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PubMed2004

Is syntax separate or shared between languages? Cross-linguistic syntactic priming in Spanish-English bilinguals.

Much research in bilingualism has addressed the question of the extent to which lexical information is shared between languages. The present study investigated whether syntactic information is shared by testing if syntactic priming occurs between languages. Spanish-English bilingual participants described cards to each other in a dialogue game. We found that a participant who had just heard a sentence in Spanish tended to use the same type of sentence when describing the next card in English. In particular, English passives were considerably more common following a Spanish passive than otherwise. We use the results to extend current models of the representation of grammatical information to bilinguals.

Adult↗
PubMed2005

Transient fixation on a non-native language associated with anaesthesia.

We report a patient with the unusual language disturbance of transient fixation on a non-native language after otherwise uneventful general anaesthesia. The patient was unable to speak his native language for a period of 5-10 min, despite a desire to do so. He fully and spontaneously recovered from the episode. The phenomenon raises a number of interesting questions about the nature of human language, anaesthesia and consciousness. We discuss our patient in the context of some of these questions and present a review of three similar patients reported in the anaesthetic literature.

Anesthesia, General↗
PubMed2006

Communicative sensitivity in the bilingual healthcare setting: a qualitative study of language awareness.

AIM: This paper reports on the second phase of a national study in Wales. The research aimed to assess the level of Welsh language awareness amongst healthcare professionals across Wales, and to identify the factors that enhance language choice within service delivery. BACKGROUND: The literature suggests that language sensitive healthcare practice is central to ensuring high quality care. However, it is evident that language barriers continue to compromise the quality of care within nursing and other health services. One issue that has received little attention is the level of language awareness that healthcare professionals currently demonstrate. Furthermore the factors that influence language choice for bilingual/multilingual speakers are not well explored in the literature. METHODS: The study involved semi-structured interviews with a range of healthcare professionals in acute and community settings across Wales. Using a systematic sampling matrix, a purposeful sample of 83 professionals was selected to participate. Twenty-seven of the respondents were nurses, health visitors and midwives. The interviews focussed on the factors that facilitate or impede language sensitive healthcare practice. All interviews were audiotaped and, using a framework analysis approach, conceptual codes were developed and defined and categories and sub-categories were constructed to create thematic charts. FINDINGS: Three main themes were identified: care enhancement, which focussed on the process and outcome of offering language choice to bilingual patients; organizational issues, which reflected issues relating to the infrastructure of service provision; and training implications, which focused on Welsh language learning in health care. CONCLUSIONS: Complex dynamics of language use are in operation within bilingual healthcare settings and organizational as well as individual factors are important in facilitating appropriate language use. Many of the issues highlighted are not peculiar to the Welsh context, but apply to healthcare settings across the world, where other minority languages are in use.

Attitude of Health Personnel↗
PubMed2006

Nurses, nannies and caring work: importation, visibility and marketability.

This paper examines nurses' international migration within the broader context of female migration, particularly against more studied groups of women who have migrated for employment in care-giving roles. We analyze the similarities and differences between skilled professional female migrants (nurses) and domestic workers (nannies and in-home caretakers) and how societal expectations, meanings, and values of care and 'women's work', together with myriad social, cultural, economic and political processes, construct the female migrant care-giver experience. We argue that, as the recruitment of foreign workers gains visibility, strategies are introduced to better prepare female migrant care-givers for the marketplace. Language, specifically command of English and accent modification, is highlighted as one means to assimilate migrant care-givers to host communities.

Acculturation↗
PubMed2006

Development and validation of the Human Activity Profile into Chinese language: lessons in determining equivalence.

The Human Activity Profile (HAP), and associated Dyspnea Scale, is a self-report instrument for assessing levels of human activity. Although it has been used in studies examining the levels of activity in people, it is limited to people who are only able to understand English. However, many countries are multicultural with significant numbers of people whose native language is not English. This study sought to demonstrate the equivalence between the Chinese and English versions of the HAP and Dyspnea scales. Thirty-five bilingual university students completed both the Chinese and English versions of each questionnaire. There was 89% and 85% agreement between items across the HAP and Dyspnea Scale questionnaires, respectively. Although the psychometric evaluations suggested there was equivalence between the Chinese and English versions of both the HAP and Dyspnea Scale, lessons have been learnt regarding the different written forms of Chinese.

Activities of Daily Living↗
PubMed2006

Diabetes service provision: a qualitative study of the experiences and views of Pakistani and Indian patients with Type 2 diabetes.

AIMS: To explore Pakistani and Indian patients' experiences of, and views about, diabetes services in order to inform the development of culturally sensitive services. DESIGN: Qualitative, interview study involving 23 Pakistani and nine Indian patients with Type 2 diabetes recruited from general practices and the local community in Edinburgh, Scotland. Data collection and analysis occurred concurrently and recruitment continued until no new themes emerged from the interviews. RESULTS: Respondents expressed gratitude for the availability of free diabetes services in Britain, as they were used to having to pay to access health care on the Indian subcontinent. Most looked to services for the prompt detection and treatment of complications, rather than the provision of advice about managing their condition. As respondents attached importance to receiving physical examinations, they could be disappointed when these were not offered by health-care professionals. They disliked relying on interpreters and identified a need for bilingual professionals with whom they could discuss their diabetes care directly. CONCLUSIONS: Gratitude for free services in Britain may instil a sense of indebtedness which makes it difficult for Pakistanis and Indians to be critical of their diabetes care. Health-care professionals may need to describe their roles carefully, and explain how different diabetes services fit together, to avoid Pakistani and Indian patients perceiving treatment as unsatisfactory. Whilst linkworker schemes may meet patients' need to receive culturally sensitive information in their first language, work is needed to assess their effectiveness and sustainability.

Adult↗
PubMed2004

The language-specific nature of grammatical development: evidence from bilingual language learners.

The fact that early lexical and grammatical acquisition are strongly correlated has been cited as evidence against the view that the language faculty is composed of dissociable and autonomous modules (Bates & Goodman, 1997). However, previous studies have not yet eliminated the possibility that lexical-grammar associations may be attributable to language-general individual differences (e.g. children who are good at learning words are good at learning grammar). Parent report assessments of toddlers who are simultaneously learning English and Spanish (n = 113) allow an examination of the specificity of lexical-grammar relationships while holding child factors constant. Within-language vocabulary-grammar associations were stronger than cross-language relationships, even after controlling for age, proportion of language exposure, general language skill and reporter bias. Similar patterns were found based on naturalistic language samples (n = 22), ruling out a methodological artifact. These results are consistent with the view that grammar learning is specifically tied to lexical progress in a given language and provide further support for strong lexical-grammatical continuity early in acquisition.

Child Language↗
PubMed2004

Attention and inhibition in bilingual children: evidence from the dimensional change card sort task.

In a previous study, a bilingual advantage for preschool children in solving the dimensional change card sort task was attributed to superiority in inhibition of attention (Bialystok, 1999). However, the task includes difficult representational demands to encode and interpret the task stimuli, and bilinguals may also have profited from superior representational abilities. This possibility is examined in three studies. In Study 1, bilinguals outperformed monolinguals on versions of the problem containing moderate representational demands but not on a more demanding condition. Studies 2 and 3 demonstrated that bilingual children were more skilled than monolinguals when the target dimensions were perceptual features of the stimulus and that the two groups were equivalent when the target dimensions were semantic features. The conclusions are that bilinguals have better inhibitory control for ignoring perceptual information than monolinguals do but are not more skilled in representation, confirming the results of the original study. The results also identify the ability to ignore an obsolete display feature as the critical difficulty in solving this task.

Attention↗
PubMed2005

Ambiguous benefits: the effect of bilingualism on reversing ambiguous figures.

Two studies are reported in which monolingual and bilingual children, approximately 6 years old, attempted to identify the alternative image in a reversible figure. In both studies, bilingual children were more successful than monolinguals in seeing the other meaning in the images. In the first study, there was no relation between the ability to reverse the interpretation and performance on the children's embedded figures task, a task that superficially appeared to involve similar processes. The second study replicated this finding but showed that performance was strongly related to success in the post-switch phase of the dimensional change card sort task. In both cases, the meaning of an image must be reassigned, and bilinguals were better in both these tasks.

Analysis of Variance↗
PubMed2006

Two languages, one developing brain: event-related potentials to words in bilingual toddlers.

Infant bilingualism offers a unique opportunity to study the relative effects of language experience and maturation on brain development, with each child serving as his or her own control. Event-related potentials (ERPs) to words were examined in 19- to 22-month-old English-Spanish bilingual toddlers. The children's dominant vs. nondominant languages elicited different patterns of neural activity in the lateral asymmetry of an early positive component (P100), and the latencies and distributions of ERP differences to known vs. unknown words from 200-400 and 400-600 ms. ERP effects also differed for 'high' and 'low' vocabulary groups based on total conceptual vocabulary scores. The results indicate that the organization of language-relevant brain activity is linked to experience with language rather than brain maturation.

Acoustic Stimulation↗
PubMed2006

Demographic, migration status, and work-related changes in Asian female sex workers surveyed in Sydney, 1993 and 2003.

OBJECTIVE: To compare demography, sexual health awareness, migration and workplace conditions of Asian female sex workers in Sydney in 1993 and 2003. METHOD: A Chinese interpreter and a Thai-speaking health education officer (HEO) were used to administer a questionnaire survey to Thai- and Chinese-speaking sex workers attending sexual health clinics in 1993. A follow-up survey, which included some women contacted at work as well as clinic attenders, was administered by Thai- and Chinese-speaking HEOs in 2003. RESULTS: Ninety-one female sex workers were surveyed in 1993 and 165 in 2003. Median age increased (26 years vs. 33 years, p=0.000), as did numbers of Chinese- versus Thai-speakers (1993, 25.3% Chinese vs. 2003, 58.2% Chinese, p=0.000). In 2003, the women reported more years of schooling and better English skills. Fewer reported previous sex work (48.4% vs. 17.6%, p=0.000). Numbers currently or ever on a contract decreased sharply (27.5% vs. 9.1%, p=0.000) and the majority were apparently working legally. Condom use at work for vaginal (51.6% vs. 84.8%) and oral sex (39.6% vs. 66.1%) increased significantly (p=0.001). Chinese-speaking sex workers were less informed about HIV transmission and safer sex practices than were Thai sex workers. Drug and alcohol use was low. CONCLUSIONS AND IMPLICATIONS: Positive changes have occurred in the conditions of Asian female sex workers surveyed over 10 years in Sydney. Maintaining current levels of health service delivery will ensure continued improvements in health and workplace conditions and address inequalities between language groups.

Adolescent↗
PubMedDate not supplied

Executive processes in appearance-reality tasks: the role of inhibition of attention and symbolic representation.

Two studies addressed the role of representation ability and control of attention on solutions to an appearance-reality task based on two types of objects, real and representational. In Study 1, 67 preschool children (3-, 4-, and 5-year-olds) solved appearance-reality problems and executive processing tasks. There was an interaction between object type (real vs. representational) and question type (appearance vs. reality) on problem difficulty. In addition, representational ability predicted performance on appearance questions and inhibitory control predicted performance on reality questions. In Study 2, 95 children (4- and 5-year-olds) who were monolingual or bilingual solved similar problems. On appearance questions, groups performed equivalently but on reality questions, bilinguals performed better (once language proficiency had been controlled). The difference is attributed to the advanced inhibitory control that comes with bilingualism.

Attention↗
PubMedDate not supplied

Ties between the lexicon and grammar: cross-sectional and longitudinal studies of bilingual toddlers.

Studies using the English and Spanish MacArthur Communicative Development Inventories demonstrated that the grammatical abilities of 20-30-month-old bilingual children were related more strongly to same-language vocabulary development than to broader lexical-conceptual development or maturation. First, proportions of different word types in each language varied with same-language vocabulary size. Second, individual changes in predicate and closed class word proportion scores were linked to growth in same-language vocabulary but not to total conceptual vocabulary. Third, increases in English utterance length and English and Spanish sentence complexity were related to growth in same-language vocabulary but not to growth in conceptual vocabulary. Increases in Spanish utterance length were linked to growth in both Spanish vocabulary and conceptual vocabulary. Possible mechanisms underlying these patterns are considered.

Aptitude↗
PubMed2006

Health resources and health strategies among older Swedish-speaking Finns--a hermeneutic study.

Research has shown that the Swedish-speaking Finns have better health than the Finnish-speaking majority. The aim of this paper was to explore the health resources and health strategies among home-dwelling Swedish-speaking Finns aged 75 or older. The objective was to develop health-promotive nursing care for this group. Data was collected through recorded semistructured conversations with 22 older persons. The conversations were transcribed and interpreted through a hermeneutic approach. The material was read through several times and compiled into 22 narratives with relevant quotations. The narratives were subsequently summarised into one core narrative under each major category, to present the health resources and health strategies. Six categories were found: the Positive, the Social, the Active, the Adaptable, the Stubborn and the Passive. Within the Positive category, morale played an important role as a health resource and health strategy. Within the Social category, social activities were regarded as both health resources and health strategies, whereas their absence was a health obstacle. Within the Active category, a wide range of physical activities played an important role. Within the Adaptable category, contentment was a health resource. Within the Stubborn category, stubbornness itself was a health resource, whereas strong belief was a health strategy. Within the Passive category, although health obstacles permeated the life context, contentment and caution were seen as health resources. The vision of the future varied from the confidence found in the Positive category to the uncertainty prevalent in the Passive category. The main health resources and strategies used by the elderly Swedish-speaking Finns were related to social and other activities as well as to personality. Transforming health obstacles into resources could be an important health-promotive nursing strategy.

Adaptation, Psychological↗
PubMed2004

The language divide. The importance of training in the use of interpreters for outpatient practice.

PURPOSE: Provision of interpreter services for non-English-speaking patients is a federal requirement. We surveyed clinicians to describe their experience using interpreters. SUBJECTS AND METHODS: In this cross-sectional study we surveyed clinicians in three academic outpatient settings in San Francisco (N = 194) regarding their most recent patient encounter which involved an interpreter. Questions about the visit included type of interpreter, satisfaction with content of clinical encounter, potential problems, and frequency of need. Previous training in interpreter use, languages spoken, and demographics were also asked. Questionnaires were self-administered in approximately 10 minutes. RESULTS: Of 194 questionnaires mailed, 158 were completed (81% response rate) and 67% were from resident physicians. Most respondents (78%) were very satisfied or satisfied with the medical care they provided, 85% felt satisfied with their ability to diagnose a disease and treat a disease, but only 45% were satisfied with their ability to empower the patient with knowledge about their disease, treatment, or medication. Even though 71% felt they were able to make a personal connection with their patient, only 33% felt they had learned about another culture as a result of the encounter. Clinicians reported difficulties eliciting exact symptoms (70%), explaining treatments (44%), and eliciting treatment preferences (51%). Clinicians perceived that lack of knowledge of a patient's culture hindered their ability to provide quality medical care and only 18% felt they were unable to establish trust or rapport. Previous training in interpreter use was associated with increased use of professional interpreters (odds ratio [OR], 3.2; 95% confidence interval [CI], 1.4 to 7.5) and increased satisfaction with medical care provided (OR, 2.6; 95% CI, 1.1 to 6.6). CONCLUSIONS: Clinicians reported communication difficulties affecting their ability to understand symptoms and treat disease, as well as their ability to empower patients regarding their healthcare. Training in the use of interpreters may improve communication and clinical care, and thus health outcomes.

Adult↗