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This article discusses the translation objectives, strategy and praxis adopted by Argentine Carlos Agustin Aldao (1860–1932) in his translations to Spanish of British travel accounts published by t...

A range of studies investigating how overspecified referring expressions (e.g., the stripy cup to describe a single cup) affect referent identification have found it to slow identification, speed it up, or yield no effect on processing speed. To date, these studies have all used adjectives that are semantically arbitrary within the sentential context. In addition to the standard ‘informativeness’ design that manipulates the presence of contrast sets, we controlled the semantic relevance of adjectives in discourse to reveal whether overspecifying adjectives would affect processing when relevant to the context (fed the hungry rabbit) compared to when they are not (tickled the hungry rabbit). Using a self-paced reading paradigm with a sample of adult participants (N = 31), we found that overspecified noun phrases were read more slowly than those that distinguished a member of a contrast set. Importantly, this penalty was mitigated when adjectives were semantically relevant. Contrary to classical approaches, we show that modifiers do not necessarily presuppose a set, and that referential and semantic information is integrated rapidly in pragmatic processing. Our data support Fukumura and van Gompel's (2017) meaning-based redundancy hypothesis, which predicts that it is the specific semantic representation of the overspecifying adjective that determines whether a penalty is incurred, rather than generic Gricean expectations. We extend this account using a novel experimental design.

Addressees use information from specific speakers’ previous discourse to make predictions about incoming linguistic material and to restrict the choice of potential interpretations. In this way, speaker specificity has been shown to be an influential factor in language processing across several domains e.g., spoken word recognition, sentence processing, and pragmatics. However, its influence on semantic disambiguation has received little attention to date. Using an exposure-test design and visual world eye tracking, we examined the effect of speaker-specific literal vs. nonliteral style on the disambiguation of metaphorical polysemes such as ‘fork’, ‘head’, and ‘mouse’. Eye movement data revealed that when interpreting polysemous words with a literal and a nonliteral meaning, addressees showed a late-stage preference for the literal meaning in response to a nonliteral speaker. We interpret this as reflecting an indeterminacy in the intended meaning in this condition, as well as the influence of meaning dominance cues at later stages of processing. Response data revealed that addressees then ultimately resolved to the literal target in 90% of trials. These results suggest that addressees consider a range of senses in the earlier stages of processing, and that speaker style is a contextual determinant in semantic processing.

The article compares the semantics of economic crises in the second half of the 19th century, focussing on the German-speaking world during the crises of 1857 and 1873. It examines, firstly, religious interpretations of the crises, arguing that these were on the wane. Even during the earlier crisis of 1857 they only played a role in a few instances. Secondly, the article examines the semantics employed by entrepreneurs, as found in annual reports by chambers of commerce. During both crises, the authors of these reports criticized the misdeeds of individual entrepreneurs. In 1857/58, this co-existed with the use of metaphors of physiology and meteorology. In the 1870s, by contrast, such metaphors were less frequent.

Older children with online schooling requirements, unsurprisingly, were reported to have increased screen time during the first COVID-19 lockdown in many countries. Here, we ask whether younger children with no similar online schooling requirements also had increased screen time during lockdown. We examined children’s screen time during the first COVID-19 lockdown in a large cohort (n = 2209) of 8-to-36-month-olds sampled from 15 labs across 12 countries. Caregivers reported that toddlers with no online schooling requirements were exposed to more screen time during lockdown than before lockdown. While this was exacerbated for countries with longer lockdowns, there was no evidence that the increase in screen time during lockdown was associated with socio-demographic variables, such as child age and socio-economic status (SES). However, screen time during lockdown was negatively associated with SES and positively associated with child age, caregiver screen time, and attitudes towards children’s screen time. The results highlight the impact of the COVID-19 lockdown on young children’s screen time.

Background: Adjectives are essential for communication, conceptual development, and academic success. However, they are semantically and syntactically complex and can be particularly challenging for children with Developmental Language Disorder. Surprisingly, language interventions have not typically focused on this important word class.Aims: 1) To provide a supportive and accessible primer on adjectives for practitioners; 2) to explore how the SHAPE CODINGTM system can be adapted to support adjective learning in DLD; and 3) to provide practical recommendations on how to support adjective learning in clinical practice and education.Methods/procedure: We synthesise linguistic and psychological research on adjective semantics, clinical insights into DLD, and pedagogical practice supporting this population.Main contribution: We address the lack of specific training in the nature and acquisition of adjectives for SLTs by providing an accessible primer. We provide an innovative, detailed, and practical guide to adapting an established metalinguistic intervention to support adjective learning. Conclusions/Implications: Without targeted support for adjective learning, the communicative potential of children with DLD is compromised. Our guide can be used across a range of therapeutic and educational contexts to enable SLTs and teaching staff to improve their understanding and practice in this area and, ultimately, to develop robust, effective interventions for children with DLD.

Adjectives are a powerful tool for enriching vocabulary and developing conceptual understanding. In early elementary and primary classrooms, across core and foundation subjects, children are expected to describe, measure, classify, and compare objects and events - all processes that require a mastery of adjective meanings and use. While teachers are trained in vocabulary learning, they are likely to be less familiar with the psychological processes by which children learn adjectives, and how attention to adjectives can support further learning in domains outside of language and literacy lessons. To address this gap, we have collaborated as a unique interdisciplinary team with linguistic, psychological, and pedagogical expertise, to synthesise research across our disciplines to provide an accessible evidence-based, practical primer of relevant research findings on adjective development. We then provide clear guidance on how these findings can be leveraged to enhance current teaching and learning practices across subjects for children aged five to seven.

High‐quality, centre‐based education and care during the early years benefit cognitive development, especially in children from disadvantaged backgrounds. During the COVID‐19 pandemic and its associated lockdowns, access to early childhood education and care (ECEC) was disrupted. We investigate how this period affected the developmental advantages typically offered by ECEC. Using parent‐report data from 189 families living in the UK, we explore associations between time spent in ECEC by 8‐to‐36‐month‐olds, their socioeconomic background, and their growth in language and executive functions between Spring and Winter 2020. Receptive vocabulary growth was greater in children who continued to attend ECEC during the period, with a stronger positive effect for children from less advantaged backgrounds. The growth of cognitive executive functions (CEFs) was boosted by ECEC attendance during the period, regardless of socioeconomic background. Our findings highlight the importance of high‐quality ECEC for the development of key skills and for levelling socioeconomic inequalities.

Combining information from adjectives with the nouns they modify is essential for comprehension. Previous research suggests that preschoolers do not always integrate adjectives and nouns, and may instead over-rely on noun information when processing referring expressions (Fernald, Thorpe, & Marchman, 2010; Thorpe, Baumgartner, & Fernald, 2006). This disjointed processing has implications for pragmatics, apparently preventing under-fives from making contrastive inferences (Huang & Snedeker, 2013).Using a novel experimental design that allows preschoolers time to demonstrate their abilities in adjective-noun integration and in contrastive inference, two visual world experiments investigate how English-speaking three-year-olds (N=73, Mage=44 months) process size adjectives across syntactic (prenominal; postnominal) and pragmatic (descriptive; contrastive) contexts. We show that preschoolers are able to integrate adjectives and nouns to resolve reference accurately by the end of the referring expression, in a variety of pragmatic and syntactic contexts and in the presence of multiple distractors. We reveal for the first time that they can contrastively infer, given a slowed speed of presentation and visually salient size contrasts. Our findings provide evidence for a continuity in the development of pragmatic skills, which do not appear to be linked to children’s language proficiency or speed of processing.

Military conflicts and wars shaped Spanish America in the transformative period from the 1780s to the 1830s with its first anticolonial uprisings and the Spanish American Wars of Independence. This chapter explores the impact of warfare and militarization on the social and gender order in the Spanish Atlantic Empire in this transformative period and examines, conversely, how ideas about the gender order shaped society, warfare, and military culture. It focuses on the first anticolonial uprisings, especially the Tupac Amaru Rebellion in the South American Andes and the Rebellion of the Comuneros in New Granada—two of the largest and earliest in the history of Latin America—and the Spanish American Wars of Independence and their aftermath.

The chemical and structural nature of potassium compounds involved in catalytic soot oxidation have been studied by a combination of temperature programmed oxidation and operando potassium K-edge X-ray absorption spectroscopy experiments. These experiments are the first known operando studies using tender X-rays (similar to 3.6 keV) under high temperature oxidation reaction conditions. X-ray absorption near edge structure analysis of K2CO3/Al(2)O(3)catalysts during heating shows that, at temperatures between 100 and 200 degrees C, potassium species undergo a structural change from an initial hydrated K2CO3 center dot xH(2)O and KHCO(3)mixture to well-defined K2CO3. As the catalyst is heated from 200 degrees C to 600 degrees C, a feature associated with multiple scattering shifts to lower energy, indicating increased K(2)CO(3)dispersion, due to its mobility at high reaction temperature. This shift was noted to be greater in samples containing soot than in control experiments without soot and can be attributed to enhanced mobility of the K2CO3, due to the interaction between soot and potassium species. No potassium species except K(2)CO(3)could be defined during reactions, which excludes a potential reaction mechanism in which carbonate ions are the active soot-oxidising species. Simulations of K-edge absorption near edge structures were performed to rationalise the observed changes seen. Findings showed that cluster size, unit cell distortions and variation in the distribution of potassium crystallographic sites influenced the simulated spectra of K2CO3. While further simulation studies are required for a more complete understanding, the current results support the hypothesis that changes in the local structure on dispersion can influence the observed spectra.Ex situcharacterisation was carried out on the fresh and used catalyst, by X-ray diffraction and X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy, which indicated changes to the carbonate species, in line with the X-ray absorption spectroscopy experiments.

Contains fulltext : 217367.pdf (Publisher’s version ) (Closed access) The ability to make inferences is essential for effective language comprehension. While inferencing training benefits reading comprehension in school-aged children (see Elleman, 2017, for a review), we do not yet know whether it is beneficial to support the development of these skills prior to school entry. In a pre-registered randomised controlled trial, we evaluated the efficacy of a parent-delivered intervention intended to promote four-year-olds’ oral inferencing skills during shared book-reading. One hundred children from socioeconomically diverse backgrounds were randomly assigned to inferencing training or an active control condition of daily maths activities. The training was found to have no effect on inferencing. However, inferencing measures were highly correlated with children's baseline language ability. This suggests that a more effective approach to scaffolding inferencing in the preschool years might be to focus on promoting vocabulary to develop richer and stronger semantic networks. 25 p.

The field of infancy research faces a difficult challenge: some questions require samples that are simply too large for any one lab to recruit and test. ManyBabies aims to address this problem by forming large-scale collaborations on key theoretical questions in developmental science, while promoting the uptake of Open Science practices. Here, we look back on the first project completed under the ManyBabies umbrella – ManyBabies 1 – which tested the development of infant-directed speech preference. Our goal is to share the lessons learned over the course of the project and to articulate our vision for the role of large-scale collaborations in the field. First, we consider the decisions made in scaling up experimental research for a collaboration involving 100+ researchers and 70+ labs. Next, we discuss successes and challenges over the course of the project, including: protocol design and implementation, data analysis, organizational structures and collaborative workflows, securing funding, and encouraging broad participation in the project. Finally, we discuss the benefits we see both in ongoing ManyBabies projects and in future large-scale collaborations in general, with a particular eye towards developing best practices and increasing growth and diversity in infancy research and psychological science in general. Throughout the paper, we include first-hand narrative experiences, in order to illustrate the perspectives of researchers playing different roles within the project. While this project focused on the unique challenges of infant research, many of the insights we gained can be applied to large-scale collaborations across the broader field of psychology.

This year's lockdown prompted new and unexpected forms of parental engagement at settings. Dr Catherine Davies, Dr Louise Tracey and Dr Julian Grenier report

There remains considerable debate over the active form of gold under operating conditions of a recently validated gold catalyst for acetylene hydrochlorination. We have performed an in situ x-ray absorption fine structure study of gold/carbon (Au/C) catalysts under acetylene hydrochlorination reaction conditions and show that highly active catalysts comprise single-site cationic Au entities whose activity correlates with the ratio of Au(I):Au(III) present. We demonstrate that these Au/C catalysts are supported analogs of single-site homogeneous Au catalysts and propose a mechanism, supported by computational modeling, based on a redox couple of Au(I)-Au(III) species.\ud View Full Text

How do speakers get other people to understand what they are talking about? Language wouldn’t succeed unless we were able to refer to ideas and things in the world, and get other people to understand them. Yet this human ability is complex, not least because it requires speakers and addressees to pay attention to context. This chapter reviews research on reference and informativeness in communication. It outlines the problem of referential choice, that is, how speakers select from the variety of expressions available to them. It then compares findings from two previously distinct literatures—pragmatic informativeness and discourse-based models of reference—and discusses how each has investigated (i) speakers’ choice of referring expressions; and (ii) how speakers’ choices affect addressees. It also examines processing, by reviewing the constraints affecting referential choice, both those associated with interlocutors themselves and those stemming from the referents under discussion. It concludes by raising some of the outstanding questions in linguistic reference.

In this review we discuss the history of research into the use of gold for the acetylene hydrochlorination reaction, and describe the recent developments which have led to its commercialisation. We discuss the use of different precursors and the addition to gold of a secondary metal as methods which attempt to improve these catalysts, and consider the nature of the active gold species. The vast majority of poly vinyl chloride (PVC) produced globally still uses a mercuric chloride as a catalyst, despite the environmental problems associated with it. Due to the agreement by the Chinese government to remove mercury usage in the PVC industry over the course of the next few years there is an obvious need to find a replacement catalyst; the potential use of gold for this process has been well known for several decades and to date gold seems to be the best candidate for this, primarily due to its superior selectivity when compared to other metals.

This article analyses how journalists and businessmen used and perceived the Atlantic cable following the failure of New York banking house Jay Cooke & Co. in September 1873, an event which sparked stock markets panics in Vienna and Berlin. It is argued that while bankers successfully used telegraphic cables to communicate intelligence such as price information, letters proved superior as a medium for establishing personal trust, as the case of New York banker George Opdyke shows. Journalists, too, were critical of the telegraph’s performance, blaming the paucity of information available on the technology’s supposedly inherent deficiencies. This criticism, it is argued, was ultimately based on the ‘imagined reception’ of cables by their senders, as well as on the persistence of earlier imagined uses of telegraphy. These, I argue, continued to inform contemporary expectations of telegraphy’s performance.

Children's ability to refer is underpinned by their developing cognitive skills. Using a production task (n = 57), we examined pre-articulatory visual fixations to contrast objects (e.g., to a large apple when the target was a small one) to investigate how visual scanning drives informativeness across development. Eye-movements reveal that although four-year-olds fixate contrast objects to a similar extent as seven-year-olds and adults, this does not result in explicit referential informativeness. Instead, four-year-olds frequently omit distinguishing information from their referring expressions regardless of the comprehensiveness of their visual scan. In contrast, older children make greater use of information gleaned from their visual inspections, like adults. Thus, we find a barrier not to theincidenceof contrast fixations by younger children, but to theiruseof them in referential informativeness. We recommend that follow-up work investigates whether younger children's immature executive skills prevent them from describing referents in relation to contrast objects.

This research project investigates women’s involvement in the struggles to achieve political independence in Spanish America and Brazil during the first half of the 19th century. The project is hosted at the University of Nottingham, Department of Spanish, Portuguese, and Latin American Studies, School of Cultures, Languages, and Area Studies; it was funded by the University of Nottingham and the UK Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) between 2001 and 2014. The online searchable database was a core output of the first of these AHRC-funded projects (2001–2006): “Gendering Latin American Independence: Women’s Political Culture and the Textual Construction of Gender 1790–1850.” It was enhanced in stages with an AHRC Pilot Dissemination Award (2006–2007) and Follow-on Funding (2012) for the crowd-sourcing project “Women and Independence in Latin America: A New Multimedia Community–Contributed, Community-Driven Online Resource” in collaboration with the Horizon Digital Economy Institute, University of Nottingham. The aim of the follow-on-funding awards was to stimulate widespread public debate, preferably in collaboration with partners (national and international). This was of particular importance with respect to the involvement of Latin American women in the independence wars against Spain and Portugal, an aspect of women’s history that had been much neglected. Since 2006, a lively public debate has emerged about women’s involvement in the wars of independence, especially in Latin America. The debate has focused on women’s exclusion from mainstream nationalist historiography and their problematic position in postindependence politics and public culture. The unprecedented surge of interest in women’s history and the founding discourses of the Spanish American republics has been triggered by the bicentenary celebrations of Spanish American political independence, which began in 2010 and will continue into the 2020s, and the recent rise to political prominence of women in Latin America (women presidents in Brazil, Costa Rica, Chile, and Argentina). The research project of 2001–2006 focused more specifically on the constructions of gender categories in the culture of the independence period and the impact of war and conflict on women’s lives, social relationships, and cultural production. The research emphasized the significance of women in the independence process and explored the reasons for their subsequent exclusion from political culture until recently. Independence was examined in terms of gender: (a) the study of women’s political culture, (b) women’s activities and writings, and (c) the textual construction of gender in political discourse. Questions were posed: Did the wars of independence change traditional ways of thinking about women, and change women’s views of themselves? How was the category “woman” produced historically and politically in Spanish America at the time? In what ways were those identified as women constructed ambiguously as subjects and objects in political discourse? What were women’s responses to the republican discourse of individual rights that equated individuality with masculinity? Why, after political independence, were political rights still denied to over half the population according to the criterion of sexual difference?

Magnetite is a common subsurface mineral, formed biogenically in anaerobic environments. Containing Fe(II), it is reactive towards a variety of common redox sensitive subsurface contaminants. To extend the reactivity of biomagnetite it is possible to add a coating of Pd(0) nanostructures, which is capable of sustained catalytic reactivity. Here we assess the reactivity of biogenic nano-magnetite (BnM), formed by the reduction of Fe(III) oxyhydroxide by Geobacter sulfurreducens, to the model organic compounds nitrobenzene (ArNO2) and tetrachloroethylene (PCE), and compare its performance to biomagnetite functionalized with Pd(0) (Pd-BnM). The BnM and the Pd-BnM were both found to be highly reactive towards ArNO2, quantitatively transforming it to the reduced product aniline (ArNH2). When applied to tetrachloroethylene (PCE), the BnM was found to be poorly reactive, while the Pd-BnM rapidly dechlorinated the PCE to the benign product, ethane, at rates comparable to synthetic nano-scale catalysts. The biological synthesis route proposed is highly scalable and offers a green, environmentally benign route for the production of highly reactive nanoparticles for environmental clean-up.