| 1. |
- Pecorari, Diane, 1964-, et al.
(författare)
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English Textbooks in Parallel-Language Tertiary Education
- 2011
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Ingår i: TESOL quarterly (Print). - : Wiley. - 0039-8322 .- 1545-7249. ; 45:2, s. 313-333
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- Tertiary education in many countries is increasingly bilingual, with English used in parallel with the national language, particularly as a reading language. This article describes the results of a survey of student attitudes toward, and reading practices regarding, English language textbooks. Over 1,000 students at three Swedish universities responded to a questionnaire asking about their experiences with English textbooks. Textbooks written in English were generally unpopular, and the perception was widespread that they placed a greater burden on students. However, respondents were divided about whether their reading behavior and their learning outcomes were affected by having a textbook in English, and about whether English texts were desirable. The findings of this study have implications for teaching practices in contexts in which students are asked to read, or are being prepared to read, in a second language. Implications for the English as a foreign language or English as a second language classroom are discussed.
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| 2. |
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| 3. |
- Kaiserfeld, Thomas, et al.
(författare)
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Changing the System Culture : Mobilizing the Social Sciences in the Swedish Nuclear Waste System
- 2021
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Ingår i: Nuclear Technology. - : Informa UK Limited. - 0029-5450 .- 1943-7471. ; 207:9, s. 1456-1468
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- The purpose of this paper is to analyze how competence in the humanities and social sciences has been introduced into the system culture of the Swedish nuclear waste system (SNWS) traditionally dominated by scientists and engineers. In the spring of 1980, fierce local protests were directed against drilling teams sent out to investigate the geology of potential locations for a repository of spent nuclear fuel. This demonstrated the political and ethical dimensions of the waste issue and the limitations of the technocratic approach that had hitherto dominated the system culture of the SNWS. In order to counter this tendency, the government established an advisory board, Samrådsnämnden för kärnavfall (abbreviated KASAM), in 1985 with the task to widen the perspectives on the nuclear waste issue. KASAM engaged social scientists and humanists and started organizing annual workshops inviting engineers and scientists working with the waste issue to discuss its ethical and political dimensions. In the early 1990s, SKB, the Swedish implementer organization responsible for the management of nuclear waste, changed its strategy for finding suitable locations for a repository of spent nuclear fuel. Approval from the local population became a key condition. In the early 2000s, only two municipalities remained, both of them already housing nuclear power plants. After careful investigations and many deliberations, one of them was eventually chosen. The combination of KASAM’s activities to broaden the discussion and the local protests in many communities initiated a gradual change of the system culture within the SNWS. The initial technocratic approach was broadened to encompass ethical, social, and political aspects, and the main organizations now acknowledge that not only technical and scientific skills but also competence from social science and the humanities were of essence.
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| 4. |
- Ambrazaitis, Gilbert, 1979-, et al.
(författare)
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Word prominence ratings in Swedish television news readings : Effects of pitch accents and head movements
- 2020
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Ingår i: Proceedings of the International Conference on Speech Prosody. - : International Speech Communication Association. - 2333-2042. ; , s. 314-318, s. 314-318
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Konferensbidrag (refereegranskat)abstract
- Prosodic prominence is a multimodal phenomenon where pitch accents are frequently aligned with visible movements by the hands, head, or eyebrows. However, little is known about how such movements function as visible prominence cues in multimodal speech perception with most previous studies being restricted to experimental settings. In this study, we are piloting the acquisition of multimodal prominence ratings for a corpus of natural speech (Swedish television news readings). Sixteen short video clips (218 words) of news readings were extracted from a larger corpus and rated by 44 native Swedish adult volunteers using a web-based set-up. The task was to rate each word in a clip as either non-prominent, moderately prominent or strongly prominent based on audiovisual cues. The corpus was previously annotated for pitch accents and head movements. We found that words realized with a pitch accent and head movement tended to receive higher prominence ratings than words with a pitch accent only. However, we also examined ratings for a number of carefully selected individual words, and these case studies suggest that ratings are affected by complex relations between the presence of a head movement and its type of alignment, the word's F0 profile, and semantic and pragmatic factors.
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| 5. |
- Angere, Staffan
(författare)
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The defeasible nature of coherentist justification
- 2007
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Ingår i: Synthese. - : Springer Science and Business Media LLC. - 0039-7857 .- 1573-0964. ; 157:3, s. 321-335
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- The impossibility results of Bovens and Hartmann (2003, Bayesian epistemology. Oxford: Clarendon Press) and Olsson (2005, Against coherence: Truth, probability and justification. Oxford: Oxford University Press.) show that the link between coherence and probability is not as strong as some have supposed. This paper is an attempt to bring out a way in which coherence reasoning nevertheless can be justified, based on the idea that, even if it does not provide an infallible guide to probability, it can give us an indication thereof. It is further shown that this actually is the case, for several of the coherence measures discussed in the literature so far. We also discuss how this affects the possibility to use coherence as a means of epistemic justification.
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| 6. |
- Boholm, Max, 1982, et al.
(författare)
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Dis-Ag-reement: the construction and negotiation of risk in the Swedish controversy over antibacterial silver
- 2015
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Ingår i: Journal of Risk Research. - : Informa UK Limited. - 1366-9877 .- 1466-4461. ; 18:1, s. 93-110
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- What constitutes a potentially hazardous object is often debated. This article analyses the polemic construction and negotiation of risk in the Swedish controversy over the use of antibacterial silver in health care and consumer products. This debate engages the media, government agencies, parliament and government, non-governmental organizations and companies. Texts and websites from these actors were studied using content analysis. Antibacterial silver is construed by some actors as a risk object with harmful effects on a series of objects at risk: the environment, public health, organisms and sewage treatment. In contrast, other actors deny that antibacterial silver is a risk object, instead construing it as mitigating risk. In such a schema, antibacterial silver is conceived of as managing the risk objects of bacteria and micro-organisms, in turn managing the risk objects of infection, bad smell and washing, and in turn helping the environment and public health (objects at risk). The structure of the debate suggests two basic modes of risk communication. First, antibacterial silver is construed as a risk object, endangering a variety of objects at risk, such as organisms, public health, the environment and sewage treatment. Second, this association between antibacterial silver and objects at risk is obstructed, by denying that antibacterial silver is a risk object or by associating silver with the benefit of mitigating risk.
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| 7. |
- Bruce, Gösta, et al.
(författare)
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Modelling intonation in varieties of swedish
- 2008
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Ingår i: Proceedings of the 4th International Conference on Speech Prosody, SP 2008. - : International Speech Communications Association. - 9780616220030 ; , s. 571-574
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Konferensbidrag (refereegranskat)abstract
- The research project Simulating intonational varieties of Swedish (SIMULEKT) aims to gain more precise and thorough knowledge about some major regional varieties of Swedish: South, Göta, Svea, Gotland, Dala, North, and Finland Swedish. In this research effort, the Swedish prosody model and different forms of speech synthesis play a prominent role. The two speech databases SweDia 2000 and SpeechDat constitute our main material for analysis. As a first test case for our prosody model, we compared Svea and North Swedish intonation in a pilot production-oriented perception test. Näi{dotless}ve Swedish listeners were asked to identify the most Svea and North sounding stimuli. Results showed that listeners can differentiate between the two varieties from intonation only. They also provided information on how intonational parameters affect listeners' impression of Swedish varieties. All this indicates that our experimental method can be used to test perception of different regional varieties of Swedish.
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| 8. |
- Hansson, Sven Ove, et al.
(författare)
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David Makinson and the Extension of Classical Logic
- 2014
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Ingår i: David Makinson on Classical Methods for Non-Classical Problems. - Dordrecht : Springer. - 9789400777583 - 9789400777590 ; , s. 11-18
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Bok (refereegranskat)abstract
- There are two major ways to deal with the limitations of classical logic. It can be replaced by systems representing alternative accounts of the laws of thought (non-classical logic), or it can be supplemented with non-inferential mechanisms. David Makinson has a leading role as proponent of the latter approach in the form of the inferential-preferential method in which classical logic is combined with representations of preference or choice. This has turned out to be a highly efficient and versatile method. Its applications in non-monotonic logic and belief revision are used as examples.
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| 9. |
- Karlsson, Anastasia, et al.
(författare)
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Prosodic signaling of information and discourse structure from a typological perspective
- 2015
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Ingår i: Proceedings of the 18th International Congress of Phonetic Sciences.. - Glasgow, UK : ICPHS. - 9780852619414 - 9780852619421
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Konferensbidrag (refereegranskat)abstract
- This study investigates the relationship between prosody and information/discourse structure in spontaneous spoken folk tales in the tonal Mon-Khmer language Northern Kammu, a language that behaves as a typical phrase language where available boundary tones are enhanced to mark information structuring. Topic is always placed before Comment by syntactic movement if necessary. There is a prosodic signaling of the boundary between Topic and Comment. Discourse structure is reflected in prosody, and we find higher boundary tones near the boundaries between Discourse Units. The results are dicussed in terms of a typology of spoken discourse.
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| 10. |
- Ambrazaitis, Gilbert, et al.
(författare)
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Acoustic features of multimodal prominences : Do visual beat gestures affect verbal pitch accent realization?
- 2017
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Ingår i: Proceedings of The 14th International Conference on Auditory-Visual Speech Processing (AVSP2017). - Stockholm : International Speech Communication Association. - 2308-975X.
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Konferensbidrag (refereegranskat)abstract
- The interplay of verbal and visual prominence cues has attracted recent attention, but previous findings are inconclusive as to whether and how the two modalities are integrated in the production and perception of prominence. In particular, we do not know whether the phonetic realization of pitch accents is influenced by co-speech beat gestures, and previous findings seem to generate different predictions. In this study, we investigate acoustic properties ofprominent words as a function of visual beat gestures in a corpus of read news from Swedish television. The corpus was annotated for head and eyebrow beats as well as sentence-level pitch accents. Four types of prominence cues occurredparticularly frequently in the corpus: (1) pitch accent only, (2) pitch accent plus head, (3) pitch accent plus head plus eyebrows, and (4) head only. The results show that (4) differs from (1-3) in terms of a smaller pitch excursion and shorter syllable duration. They also reveal significantly larger pitch excursions in (2) than in (1), suggesting that the realization of a pitch accent is to some extent influenced by the presence of visual prominence cues. Results are discussed in terms of the interaction between beat gestures and prosody with a potential functional difference between head and eyebrow beats.
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