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Even individuals that are otherwise healthy may experience health effects when air pollutant levels increase. How you can help: Residents can take simple steps to help reduce emissions that create smog. Motor vehicle emissions contribute to fine particle pollution. To lower levels of air pollution, the MPCA is urging r... |
to use alternate modes of transportation such as mass transit, car pools, biking and walking to work or shop. Other measures that will help reduce emissions on days when the Index reaches 100 and above include: 1. Limit driving - share a ride to work and postpone errands until the |
next day. 2. Don’t idle your vehicle for more than three minutes** 3. Refuel your vehicle after 6 p.m. 4. Leave your car at home and walk, bike, carpool or take public transportation whenever you can. 5. Postpone using other gasoline-powered engines, like garden and recreational equipment. 6. Postpone indoor |
and outdoor recreational fires. 7. To reduce the demand on power plants, turn off as many electric items as possible. 8. If you fall in the sensitive group category, arrange to work indoors for the day. **The City of Minneapolis approved limits on vehicle idling that aim to reduce air |
pollution in Minneapolis. The ordinance, which was passed in 2008, limits most vehicle idling to three minutes, except in traffic. Reducing vehicle idling in Minneapolis translates into less air pollution, protecting the public health and the environment and saving money in fuel. Vehicle motors release particulate matt... |
You're using more water than you think A water footprint is the total volume of freshwater used to produce the goods and services consumed. Here are some ways to lighten your water footprint. Fri, Aug 31 2012 at 11:28 AM Prodded by environmental consciousness — or penny pinching — you installed low-flow showerheads and... |
was sucking down an unnatural amount of water — nearly 7 billion gallons of water is used to irrigate home landscaping, according to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency — you ripped up the turf and replaced it with native plants. You’re still using a lot more water than you think. The drought of 2012 has generated... |
least 36 states are projecting water shortages between now and 2013, according to a survey by the federal General Accounting Office. Water supplies are finite, and fickle. Water, we all know, is essential to life. It is also essential to agriculture, industry, energy and the production of trendy T-shirts. We all use wa... |
measure of both direct and indirect water use is known as the water footprint. Your water footprint is the total volume of freshwater used to produce the goods and services consumed, according to the Water Footprint Network, an international nonprofit foundation based in the Netherlands. The Water Footprint Network has... |
of your footprint. You’ll be astonished to know how much water you’re using … once you’ve converted all those metric measurements into something you can understand. The average American home uses about 260 gallons of water per day, according to the EPA. That quarter-pound burger you just gobbled down? More than 600 gal... |
to your diet and buying habits can have a much greater impact on the size of your water footprint than taking 40-second showers. A pound of beef, for example, takes nearly 1,800 gallons of water to produce, with most of that going to irrigate the grains and grass used to feed the cattle. A pound of chicken demands just... |
want to save water, eat more goat. A pound of goat requires 127 gallons of water. We’ve been told to cut down on our use of paper to save the forests, but going paperless also saves water. It takes more than 1,300 gallons of water to produce a ream of copy paper. Even getting treated water to your house requires electr... |
run for five minutes, the EPA says, uses about as much energy as burning a 60-watt light bulb for 14 hours. Reducing your water footprint also reduces your carbon footprint, the amount of greenhouse gases your lifestyle contributes to the atmosphere and global warming. So, you could say that conserving water is more th... |
|About the presenter: Patricia M. Roberts, Ph.D., CCC-SLP, SLP(C), currently Associate Professor in speech language pathology at the University of Ottawa, in Canada's capital. She holds degrees from Queen's University |
(Kingston, Canada) and Florida State University and obtained her Ph.D. from the Universite de Montreal.In her first career as a clinical SLP, she worked with many bilingual clients and was |
privileged to have the late Marie Poulos as colleague and mentor. She is spending much of her 2nd career as a professor and researcher trying to understand the many unsolved |
puzzles of bilingual stuttering.| In this presentation, I will focus on four mysteries (things we do not yet know) about stuttering in bilingual children and adults and some of the |
myths associated with these gaps in our current knowledge. To make this essay easier to read, I won't say "bilingual or multilingual" each time the word "bilingual" comes up but |
in most places, what applies to bilinguals also applies to multilingual speakers - as far as we know - so far. Mystery 1: How many bilingual people are there? It |
is sometimes confusing to even try to discuss bilingualism because the word bilingual means different things to different people. For some people, bilinguals are people who speak two (or more |
- for multilinguals) languages equally and perfectly. People who speak two languages in their daily lives, and can do most things such as talking to people at work, reading the |
newspaper, understanding conversations with friends sometimes say "Oh yes, I can do all that. But I am not bilingual". Other people describe themselves as bilingual if they can communicate basic |
ideas, even if they make many errors in grammar and pronunciation and have a very small vocabulary in one language. In research, both these kinds of people are seen as |
having different levels of bilingualism. Ratings from 1 to 7 or 1 to 9 are often used to estimate where each person falls along the continuous line that goes from |
"I really ONLY know one language" to "I am one of those rare people who feels equally at home in two languages, no matter what the task or topic". For |
speaking, hearing, reading, and writing, most of us are at slightly different levels of ability, in each of the languages we know. For this essay - and the discussions I |
hope it will spark - let's think of bilingualism as being a continuum. We don't divide the world into tall people and short people. There is no rational cut-off to |
separate "tall" from "short". Same thing for "bilingual" and "unilingual". Everyone is at some point along the line that goes from strongly unilingual to very, very bilingual. With a broad |
definition of bilingualism, some authors estimate that there are at least as many people in the world who need to use two or more languages in their daily lives as |
there are people who can only function in one language (see, for example, Bhatia & Ritchie, 2006). We cannot make precise estimates unless we first define what levels of bilingualism |
are included or excluded from the count (and where to divide dialects from languages). Mystery 2: Is the incidence of stuttering the same in different languages? There are studies of |
the incidence of stuttering in different countries. Some authors use these studies to say things like "the incidence of stuttering is higher in Country X than in Country Y". But, |
if each study used different ways of sampling and different ways of determining who stutters, it is not valid to compare across studies. For example, from one study to the |
next, different methods were used in deciding who is stuttering: parent reports? Teachers in schools or day care centres? Parents remembering what the child was like 5 or 10 years |
ago? There are also differences in what counts as stuttering: only for a few months at age 3? Only people who stuttered for more than a year? Only those who |
reach a given level of severity? When people see these reports, they often speculate about why the incidence figures SEEM to be different (ignoring the differences in how the estimates |
were reached), often using their favourite aspect of stuttering as the explanation. Thus, we see explanations like: 1) "There is more stuttering in Country X than in Country Y because |
the grammar of the language spoken in Country X makes greater demands on memory...." The complexity of a language might be relevant, in some subtle ways including the location of |
moments of stuttering within a sentence. Concluding that the language itself influences the number of people who stutter requires a huge, dangerous leap of logic. There are other possible explanations |
that have to be ruled out before we can select one of them and reject the others. 2) "There is more stuttering in ___ because that culture views speaking well |
as very important and the pressure to speak well makes people stutter". This explanation now seems very unlikely, given what we know about the causes of stuttering. Now that we |
understand the importance of genetics and the inherited nature of stuttering for many people, it seems logical to ask whether, in some ethnic groups, more people carry the genes that |
make them vulnerable to stuttering than is the case in other ethnic groups. Perhaps the genetic pool, not cultural or linguistic features, has the strongest influence on the incidence of |
stuttering. Or, more likely, perhaps several causal factors contribute, interacting with each others in ways we do not yet understand. The only way we will ever know if the incidence |
of stuttering varies across languages or countries is to do international, collaborative studies where the same rigourous methods are used in everywhere THEN we can propose explanations for the similar |
or differing rates of stuttering in different languages and/or countries. Mystery 3: Does speaking more than one language increase the risk of a child stuttering? Many people think it does. |
For the general public, it seems logical. Sometimes people reason this way: 1) Speaking two languages is hard. 2) For children who stutter, speaking is hard. 3) Therefore, children who |
stutter (or those who are at risk of developing stuttering, because of a known family history) should not be expected to learn two languages. In the research on stuttering, the |
Demands and Capacities model of stuttering seems to apply here. But is it "hard" to learn two languages or is this a myth? If learning two languages as a young |
child is neurologically or cognitively strenuous, why is it that tens of millions of children do so successfully? Are their brains slightly stressed if they have to sort out two |
languages during the best language-learning years in childhood? Most of the research on bilingualism says "no". However, bilingualism is seen as something very positive by most people who do research |
on it, and most studies are designed to detect advantages and not problems associated with bilingualism. Also, this research is based on children with no speech or language problems. In |
children with a genetic vulnerability to stuttering, is learning two sets of words and grammar rules, and two sets of speech sounds harder than it is for children without this |
vulnerability? If learning two languages as a child is much harder than learning one, is it all potentially bilingual children or only a sub-group of those who might be at |
risk for stuttering? How should we interpret the recent and somewhat controversial study by Howell, Davis and Williams (2009) that found a higher incidence of stuttering in children if they |
began learning English (the language of their new country? before age 5? Were there other reasons for the finding that children who learned English before starting school were more likely |
to stutter than those who reportedly began learning English when they began school in London, England? (See Packman, et al, 2009 letter to the editor and Howell et al.'s reply.) |
There are four other, older studies that have led some people to conclude that bilingualism is too great a strain for children who stutter. In each case, these studies have |
serious flaws that make it impossible to draw any conclusions from them. Travis, Johnson and Shover (1937) asked people with no training in communication disorders (such as priests and steel |
company personnel directors) to talk to young children and classify them as stuttering or not stuttering based on one interview. Stern (1948) interviewed children if their parents reported that they |
stuttered. In both these studies, we have little information about the type of speech sample obtained, how long it was or how the disfluencies were counted. Applying current standards to |
these studies, they would not be accepted for publication. Dale (1977) reported that four Cuban-American teenagers reported feeling that being made to speak their weaker language made them more disfluent. |
Most bilinguals have a stronger and a weaker language. For these teens, their first language - Spanish - was their weaker language, since so much of their lives at school |
and with friends took place in English, their second language. This study "blames" bilingualism. But we have no information about real disfluency rates across different situations, and Dale does not |
distinguish between normal disfluencies and tense, stuttered disfluencies. There are studies showing that, in adults, the memory load of speaking in their weaker language may lead to a higher number |
of normal disfluencies (ums, uh's, revisions) in the weaker language than in the preferred language (e.g., Fehringer & Fry, 2007). Perhaps that is all that was happening in this study. |
Dale offers no data to support the notion that any of the four adolescents, in fact, stuttered. Karniol (1992) described how stuttering appeared to increase and decrease in a young |
boy whose environment included exposure to various levels of English, Hebrew, and Hungarian during an extremely tense time that included a war going on around him. With the information provided, |
we cannot tell what his real level of exposure to each language was (siblings, friends, parents etc.) and whether his parents' attempts to expose him to only Hebrew had any |
impact on what is described as a recovery from stuttering. The parents' diaries cover a period of approximately one year (age 2 to age 3) when the boy was in |
the age group where the chances of spontaneous recovery from stuttering are very, very high. There is (still) no clinical research to support the strategy of removing one language from |
a child's environment. Recent reviews of the literature do not find support for doing this routinely for all children (e.g., Bernstein Ratner, 2004; Roberts & Shenker, 2007; Van Borsel, Maes |
& Foulon, 2001). Some clinicians do this, however, if they work in a Demands and Capacities framework OR if the child also has delayed language and/or problems learning the speech |
sounds of his/her language. Until there is solid evidence on the impact of bilingualism in young children (i.e. a series of studies, done by different authors, ideally on different types |
of speakers and different pairs of languages), each clinician is left to try a particular strategy and assess its impact on a case by case basis. Mystery 4: Do some |
bilingual people stutter in only one language? As of 2010, I am still not aware of any documented case of this occurring. Like the Loch Ness monster, there are reported |
sightings from time to time, but no real proof that this is possible. In my years working with bilingual adults who stutter, I never assessed or treated a case of |
"unilingual stuttering". (Note: if you know of someone who stutters in only one of their two (or more) languages, I would be interested in exploring this with you. Just because |
there are no documented cases does not mean that it never occurs !) Nonetheless, given the roles of genetics and motor processes in stuttering, it is highly unlikely that someone |
would stutter in only one of their languages. Van Riper (1971) cites second- and third-hand reports of two people reported to stutter in only one of their two languages, but |
offers no data. Howell, Davis and Williams (2009) report that 2 of the 38 children in their bilingual group stuttered in only one language, but there is no supporting data |
about the rates of disfluencies, or the level of proficiency in each language and the children were not assessed using a range of speaking tasks. Roberts and Shenker (2007, Table |
1) outlined the steps that would be required to show that someone with a working knowledge of two languages stutters in only one language. Sometimes, when someone appears to stutter |
in only one language it could be for one or more of the following reasons: There are more and more studies about stuttering in different languages and some studies (and |
soon, a new book edited by Howell and Van Borsel) that focus specifically on stuttering in bilingual speakers. This is a very welcome change. Ten or fifteen years ago, there |
was little awareness that bilingual stuttering was a topic that needed exploring. Perhaps in a future ISAD forum, there will be articles about the answers to the questions raised in |
this one. Bernstein Ratner, N. (2004). Fluency and stuttering in bilingual children. In B.Goldstein (Ed.) Bilingual language development and disorders in Spanish-English speakers (pp. 287-308). Baltimore: Paul H. Brookes. Bhatia, |
T.K., & Ritchie, W.C. (2006). Introduction. In T.K. Bhatia & W.C. Ritchie (Eds.) The Handbook of Bilingualism (pp. 1-2), Oxford: Blackwell Publishing. Dale, P. (1977). Factors relating to disfluent speech |
in bilingual Cuban-American adolescents. Journal of Fluency Disorders, 2, 311-314. Fehringer, C., & Fry, C. (2007). Hesitation phenomena in the language production of bilingual speakers. Folia Linguistica, 41, 37-72. Howell, |
P., Davis, S. Williams,R. ( 2009). The effects of bilingualism on stuttering during late childhood. Archives of Disease in Childhood, 94, 42-46 Karniol, R. (1992). Stuttering out of bilingualism. First |
Language, 12, 255-283. Packman,A., Onslow, M., Reilly, S. et al. (2009). Stuttering and bilingualism. Archives of Disease in Childhood, 94, 248. (a letter to the editor re the Howell, Davis |
and Williams study) Roberts, P.M. & Shenker, R.C. (2007). Assessment and treatment of stuttering in bilingual speakers. In R.F. Curlee & E.G. Conture (Eds). Stuttering and related disorders of fluency |
3rd edition (pp. 183-209). New York: Thieme Medical Publishers. Stern, E. (1948). A preliminary study of bilingualism and stuttering in four Johannesburg schools. Journal of Logopedics, 1, 15-25. Travis, L.E., |
Johnson, W., & Shover, J. (1937). The relation of bilingualism to stuttering: a survey in the east Chicago, Indiana, Schools. Journal of Speech Disorders, 12, 185-189. Van Borsel, J. Maes, |
As America's independence was being declared in Philadelphia in l776, Padre Francisco Garces trekked through the Mojave area, leaving traces of his visit at Willow Springs, near Rosamond, and on Castle Butte, near California City. Garces was followed by famous pathfinders like Jedediah Smith, in 1827, John C. Fremont, ... |
Carson and Wyatt Earp. Many of these visitors, including a group from the ill-fated Manly-Jayhawker Party, used the Midland Trail, which roughly parallels Highway 14 north of town. Wagon trails to the Panamint mines were established by men like M.M. Belshaw and others who are remembered in many local street |
names. Mojave was established in 1876 when the Southern Pacific Railroad laid out the original plat for a town on its line between Los Angeles and San Francisco over nearby Tehachapi Pass. The first passenger train arrived August 8, 1876, which is celebrated as Mojave's birthday. Chinese coolies built a |
line from Mojave to Needles, California, on the Colorado River, reaching the Arizona border in 1883. That line was sold to the Santa Fe Railway in 1898, granting that railroad trackage rights over Tehachapi Pass. Today the Southern Pacific is now part of the Union Pacific Railroad, while Santa Fe |
is now part of the giant Burlington Northern Santa Fe. The UP's Lone Pine Branch, which runs north out of Mojave, was built by Southern Pacific in 1910 to aid in constructing the Los Angeles Aqueduct. The line connected with the Carson and Colorado Narrow Gauge Railroad at Owenyo, providing, |
for a time, a direct rail link between Los Angeles and the Southern Pacific's Overland Route over Donner Summit. The Lone Pine branch now carries coal to and potash products from the Trona Railway connection at Searles Station, between Randsburg and Ridgecrest. Another rail line, the Oak Creek Branch, runs |
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