To determine the views of teachers, general practitioners (GPs) and paediatricians about whether there has been a recent change in the timing of the onset of puberty in children in the UK and in the timing of menarche in girls.Questionnaires were sent to a stratified random sample of each professional group.In relation to girls, almost 80% of teachers believe that the onset of puberty is occurring earlier and 73% feel that the menarche is occurring earlier. Those who had been working for longer than 10 years were more likely to say that the age of onset of puberty had decreased. GPs feel that both puberty and menarche are starting earlier, whereas paediatricians were evenly divided between those who thought puberty was starting earlier and those who thought that the timing had not changed. In boys, professionals generally believe that the timing of the onset of puberty has not altered significantly.Further study is required to determine whether puberty is really occurring earlier in girls.
Dialect variation is of considerable interest in linguistics and other social sciences. However, traditionally it has been studied using proxies (transcriptions) rather than acoustic recordings directly. We introduce novel statistical techniques to analyze geolocalized speech recordings and to explore the spatial variation of pronunciations continuously over the region of interest, as opposed to traditional isoglosses, which provide a discrete partition of the region. Data of this type require an explicit modeling of the variation in the mean and the covariance. Usual Euclidean metrics are not appropriate, and we therefore introduce the concept of d-covariance, which allows consistent estimation both in space and at individual locations. We then propose spatial smoothing for these objects which accounts for the possibly nonconvex geometry of the domain of interest. We apply the proposed method to data from the spoken part of the British National Corpus, deposited at the British Library, London, and we produce maps of the dialect variation over Great Britain. In addition, the methods allow for acoustic reconstruction across the domain of interest, allowing researchers to listen to the statistical analysis. Supplementary materials for this article are available online.
The YorkTalk laboratory phonology speech generation system (Coleman 1992a, 1992b; Local 1992) implements two radical hypotheses about phonology and phonetics: (i) There are no segments in phonological or phonetic representations; (ii) There is no need for rewriting rules in the expression of phonological relations, regularities and generalizations, or in the phonetic interpretation of phonological representations. Instead, phonological representations are hierarchically structured graphical objects, and phonological relations, regularities and generalizations, and phonetic interpretation, are represented and solved by a declarative system of simultaneous constraints. Previous descriptions of the YorkTalk system have concentrated in particular on three areas: (i) The phonological structure and phonetic interpretation of single syllables in English (Coleman 1992a); (ii) The representation and interpretation of assimilation in English (Local 1992); (iii) Declarative analyses of apparently procedural phenomena, such as epenthesis, metathesis, and elision (Coleman 1990, 1992b).
Adolescence is a complex stage of human development, for the years twelve to eighteen involve a wide range of major life changes. In fact it is unlikely that the individual undergoes greater changes at any other stage in the life-cycle apart from infancy. During the teenage years the young person experiences puberty, which has an impact on physical, physiological and psychological systems. Of all the theories of adolescence it is evident that the psychoanalytic and sociological approaches have had the widest impact. However the two are clearly different from each other. The psychoanalytic view takes as its starting point the upsurge of instincts which is said to occur as a result of puberty. Puberty, and the physical growth that accompanies it, is important to those involved in education for a number of reasons. Changes in intellectual functioning during the teenage years have implications for a wide range of behaviours and attitudes.
According to many works on English phonology, word-final alveolar consonants – and only alveolar consonants – assimilate to following word-initial consonants, e.g. ran quickly → ra [ŋ] quickly . Some phonologists explain the readiness of alveolar consonants to assimilate ( vs. the resistance of velar and labial articulations) by proposing that they have underspecified place of articulation (e.g. Avery & Rice 1989). Labial or dorsal nasals do not undergo assimilation because their place nodes are specified. There are reports that velar and labial consonants sometimes assimilate in English, but these are anecdotal observations, with no available audio and no statistics on their occurrence. We find evidence of assimilation of labial and velar nasals in the Audio British National Corpus, motivating a new, quantitative phonological framework: a statistical model of underspecification and variation which captures typical as well as less common but systematic patterns seen in non-coronal assimilation.
'%3e%3cpath fill='%23012169' d='M0 0v30h60V0z'/%3e%3cpath stroke='%23fff' stroke-width='6' d='m0 0 60 30m0-30L0 30'/%3e%3cpath stroke='%23C8102E' stroke-width='4' d='m0 0 60 30m0-30L0 30' clip-path='url(%23b)'/%3e%3cpath stroke='%23fff' stroke-width='10' d='M30 0v30M0 15h60'/%3e%3cpath stroke='%23C8102E' stroke-width='6' d='M30 0v30M0 15h60'/%3e%3c/g%3e%3c/svg%3e)
