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This paper reports follow-up findings for an Mentalization based treatment (MBT) parenting intervention delivered to a community mental health sample. Parents completed the 12-week version of the Lighthouse Parenting Program (LPP) and were evaluated on parenting practices, parent-child relationships, parental mental health indicators, and child problem behaviour levels. We evaluated the extent to which improvements in mentalizing at follow-up mediated changes in parenting, parental adjustment, mental health, and child outcomes. Results included a reduction in parental coercive behaviours and child problems, improved parent-child relationship, and better parental psychological adjustment and mental health. Improvement in self-focused mentalizing were observed. Self-focused mentalizing mediated the changes in most outcomes from baseline to 3-month follow-up. These results provide strong preliminary evidence that the LPP improves parent and child outcomes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents the investigation and analysis of speech accommodation effects in data obtained from Spanish learners of German with varying proficiency levels. The production data were recorded during a collaborative map task of the Spanish learners of German among each other and with a native speaker of German. The map task was designed to target words and phrases with specific segmental and suprasegmental characteristics. These characteristics were derived from contrastive analyses of Spanish and German. The main objectives of the paper were to investigate whether segmental and suprasegmental characteristics of the target language German are affected by phonetic accommodation to varying degrees and whether these differences depend on the proficiency level of the speaker or the interlocutor. The statistical analysis, using regression analyses, revealed inconsistent accommodation effects across learners of different proficiency levels as well as different linguistic phenomena. In line with previous findings the results can best be accounted for by an adaptation of a dynamic system approach. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores trade union strategies to protect wages in the face of EU migration after the enlargement of the European Union. We argue that unions have three instruments at their disposal to deal with the risks linked to downward wage pressure: closure through immigration control, equalisation through collective bargaining and minimum wages, and the organisation of migrant workers. Using comparative case studies of Sweden, Germany and the UK, we show how different types of power resources shape union strategies: unions with substantial organisational resources (in Sweden) relied on a large membership to pursue an equalisation strategy and expected to be able to 'afford' openness. German unions with low membership but access to the political system pushed for a mix of closure and equality drawing on political intervention (e.g. minimum wages). British unions, unable to pursue either, focused their efforts on organisation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper reports on the prosody of rhetorical questions (RQs) and information-seeking questions (ISQs) in German for two question types—polar questions and constituent questions (henceforth " wh -questions"). The results are as follows: Phonologically, polar RQs were mainly realized with H-% (high plateau), while polar ISQs mostly ended in H-^H% (high-rise). Wh -RQs almost exclusively terminated in a low edge tone, whereas wh -ISQs allowed for more tonal variation (L-%, L-H%, H-^H%). Irrespective of question type, RQs were mainly produced with L*+H accents. Phonetically, RQs were more often realized with breathy voice quality than ISQs, in particular in the beginning of the interrogative. Furthermore, they were produced with longer constituent durations than ISQs, in particular at the end of the interrogative. While the difference between RQs and ISQs is reflected in the intonational terminus of the utterance, this does not happen in the way suggested in the semantic literature, and in addition, accent type and phonetic parameters also play a role. Crucially, a simple distinction between rising and falling intonation is insufficient to capture the realization of the different illocution types (RQs, ISQs), against frequent claims in the semantic and pragmatic literature. We suggest alternative ways to interpret the findings. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper studies the prosodic realization of dual-focus in German, that is, two foci in a single sentence, with special consideration of the interaction between focus assignment and phrasing. In a production experiment, dual-focus was compared with its initial, final, and all-new counterparts in sentences with subject NPs and VPs of different lengths. The results showed that there were three different patterns of dual-focus realization: (1) The most frequent one was the two-peak pattern (57.8%), that is, a falling tone on both focused words and compressed and lowered pitch in-between; (2) the second most frequent was the two-phrase realization (23.5%), in which both foci were also realized as a falling tone, but in this case, a high boundary tone was inserted after the subject NP; (3) the least frequent pattern was the hat-pattern (18.7%), consisting of a rising tone on the first focus and a falling tone on the second one while the pitch in-between is kept as a high plateau. This was applied mostly in utterances containing a short subject NP. We interpret these results in terms of optional prosodic phrasing. A sentence with two foci can be realized in one or two intonation phrases, but in both cases, the focus is assigned within the prosodic domain derived from syntax. These results show that Culminativity, the principle requiring a one-to-one correspondence between prosodic domains and their heads, is violable in German. Two equally prominent pitch accents are allowed to co-exist in one intonation phrase. Finally, the metrical structure of dual-focus speaks for a recursive structure of German prosody. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Aim: Measuring socioeconomic inequalities in health and health care, and understanding determinants of such inequalities, are critical for achieving higher equity in health. Equity in health is a prerequisite for public health and welfare. The aim of the paper is (1) to quantify inequality in diabetes morbidity patterns over patients’ entire life span, and (2) to compare levels of inequality measured through income and educational level, respectively, as proxies for socioeconomic status (SES). Method: Historic individual register data on the entire Danish diabetes population alive in 2011 were gathered. Cox survival analysis and a concentration index decomposition approach were applied to analyse relevant morbidity indicators reflecting patients’ health state at diagnosis and throughout their lives with diabetes. Results: Patients with high education have approximately 26% lower mortality hazard when diagnosed with diabetes and 10–15% lower hazard of developing complications as compared with patients with short education. The outcome variables: ‘severe complications at diagnosis’ and ‘years with severe complications’ inhibit the highest negative concentration index value, indicating that morbidity is concentrated among the lower SES groups, whereas the outcome variables ‘years without complications’ and ‘duration of diabetes’ concentrate among the socioeconomically better-off patients. Conclusions: Significant differences in diabetes patients’ morbidity patterns and survival indicate that diabetes impacts harder on patients of lower SES; these patients experience more severe complications and die earlier. Hence to reduce inequality in health, it is important to invest in efforts targeted towards socially vulnerable groups. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Aims: The Study on Mental Health at Work (S-MGA) generates the first nationwide representative survey enabling the exploration of the relationship between working conditions, mental health and functioning. This paper describes the study design, sampling procedures and data collection, and presents a summary of the sample characteristics. Methods: S-MGA is a representative study of German employees aged 31–60 years subject to social security contributions. The sample was drawn from the employment register based on a two-stage cluster sampling procedure. Firstly, 206 municipalities were randomly selected from a pool of 12,227 municipalities in Germany. Secondly, 13,590 addresses were drawn from the selected municipalities for the purpose of conducting 4500 face-to-face interviews. The questionnaire covers psychosocial working and employment conditions, measures of mental health, work ability and functioning. Data from personal interviews were combined with employment histories from register data. Descriptive statistics of socio-demographic characteristics and logistic regressions analyses were used for comparing population, gross sample and respondents. Results: In total, 4511 face-to-face interviews were conducted. A test for sampling bias revealed that individuals in older cohorts participated more often, while individuals with an unknown educational level, residing in major cities or with a non-German ethnic background were slightly underrepresented. Conclusions: There is no indication of major deviations in characteristics between the basic population and the sample of respondents. Hence, S-MGA provides representative data for research on work and health, designed as a cohort study with plans to rerun the survey 5 years after the first assessment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper addresses the impact of dialogue strategies and functional features of spatial arrangements on communicative success. To examine the sharing of cognition between two minds in order to achieve a joint goal, we collected a corpus of 24 extended German-language dialogues in a referential communication task that involved furnishing a dolls' house. Results show how successful communication, as evidenced by correct placement of furniture items, is affected by: (a) functionality of the furniture arrangement; (b) previous task experience; and (c) dialogue features such as description length and orientation information. To enhance research in this area, our 'Dolldialogue' corpus (www.dolldialogue.space) is now available as a free resource. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The voicing contrast is neutralized syllable and word finally in Dutch and German, leading to alternations within the morphological paradigm (e.g., Dutch ‘bed(s)’, be[t]-be[d]en, German ‘dog(s)’, Hun[t]-Hun[d]e). Despite structural similarity, language-specific morphological, phonological and lexical properties impact on the distribution of this alternation in the two languages. Previous acquisition research has focused on one language only, predominantly focusing on children’s production accuracy, concluding that alternations are not acquired until late in the acquisition process in either language. This paper adapts a perceptual method to investigate how voicing alternations are represented in the mental lexicon of Dutch and German 3-year-olds. Sensitivity to mispronunciations of voicing word-medially in plural forms was measured using a visual fixation procedure. Dutch children exhibited evidence of overgeneralizing the voicing alternation, whereas German children consistently preferred the correct pronunciation to mispronunciations. Results indicate that the acquisition of voicing alternations is influenced by language-specific factors beyond the alternation itself. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper describes a cross-linguistic production study of devoicing for European Portuguese (EP), Italian, and German. We recorded all stops and fricatives in four vowel contexts and two word positions. We computed the devoicing of the time-varying patterns throughout the stop and fricative duration. Our results show that regarding devoicing behaviour, EP is more similar to German than Italian. While Italian shows almost no devoicing of all phonologically voiced consonants, both EP and German show strong and consistent devoicing through the entire consonant. Differences in consonant position showed no effect for EP and Italian, but were significantly different for German. The height of the vowel context had an effect for German and EP. For EP, we showed that a more posterior place of articulation and low vowel context lead to significantly more devoicing. However, in contrast to German, we could not find an influence of consonant position on devoicing. The high devoicing for all phonologically voiced stops and fricatives and the vowel context influence are a surprising new result. With respect to voicing maintenance, EP is more like German than other Romance languages. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The paper reports on a perception experiment in German that investigated the neuro-cognitive processing of information structural concepts and their prosodic marking using event-related brain potentials (ERPs). Experimental conditions controlled the information status (given vs. new) of referring and non-referring target expressions (nouns vs. adjectives) and were elicited via context sentences, which did not – unlike most previous ERP studies in the field – trigger an explicit focus expectation. Target utterances displayed prosodic realizations of the critical words which differed in accent position and accent type. Electrophysiological results showed an effect of information status, maximally distributed over posterior sites, displaying a biphasic N400 - Late Positivity pattern for new information. We claim that this pattern reflects increased processing demands associated with new information, with the N400 indicating enhanced costs from linking information with the previous discourse and the Late Positivity indicating the listener’s effort to update his/her discourse model. The prosodic manipulation registered more pronounced effects over anterior regions and revealed an enhanced negativity followed by a Late Positivity for deaccentuation, probably also reflecting costs from discourse linking and updating respectively. The data further lend indirect support for the idea that givenness applies not only to referents but also to non-referential expressions (‘lexical givenness’). [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]