girls, those who were Non-English-dominant were one-fourth as likely to have experienced dating violence as those immigrant girls who were English-dominant (aOR 0.27 [95% CI 0.08-0.87]). Among US-born Hispanic girls, those who were Non-English-dominant were less likely to have experienced dating violence; however, this value did not reach statistical significance (aOR 0.65 [95% CI 0.33-1.27]). Past sexual experience was a significant risk factor for dating violence for US-born Hispanic girls (aOR 4.99 [95% CI 3.18-7.83]) but not for immigrant Hispanic girls (aOR 1.66 [95% CI 0.63-4.43]). Immigrant status was not found to be protective against dating violence for New Mexico Hispanic girls. However, those immigrant girls who were less acculturated in terms of language used at home were found to have only a quarter of the risk of dating violence as those more acculturated. The use of heritage language by immigrant Hispanic girls may be a protective factor against dating violence. Further studies are indicated to confirm this finding.

Non-confluent and non-terminating rewrite systems are interesting from the point of view of programming. In particular, existing functional logic languages use such kind of rewrite systems to define possibly non-strict non-deterministic functions. The semantics adopted for non-determinism is call-time choice, whose combination with non-strictness is not a trivial issue that has been addressed from a semantic point of view in the Constructor-based Rewriting Logic (CRWL) framework. We investigate here how to express call-time choice and non-strict semantics from a point of view closer to classical rewriting. The proposed notion of rewriting uses an explicit representation for sharing with let-constructions and is proved to be equivalent to the CRWL approach. Moreover, we relate this let-rewriting relation (and hence CRWL) with ordinary rewriting, providing in particular soundness and completeness of let-rewriting with respect to rewriting for a class of programs which are confluent in a certain semantic sense.

Simulation models of agro-ecological systems are typically written in a manner that precludes reusability of parts of the model without a significant amount of familiarity with and rewriting of existing code. Similarly, replacing a part of a model with a functionally equivalent part from another model is typically difficult. The objective of this study was to develop a method to enable the assembly of simulation models from previously and independently developed component models. Recent advances in software engineering have enabled the development of software applications from smaller parts (called components) on the basis of an abstract decomposition of the relevant domain (called a framework). Based on a requirements analysis of existing simulation models we developed the ModCom simulation framework. ModCom provides a set of interface specifications that describe components in a simulation. ModCom also provides implementations of the core simulation services. The framework interfaces use well-defined binary standards and allows developers to implement the interfaces using a broad range of computer languages. Using this framework, simulation models can be assembled by connecting component models in much the same way that Lego blocks are put together to assemble a house. ModCom thus allows modelers to create models and modeling tools that are easily exchanged (in binary form or source code) with colleagues across the hall or across the globe.

This longitudinal study examined Latino adolescents’ feelings of loneliness and the repercussions of loneliness for later educational success. Participants were 640 Latino students (56% girls, 62% Mexican/Mexican–American) who reported on loneliness across the first 2 years of high school. Growth mixture modeling identified three distinct loneliness trajectory classes for the Latino adolescents—consistently low, chronically high, and low but increasing. Language brokering, language use, and school mobility emerged as predictors of class membership. Increasingly and chronically lonely youth experienced academic difficulty, both in terms of academic progress and exit exam success, but support from friends served as a buffer of the negative relationship between loneliness and academic success. This study highlights the pernicious effects of loneliness and suggests promoting prosocial friendship support as a means of facilitating more positive academic outcomes for Latino youth.

There are many accurate methods for language identification of long text samples, but identification of very short strings still presents a challenge. This paper studies a language identification task, in which the test samples have only 5-21 characters. We compare two distinct methods that are well suited for this task: a naive Bayes classifier based on character n-gram models, and the ranking method by . For the n-gram models, we test several standard smoothing techniques, including the current state-of-theart, the modified Kneser-Ney interpolation. Experiments are conducted with 281 languages using the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Advanced language model smoothing techniques improve the identification accuracy and the respective classifiers outperform the ranking method. The higher accuracy is obtained at the cost of larger models and slower classification speed. However, there are several methods to reduce the size of an n-gram model, and our experiments with model pruning show that it provides an easy way to balance the size and the identification accuracy. We also compare the results to the language identifier in Google AJAX Language API, using a subset of 50 languages.

We present the ideas underlying Sc E X, a music typesetting system that we are developing at the University of Porto. The focus is on the languages used for representing music documents and on the graphic editor that provides a means for their preparation.

This study presents an optimal design for magnetorheological (MR) valves for minimizing the control energy to be applied to coils to control the pressure drop of the valves. The optimization problem identifies parameters such as applied current, coil wire size and geometric dimensions of the valves which satisfy the specified pressure drop and inductive time constant requirements. After describing the configuration of MR valves, their pressure drops are obtained on the basis of the Bingham model of MR fluid. Then, the control energy which is an objective function and the inductive time constant are derived. Subsequently, an optimization procedure using a golden-section algorithm and a local quadratic fitting technique is constructed via a commercial finite element method parametric design language. Using the optimization tool developed in this study, optimal MR valve configurations are identified, which are constrained to a specific cylindrical volume defined by its radius and height. In addition, optimization results for MR valves with different required pressure drops and different constrained volumes are obtained and presented.

Esperanto is a constructed natural language, which was intended to be an easy-to-learn lingua franca. Zipf's law models the statistical proportions of various phenomena in human ecology, including natural languages. Given Esperanto's artificial origins, one wonders how "natural" it appears, relative to other natural languages, in the context of Zipf's law. To explore this question, we collected a total of 283 books from six languages: English, French, German, Italian, Spanish, and Esperanto. We applied Zipf-based metrics on our corpus to extract distributions for word, word distance, word bigram, word trigram, and word length for each book. Statistical analyses show that Esperanto's statistical proportions are similar to those of other languages. We then trained artificial neural networks (ANNs) to classify books according to language. The ANNs achieved high accuracy rates (86.3% to 98.6%). Subsequent analysis identified German as having the most unique proportions, followed by Esperanto, Italian, Spanish, English, and French. Analysis of misclassified patterns shows that Esperanto's statistical proportions resemble mostly those of German and Spanish, and least those of French and Italian.

The field of English for Academic Purposes has developed rapidly in the past 25 years to become a major force in English language teaching and research. Drawing its strength from broad theoretical foundations and a commitment to research-based language education, EAP has begun to reveal some of the constraints of social contexts on language use and to develop ways for learners to gain control over these. In this first issue of a new journal devoted to developments and understandings in this field, the editors briefly sketch the context within which the journal has emerged and point to some of the issues which currently influence and confront our discipline. In so doing we raise a number of questions which are likely to preoccupy JEAP's readers and contributors into the near future. #

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The Mandarin Chinese disposal constructions involving ba and jiang have been considered synonyms that differ only in terms of register. This paper reexamines the status of ba versus jiang in the light of spoken and written corpus data and new insights that have arisen from recent hypotheses concerning the meaning of the ba-construction. We postulate a dynamic system of disposal in which ba and jiang share the basic meaning of disposal while contrasting in terms of subjectivity and emotionality. By treating meaning and broad discourse contexts (genres) as prototypically organized categories, which demonstrate conceptual and discourse principles, we are able to explain the precise distributional patterns of the two items across a variety of genres in two spoken and written language corpora. We conclude that dynamic language use gives rise to language change along the diachronysynchrony continuum and beyond the simple speech and writing dichotomy. This study also shows that the symbiotic development of subjectification and objectification in the disposal system raises interesting questions for theories of grammaticalization.

Pain is a largely subjective experience, and one which is difficult to convey to others, and relies significantly on language to be communicated. The language used to describe pain is therefore an important aspect of understanding and assessing another's pain. A growing body of research has reported differences in the pain experienced by men and women. However, few studies have examined gender differences, where gender is understood in both the biological and the social sense, in the language used when reporting pain. The purpose of this descriptive and analytical study was to explore gender differences in the language used by articulate men and women when describing a recollected painful event. Two-hundred and one students from an Australian university (35.32% males and 64.68% females) provided written descriptions of a past pain event. These descriptions were analysed using content analysis. Gender differences were identified in the words and patterns of language used, the foc...

We are currently pursuing methods for “author profiling” in which various aspects of the author's identity might be identified from a text, without necessarily having a corpus of documents from the same individual. A key component of such an identity profile is personality; this ...

Two projects explored the links between language use and aging. In the first project, written or spoken text samples from disclosure studies from over 3,000 research participants from 45 different studies representing 21 laboratories in 3 countries were analyzed to determine how people change in their use of 14 text dimensions as a function of age. A separate project analyzed the collected works of 10 well-known novelists, playwrights, and poets who lived over the last 500 years. Both projects found that with increasing age, individuals use more positive and fewer negative affect words, use fewer selfreferences, use more future-tense and fewer past-tense verbs, and demonstrate a general pattern of increasing cognitive complexity. Implications for using language as a marker of personality among current and historical texts are discussed.

This cross-sectional study examined whether length of time in the U.S., language use, and birthplace (proxy measures of acculturation) were associated with body mass index (BMI) and obesity in a sample of 174 low-income Puerto Rican women from Hartford, Connecticut. The mean BMI for the total sample (N ϭ 174) was 27.39 (S.D. ϭ 5.07), and nearly 34% of the sample was considered obese (BMI Ն 30). There was a statistically significant increase in BMI with length of time in the U.S. (P ϭ 0.012) and these differences were even greater among women born in Puerto Rico (P ϭ 0.003). Moreover, obesity prevalence was highest among women who had been in the U.S. for 10 years or more (40%), as compared to those who had been in the U.S. less than 1 year (29%; P ϭ 0.045). There were no statistically significant associations between language and BMI for the total sample. However, among bilingual speakers born in Puerto Rico, there were significant differences in BMI according to their level of English fluency. Those who spoke fluent or very good English had a significantly higher BMI (mean ϭ 29.72; SD ϭ 4.12) than women whose English was good to not-so-good (mean ϭ 26.8; SD ϭ 5.24; P ϭ 0.016). The findings from this study point to the need for more research on the acculturation process and obesity, in order to design culturally tailored obesity prevention programs.

One of the most successful applications of textual analysis in software engineering is the use of Information Retrieval (IR) methods to reconstruct traceability links between software artifacts. Unfortunately, due to the limitations of both the humans developing artifacts and the IR techniques any IR-based traceability recovery method fails to retrieve some of the correct links, while on the other hand it also retrieves links that are not correct. This limitation has posed challenges for researchers that have proposed several methods to improve the accuracy of IR-based traceability recovery methods by removing the "noise" in the textual content of software artifacts (e.g., by removing common words or increasing the importance of critical terms). In this paper we propose a heuristic to remove the "noise" taking into account the linguistic nature of words in the software artifacts. In particular, the language used in software documents can be classified as a technical language, where the words that provide more indication on the semantics of a document are the nouns. The results of a case study conducted on five software artifact repositories indicate that characterizing the context of software artifacts considering only nouns significantly improves the accuracy of IR-based traceability recovery methods. 3 recovery process a tedious task, as the software engineer has to spend much more time to discard false positives than to trace correct links.

We discuss language diversity in mathematics education research by considering the move from a view of language as representation that strives to correlate concepts, ideas, codes and signs towards addressing the representation politics of language. Language as representation of mathematics has framed the discursive construction of language diversity over the years in published research in our field. We argue that the representation politics of language as grounded in cultural and postcolonial studies enables us to see the meanings attributed to language diversity as resulting from a complex 'circuit of culture' in the realm of global and local identity politics. Three questions help us in this endeavour: (1) What are assumed as commonly shared meanings about language diversity? (2) How do they become present in prevailing discourses about the languages of mathematics, teachers and learners? (3) How may a view of language diversity as part of the 'circuit of culture' disturb the normative presence of such assumptions? Keywords Mathematics education research • Language • Language diversity • Politics of representation • Cultural and postcolonial studies • Circuit of culture

This paper describes our experiences in using Ada with other programming languages in the .NET environment. This paper explains our approach and presents lessons learned during our development of a real-world software project using .NET. We compare and contrast the languages used, justify our language choices, and present details of our efforts.

This paper describes efforts directed at the simulation and control of autonomous vehicles and pedestrians for use in driving simulators scenarios. It describes the use of artificial intelligence interactive systems, and the concepts of short time orders and long time goals to create the virtual traffic environment.

Portuguese: A Linguistic Introduction, published by Cambridge University Press in 2005, is a comprehensive overview of the present status and nature of the Portuguese language, based on an approach that draws on key topics from applied linguistics, historical and socio-linguistics, and incorporates up-to-date linguistic data based on contemporary language use and a wide range of sources

The industrial robot programming is a work for specialist in robotics. Today, this work is very hard because there are many robot manufacturers with different languages and different programming environments. Although, off-line programming is an way that can reduce drastically the machines stop time to maintenance. With the use of object oriented design patterns, it is possible minimize the time spent in robot programming. In this work is proposed a off-line programming environment. This tool is based in one abstract model to program robots, encapsulate in java classes. This way has the main advantage of best source code utilization. Grouping the business classes in modules by functionalities, we can reduce complexity between low matching. Recognized patterns like Facade and Template Method will construct the base to develop this programming framework. The programming robot languages tested in this work was Rapid, Karel and Melfa Basic IV, respectively languages used by ABB, Fanuc and Mitsubishi constructors.

Parents' assessment of children's development in the first and the second language is an essential part of their family language policy (FLP) and an important component of parent–child communication. This paper presents a pilot study focused on Russian-speaking immigrant parents' assessment of their children's language knowledge in Russian as a first language and Hebrew as the second language in the context of their FLP. The research questions were as follows: How is parents' assessment of their children's bilingual language development linked to their choice of bilingual versus monolingual preschool education? To what degree are parents' reports of their children's language knowledge similar or different to their children's actual language knowledge? Which domains of language knowledge do parents relate to or ignore when assessing their children's language development? The sample consisted of 27 children (14 from bilingual and 13 from monolingual kindergartens), and their parents. Two sets of measurements were used, one to obtain parents' reports on child's knowledge of Russian and Hebrew and the other to assess children. The finding points out parents' insensitiveness to the length of the children's utterances and their tendency to rationalise FLP by overestimating their children's general language knowledge.

The connotations of a language expression are pragmatic effects that arise from encyclopaedic knowledge about its denotation (or reference) and also from experiences, beliefs, and prejudices about the contexts in which the expression is typically used. The connotation of a language expression is clearly distinct from its sense, denotation and reference. For example, Mike and Michael can have the same reference but different connotations. John is an unsuitable name for your newborn daughter; so is Springtime in Paris an inappropriate name for a 1200cc Harley-Davidson motorbike or an auto-repair shop. Identifying the connotations of a term is to identify the community attitude towards it. For instance the connotations of English octopus and the Japanese translation equivalent tako are very different: an octopus is a sinister, alien creature; tako is edible and endearing. Connotation is intimately involved with notions of appropriateness in language use; i.e. with pragmatic effect. For instance, racist dysphemisms occur when a speaker refers to or implicates the hearer or some third person's race, ethnicity, or nationality in such terms as to cause a face affront. Many such 'racist' terms can be disarmed by being used, without irony, as in-group solidarity markers by the targeted group; e.g. the use of nigger/nigga among African Americans. The negative connotations of some existing word often lead to its replacement. Although Jesus Christ! is blasphemous; Gee whiz and By jingo are not. From a purely rational viewpoint, if one of these is blasphemous, then all of them are. But the pragmatic effects, i.e. connotations are different. Connotation is a thoroughly pragmatic category of meaning.

Previous research indicates that, prior to entering kindergarten, most children are exposed to some type of formal or direct mathematics instruction. However, the type of mathematical language and the frequency of its use vary greatly in terms of its emphasis on academic content. This study investigated the types and frequency of mathematical language used in six classrooms for children ranging in age from birth to five years. The study site was a quality early childhood setting at a state university in Southwest. Results indicated that utterances pertaining to spatial relations exceeded any other type of mathematical concepts by approximately twice the frequency. In addition, there was a paucity of higher level mathematical concepts observed. These data suggest a need for enhanced attention to higher level mathematical concepts explored in early childhood settings.

Can the language used and the patterns of communication differentiate a multidisciplinary team from an interprofessional team? This research question arose from an unexpected outcome of a study that investigated clinical reasoning of health professional team members in the elder care wards of two different hospitals. The issue at stake was the apparent disparity in the way in which the two teams communicated. To further explore this, the original transcribed interview data was analysed from a symbolic interactionist perspective in order that the language and communication patterns between the two teams could be identified and compared. Differences appeared to parallel the distinctions between multidisciplinary and interprofessional teams as reported in the literature. Our observations were that an interprofessional team was characterized by its use of inclusive language, continual sharing of information between team members and a collaborative working approach. In the multidisciplinary team, the members worked in parallel, drawing information from one another but did not have a common understanding of issues that could influence intervention. The implications of these communication differences for team members, team leaders and future research are then discussed.

In this paper, we focus on the question of the nature of place and how orderliness arises in places. The development of the psychology of place is briefly reviewed emphasizing the contribution of a phenomenological perspective. This review allows us to identify a central problem in the development of ideas of place in environmental psychology, namely the problem of sociality. The sociality problem is that current conceptualizations of place do not explain how places become known and understood intersubjectively. Current conceptualizations emphasize individual understanding without explaining how places can become known collectively. We propose a resolution to this problem by drawing upon a strand of phenomenology which has not usually been foregrounded in psychology-the phenomenology of Alfred Schutz. Schutz's programme for social science and in particular how he addressed the problem of intersubjective understanding is outlined. Schutz's perspective emphasizes the 'We-relationship' and its mutual co-construction through interaction and in particular language use; places as 'typifications' form an integral part of this co-construction. Drawing on work undertaken in discursive psychology, conversation analysis and ethnomethodology we then illustrate how this programme could be implemented in environmental psychology with a particular focus on how collective understandings of place can arise and how the genesis of this collective understanding can be empirically studied. r

In spite of South Asia being one of the richest areas in terms of linguistic diversity, South Asian languages have a lot in common. For example, most of the major Indian languages use scripts which are derived from the ancient Brahmi script, have more or less the same arrangement of alphabet, are highly phonetic in nature and are very well organised. We have used this fact to build a computational phonetic model of Brahmi origin scripts. The phonetic model mainly consists of a model of phonology (including some orthographic features) based on a common alphabet of these scripts, numerical values assigned to these features, a stepped distance function (SDF), and an algorithm for aligning strings of feature vectors. The SDF is used to calculate the phonetic and orthographic similarity of two letters. The model can be used for applications like spell checking, predicting spelling/dialectal variation, text normalization, finding rhyming words, and identifying cognate words across languages. Some initial experiments have been done on this and the results seem encouraging.