Childhood maltreatment (CM) deeply impacts victims’ social competences. The aim of the present study was to investigate the effect that CM duration exerts on victims’ affective and social development testing three different impact trajectories (i.e., linear, logarithmic and quadratic) and its physiological (facial mimicry and autonomic regulation of the heart) and behavioral (percentage of anger recognition false alarm) markers. In a cross-sectional design, 73 Sierra Leonean youths (all males, 5–17 years old) were enrolled in the study. Of those, 36 were homeless all abandoned at the age of 4 and exposed to CM, whereas 37 were controls. Only physiological markers of affective development were influenced by CM duration. A quadratic relation between the autonomic regulation recorded at rest and CM duration was found, indicating initial physiological compensation followed by progressive autonomic withdrawal. Furthermore, CM duration was associated to a specific linear decrease of facial mimicry and vagal regulation in response to angry and sad facial expressions whereas no influences were detected for happy and fearful faces. The results of the present study provide insightful clues on victims’ natural patterns of resilience, deterioration, and chronicity, allowing a deeper comprehension of the developmental pathways through which early life adversities place youths on a track of lifelong health disparities.

In this article, we experiment with a form of dark pedagogy, a pedagogy that confronts haunting pasts∼presents∼futures in environmental education. We offer a conceptualisation of ghosts that enables us to creatively explore the duration of things and consider the relationality of time. We examine this through two situated contexts, engaging with entangled, yet differentiated, socioecological issues. The first issue involves the cascading impacts of climate change on the Australian Alps, including intensifying bushfires and threats to the iconic snow gum. The second issue involves the reordering of human/animal relations through processes of settler colonialism that continue to transform land into a commodity, with a significant cultural and material consequence of such colonial harm resulting in the extermination of free-ranging bison herds in the Canadian prairies. Both are unique issues, but both involve impacts of colonisation, loss and natural-cultural hegemony. The dark elements of these Place-specific stories involve noticing and confronting loss and related injustices. In our case, we diffract such confrontations by thinking through these challenging issues and working towards ethical ways of living and learning. In this article, we (re)member ghosts and ponder practices for fostering anticolonial response-abilities and affirmative human/Earth futures.

Prosodic realization of focus has been a widely investigated topic across languages and modalities. Simultaneous focus strategies are intriguing to see how they interact regarding their functional and temporal alignment. We explored the multichannel (manual and nonmanual) realization of focus in Turkish Sign Language. We elicited data with focus type, syntactic roles and movement type variables from 20 signers. The results revealed the focus is encoded via increased duration in manual signs, and nonmanuals do not necessarily accompany focused signs. With a multichanneled structure, sign languages use two available channels or opt for one to express focushood.

Copulas are helpful in studying joint distributions of two variables, in particular, whenconfounders are unobserved. However, most conventional copulas cannot model joint distributions where one variable does not increase or decrease in the other in a monotonic manner. For instance, suppose that two variables are linearly positively correlated for one type of unit and negatively for another type of unit. If the type is unobserved, we can observe only a mixture of both types. Seemingly, one variable tends to take either a high or low value (or a middle value) when the other variable is small (large), or vice versa. To address this issue, I consider an overlooked copula with trigonometric functions (Chesneau [2021, Applied Mathematics, 1(1), pp. 3–17]) thatI name the “normal mode copula.” I apply the copula to a dataset about government formation and duration to demonstrate that the normal mode copula has better performance than other conventional copulas.

In this paper, we investigate the prosodic realization of stress and focus in Udmurt (Uralic, Permic). According to the literature, Udmurt has fixed final stress, but also has several sets of morphosyntactic exceptions with initial stress. We report the results of two production studies. The first one targets nominals with final stress, and the second one investigates the stress properties of minimal pairs consisting of (i) indicative verbs (prs.3sg; final stress) and (ii) imperative verbs (imp.2sg/pl; initial stress). To control for the information-structural contexts, the test words are studied in contexts that elicit narrow focus either on the test word (‘F’ condition) or on another constituent (‘non-F’ condition). The results show that all four acoustic parameters surveyed in the paper – duration, intensity, fundamental frequency (f0), and first formant (F1) values – participate in stress marking in Udmurt. The results for focus marking vary by study and demonstrate that all cues except for intensity may be involved in focus marking. At the same time, we find wide interspeaker variation with respect to the acoustic cues marking stress and/or focus. Finally, we outline a preliminary Autosegmental-Metrical interpretation of our f0 results; a full account of Udmurt intonation awaits further research.

Attention to the welfare of animals during slaughter transport and lairage at the abattoir is important not only to consumers, but also to the meat production industry. Inadequate transport conditions can result in higher animal mortalities and meat quality problems after slaughter of such animals. In the present study the development of mortality rates both during and after the transport of slaughter pigs, and the incidence of pathological findings, was investigated. It could be shown that the percentage of animals which died during transport and in lairage clearly decreased between 1999 and 2003. This improvement was due mainly to the reduction of animal losses in the summer season where the highest losses over the investigated years occurred. Considering the duration of the transport it could be shown that not only very long (8 h), but also short journeys (1 h) can affect the welfare of animals with increased mortalities and pathological findings during the veterinary inspection at the slaughterhouse, particularly in the summer season. The results presented indicate that the tightening of European animal welfare legislation concerning loading, transport, unloading and lairage of slaughter pigs improved mortality rates and the incidence of pathological findings. Another reason could be a reduction of the percentage of stress susceptible pigs in the porcine population. However, until now the regulations on animal welfare during pig slaughter transport focused only on long-term journeys; the results presented show that short journeys can also affect the welfare of the animals.

This article examines the essence-existence distinction in Spinoza's theory of modes. This distinction is commonly made in two ways. First, essence and existence are separated by cause. Essences are understood to follow vertically from the essence of God, while existence follows horizontally from other modes. I present textual and systematic arguments against such a causal bifurcation. Second, essence and existence are distinguished by their temporal nature. Essence is eternal. Existence is durational. However, in several passages, Spinoza writes that eternity and duration constitute two ways of understanding nature rather than two really distinct aspects of nature.

This paper presents both distributional and acoustic phonetic evidence for iambic stress in Tetsǫ́t'ıné (ISO: CHP), a Dene (Athapaskan) language with contrastive vowel length and four contrastive tones. In our acoustic study, we find that the primary correlate of stress in Tetsǫ́t'ıné is duration, whereas intensity plays a secondary but statistically significant role. There was no statistically significant effect on F0 in our results. We discuss our results in relation to several proposals regarding the typology of stress systems. Based on the Functional Load Hypothesis (Berinstein 1979) and Dispersion Theory (Flemming 1995, 2001), we find that our results are to some extent unexpected. We suggest that our results are most consistent with the Iambic–Trochaic Law (Hayes 1995), which predicts that iambic stress systems prefer to use duration as their primary stress correlate.

Studies have challenged the assumption that different types of word-final s in English are homophonous. On the one hand, affixal (e.g. laps) and non-affixal s (e.g. lapse) differ in their duration; on the other hand, variation exists across several types of affixal s (e.g. between the plural (cars) and genitive plural (cars’)). This line of research was recently expanded in a study in which an interesting side effect appeared: the s was longer if followed by a past tense verb (e.g. The pods/odds eventually dropped), in comparison to a following present tense verb (e.g. The old screens/jeans obviously need replacing.). Put differently, the s became longer in the absence of overt morphosyntactic agreement, where it was mostly the sole plurality marker in the sentence. The objective of the present article is to examine whether this effect can be replicated in a more controlled setting. Having considered a large number of potential confounding variables in a reading experiment, we found an effect in the expected direction, one that is compatible with the literature on the impact that predictability has on duration. We interpret this finding against the background of the role of fine acoustic detail in language.