Актуальный счет, или Двушка, трёшка, пятак…

The article considers the semantic asymmetry of nouns carrying a meaning related to numbers; such as dvu?ka, tre?ka, trojak, pjatak. The words dvu?ka and pjatak are primarily associated with coins while tre?ka and trojak are associated with banknotes. These words also have other meanings; the sets of those meanings do not coincide (‘grades’, ‘term of confinement’, ‘apartment with the corresponding number of bedrooms’, etc.). This semantic asymmetry receives a cultural interpretation. The choice of a particular meaning is stipulated by the cultural value of concepts such as, e.g., money. The most important and relevant meanings for a given period of time consolidate their influence on a numerical noun. E.g. the relevance of the ‘money’ meaning is determined, first of all, by the existence of a corresponding monetary unit and by the existence of a permanent function for such a unit (or for an equivalent amount of money). For these types of nouns we should also discuss the special semantic potential that exists, that is, the possibility of new meanings arising.     

Larra y el carlismo: El rechazo de un liberal hacia las clases populares campesinas

This study analyzes the five articles that Mariano José de Larra wrote at the beginning of the First Carlist War, first of a serie of three Civil Wars in Spain provoked by a dynastic problem during the XIXth Century. The Carlist movement, similar to the American Confederacy in its social constitution and aims, is also defined and analyzed in the light of the most recent studies on the topic. Through the analysis of the five journalistic texts by Larra I intend to analyze his ideological background and his perception of the popular classes and their role in XIX century Spain, and other prominent authors of the time such as José de Espronceda.     

Arabismos vinculados a la industria textil del reino de Granada a través de sus documentos: aceituní, almaizar,alquicel, anafaya

Neophilologus - The objective of this article focuses on the historical-linguistics analysis of four lexical Arabisms attached to the lexical-semantic field of the textile industry of the Kingdom...     

Superordinate vs basic level knowledge in aphasia: A case study

An aphasic patient, RW, was studied in order to address the issue of whether semantic access proceeds from the general to the specific. In naming, RW showed better performance at the basic level than superordinate level, both in visual confrontation naming and in naming to definition. In comprehension, he showed equal impairment at the superordinate and basic levels. In addition, he had disproportionate difficulties in comprehending the concept ‘vehicle’ without showing a comparable deficit in naming individual exemplars of that category. Various aspects of the patient's performance argued against attributing these findings to a semantic access deficit. The current data are consistent with a feature model of semantic memory in which impairment is equally likely to occur for superordinate and basic levels.     

Neuroanatomical markers of individual differences in native and non-native vowel perception

Although most human beings experience no difficulty in perceiving their native language, strong individual differences are observed for certain foreign phonemic contrasts. Diaz, Baus, Escera, Costa, and Sebastian-Galles (2008, Brain potentials to native phoneme discrimination reveal the origin of individual differences in learning the sounds of a second language. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 105, 16083–16088) reported a correlation between event-related potential (ERP) responses to native and non-native vowels in a group of early and highly-skilled bilinguals. In the present study, we compared the brain morphology of two groups of bilinguals who were equally proficient in their second language but differed in their perception of both native and non-native vowels. A whole brain, voxel-based morphometry analysis (VBM) revealed larger white matter volume in the right insulo/fronto-opercular region in individuals who exhibited poorer perceptual discrimination of native and non-native vowels. As the volume of the left Heschl’s gyri has previously been shown to correlate with the ability to perceive foreign phonemic contrasts (between consonants), we also measured the white and grey matter volumes of Heschl’s gyri in our subjects. We did not observe any significant relation between these volumes and vowel discrimination capabilities. This result allows the identification of anatomical brain differences related to individual differences in vowel perception. The present results add to the relatively unexplored area of the relationship between brain structure and language function in adult healthy population.     

A contrastive study of the rhetorical organisation of English and Spanish PhD thesis introductions

This paper presents an analysis of the introductory sections of a corpus of 20 doctoral theses on computing written in Spanish and in English. Our aim was to ascertain whether the theses, produced within the same scientific-technological area but by authors from different cultural and linguistic backgrounds, employed the same rhetorical strategies to introduce the work presented. The analysis follows the Swalesian approach and is based on a move/step/sub-step model proposed for PhD introductions in Spanish (Carbonell-Olivares, Gil-Salom, & Soler-Monreal, 2009). The Spanish academic conventions appear to be that move 1 (M1-Establishing the Territory) and move 3 (M3-Occupying the Niche) are obligatory moves in PhD thesis introductions in Spanish, while move 2 (M2-Establishing the Niche) is optional. The structure of English thesis introductions reveals that they conform more closely to the M1-M2-M3 arrangement. Moreover, combinations of moves and patterns, cyclicity and embedding make their organisation more complex. The step analysis suggests that introductions in both languages rely mainly on the presentation of background information and the work carried out. However, the English introductions tend to stress the writer’s own work, its originality and its contribution to the field of study. They also present more embedding and overlapping of steps and sub-steps than the Spanish texts.     

Prosody and Reading in Dyslexic Children

This study investigates the role of prosody in the reading aloud of dyslexic children. Ten dyslexic and 30 non‐dyslexic control children (mean age 9.5 and 9.9 years, respectively) were recorded when reading a text of appropriate level and subsequently asked to retell it and tested on its comprehension. The data were analysed acoustically by the WinPitchPro programme. The temporal and intonational processing of reading of the two groups were contrasted and revealed unusual characteristics of the dyslexic group with respect to what follows: (1) temporal processing (reduced speeds of reading and articulation and alterations in the number and duration of pauses); (2) variation of the fundamental frequency (limited ability to vary the melody at the phrasal and phonemic level); and (3) vowel stress patterning (difficulty in producing typical stress patterns, and of marking the pre‐stressed and stressed syllables). Fulfilling its objective, the present study promotes advances in the understanding of the functioning of prosody in reading aloud in dyslexia. Copyright © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.