Patient consent: None declared. Provenance and peer review: Not commissioned; externally peer reviewed. Data sharing statement: No additional data available. National Center for Biotechnology Information , U. BMJ Open. Published online Dec Author information Article notes Copyright and License information Disclaimer. Correspondence to Dr Waquas Waheed; ku. No commercial re-use. See rights and permissions. Published by BMJ. This article has been cited by other articles in PMC.
Associated Data Supplementary Materials Supplementary file 1. Method We aimed to recruit 25 participants fluent in speaking and writing Urdu, over the age of 60 years, able to give informed consent and who did not have a history of cognitive impairment.
Conclusion Our cognitive interviews determined the ACE-III Urdu was acceptable, especially with regards to cultural context, but further changes were made to ensure understanding. Keywords: cross cultural, cultural validation, ethnic minority, non english, psychometrics, cognitive assessment. Strengths and limitations of this study. Memory — recall Ask for the three words from 2.
Attention — registration. Language —comprehension Place a pencil and paper in front. Language —repetition Say the words caterpillar, eccentricity, unintelligible and statistician and ask them to repeat.
Language —naming Show 12 images and ask them to name each. Language —reading Ask them to read the words sew, pint, soot, dough and height. Visuospatial abilities — infinity diagram Ask them to copy the following: 15b. Visuospatial abilities — wire cube Ask them to copy the following: 15c.
Visuospatial abilities — clock Ask them to draw a clock face with numbers and the hands at ten past five. Visuospatial abilities Ask them to count the number of dots without pointing. Memory — recall Ask for the three words from 6. Memory — anterograde. Memory — recognition For each word of the name and address that could not be recalled, give the options listed and ask to identify which word it was.
Open in a separate window. Materials Participants would be provided with consent forms and demographics sheets, available in Urdu and English. Supplementary file 1 bmjopensupp Patient and public involvement There would be no patient or public involvement. Table 2 Participant characteristics.
Showing it would allow participants to know which letter we were referring to. The address, though a UK address, was deemed too difficult to pronounce for the average Urdu-speaking person. Participants would struggle to repeat the words, and this affected their ability to memorise them.
An address that used elements better known to the British Urdu-speaking elderly was developed. The image for a book was changed. The image for the suitcase was changed. The image for the bear was changed. The questions were rephrased slightly for clarification. The letters were considered easily recognisable by participants at the current level of erasure so more was required. Refer to Item 6: Memory. Item 1: attention This item was considered straightforward, asking for simple information such as the date or the building the individual is in.
Item 5a: fluency Participants felt the common belief was that Urdu speakers, if fluent, should complete this item successfully. Item 5b: fluency This item was considered straightforward because we are surrounded by various animals. Item 6: memory; item memory; item memory There were contrasting opinions regarding elements of these items, all of which required repeating, remembering or recognising a name and UK address.
Participants put forward suggestions for more culturally appropriate addresses. Item 8: language This item was deemed culturally appropriate with no need for adaptation.
Item 9: language Most participants focused on the topic of holidays and wrote about Pakistan, where they would spend vacations. Item language Though all participants completed the task there were differing opinions regarding whether these words were familiar enough to be generalised to the British Urdu-speaking population or if they were complex and only suitable for a specific group of Urdu speakers.
Some knew these words from childhood. Item language The phrases were regarded as easy to repeat as they were commonly known. P3: They are everyday phrases. Every person uses them. P5: This is a common phrase, a common phrase. Item language There was a consensus that British Urdu speakers should be able to answer the questions without issue. Item language The words were considered to be well known words that Urdu speakers would be familiar with. P2: Yes. Definitely, will read in the correct way.
Item 15a: visuospatial abilities; item 15b: visuospatial abilities Participants understood tasks, and it was the attempt at drawing the image they found difficult. Item visuospatial abilities Majority of participants found the blacked out letters easily recognisable to themselves and for average Urdu speakers.
Supplementary Material Reviewer comments: Click here to view. Author's manuscript: Click here to view. Footnotes Contributors: All authors made substantial contributions to the conception or design of the work, or the acquisition, analysis or interpretation of data. References 1. The global impact of dementia: an analysis of prevalence, incidence, cost and trends.
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Mallinson S. Cognitive interviewing survey validation: A Note. Lancaster University —3. Research synthesis: the practice of cognitive interviewing. Public Opinion Quarterly ; 71 — Cognitive interviewing techniques: In the lab and in the field Answering questions: methodology for determinig cognitive and communicative processes in survey research. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, Liamputtong P, Ezzy D. Qualitative research methods. Melbourne: Oxford University Press, They spread to neighbouring continents, taking their languages with them.
There were also those who migrated out of Africa and whose descendants later returned. These include the ancestors of the so-called Ethiosemitic languages in Eritrea and Ethiopia, some 3, years ago. The most recent and dramatic returns came with Arabo-Islamic invasions beginning in CE, European colonialism after CE , and the post-colonial work migrations of the 20th and 21st centuries.
One result of all this movement is the geographic spread and continuous development of human languages — most of them unwritten. It is difficult to study and reconstruct them: unlike with excavated finds in palaeoanthropology, human language does not leave fossils behind unless in writing. Very few living or extinct languages left behind written texts. Those that did include the Ancient Egyptian hieroglyphics dating back about 5, years, and languages ancestral to modern Semitic which left written records that also cover several millennia, the oldest from Akkadian in modern day Iraq in cuneiform script.
For more than 50 years, I have devoted considerable research efforts to the study of the so-called Chadic languages. These are spoken west, south and east of Lake Chad hence their name in Central Africa. What researchers most want to know is how these languages have developed as a family from a common ancient proto-language; they also want to unpack how languages relate to other and better known language families — Ancient Egyptian, Berber Amazigh , Cushitic, Semitic, and possibly Omotic — with whom they are assumed to form a common language phylum, Afroasiatic.
The results of my research will be presented in two books. The first volume focuses on the origin of vowels in these languages. The second and final volume will focus on sound changes affecting consonants in these languages. It is set to be published in I used well established linguistic techniques to reconstruct one of the ancestral languages likely spoken a few thousand years ago in the region around Lake Chad in Central Africa and that was ancestral to about 80 present-day languages in the area.
We made revisions to BLP questionnaires designed for adult bilingual speakers, to be more suitable to middle school aged bilinguals. The participants were further classified as Urdu-dominant or Cantonese-dominant based on their self-reporting of the BLP questionnaires, which generated Urdu and Cantonese particular scores for the four modules. And a global language dominance scores LDSs were generated for each bilingual speaker, with the Urdu score subtracted from the Cantonese score.
According to the four modules of the BLP, the participants gave self-rating on a point scale for language history, a point scale for language use, and a 6-point scale for the other two modules. The coefficients were multiplied for each module score in order to weigh the four dimensions equally.
This gave the sum of the four revised module scores for L1 and L2 in separation. The LDS were then calculated by subtracting the total scores of L1 from L2 for each bilingual speaker. Eighteen Urdu-dominants 11 female and 7 male and 18 Cantonese-dominants 10 female and 8 male were selected as participants in the experiment.
The 36 bilingual participants emigrated to Hong Kong between the ages of one and ten, and commenced their Cantonese learning between the ages of two and thirteen. Also, the Cantonese-dominant speakers used Cantonese far more frequently than the Urdu-dominants did on most occasions in class, and after class, etc.
Table 1. Hence, it is interesting to examine how the non-native learners with different overall LDSs showed variances in their ABX performances. Figure 1 illustrates the distribution of LDSs of the bilingual speakers. Figure 1. The distribution of language dominance scores according to the Bilingual Language Profile. Revised from the experimental materials in Zou et al.
Two female and one male Cantonese native speakers recorded the disyllables with CoolEdit 2. The speakers were shuffled in each ABX combination instead of it being produced by the same speaker, in order to increase phonetic variability and listeners' memory load Zou et al.
Roman script with Cantonese tone marks of the nonce words was provided to the speakers, who had been trained in the pronunciation and the Cantonese scripts of the nonce words. The native speakers were asked to produce the disyllabic pairs with an interval of around one second in a natural speaking speed and the files were sampled at 44, Hz. The pitch contours, which were averaged across different disyllables for each speaker were depicted in Figure 2.
The stimuli showed phonetic variability with the pitch range of the three speakers were distinct from each other female 1: — Hz; female 2: — Hz; male: 63— Hz. The Tone 2 in the first syllable raised from a low point of the pitch scale to a much higher pitch for each native speaker female 1: — Hz; female 2: — Hz; male: 88— Hz. The Tone 4 in the first syllable fell from a low pitch to a lower one, exhibiting a falling contour for each speaker female 1: — Hz; female 2: — Hz; male: 93—63 Hz.
The Tone 1 in the second syllable showed stable high pitch contours when it was preceded by Tone 2 female 1: — Hz; female 2: — Hz; male: — Hz , or Tone 4 female 1: — Hz; female 2: — Hz; male: — Hz.
The pitch contours obtained in the tokens correspond with the description of Cantonese tones in Hao , with tone transcription of 25, 21 and 55 for Tone 2, Tone 4, and Tone 1, respectively.
The tone transcription suggested by Chao is a method to mark tone pitch values with 1 stands for the lowest pitch and 5 for the highest. Figure 2. The pitch contours of disyllabic non-words produced by one male native speaker and two female native speakers in Cantonese. Two ABX tests were conducted with segment-and-tone and segment-or-tone conditions see Zou et al. In the segment-and-tone task, participants were asked to decide whether target X matched either A or B.
In the segment-or-tone task, target X matched either the segmental or tonal dimension with A or B. The arrangement of stimuli is illustrated in Table 2 , which shows only one AB order. The participants took part separately in the experiment in a quiet classroom in a local secondary school, with the Praat experiment script run in a computer Lenovo ThinkCentre desktop, i5 core, USB interface: 3. Before the start of the experiment, instructions were given by Cantonese native speakers.
In each task there was a ms interval between standard A and standard B, and X appeared after a ms pause Braun and Johnson, The inter-stimuli interval between the two tasks was 2, ms, and if the subject failed to respond within the interval, the stimulus would be shown again later on, to ensure no missing data in the experiment. The subjects had been given a 4-min familiarization task in the segment-and-tone condition before the formal experiment began.
The whole experiment was conducted within 30 min for each participant. The whole experiment was conducted for around 20 min for each participant. Reaction time and response rates were collected throughout the experiment.
In the statistical analysis, raw data of response rate and reaction time were natural-logarithmically transformed to achieve better normality. On the base of sample size and the distribution of data, the linear mixed-effect model LMM was performed in R using the lme4 package Bates et al. According to Baayen et al. All p -values were corrected with Bonferroni adjustment for multi-comparisons.
However, the last three factors were removed from the models for both response rate and reaction time due to their insignificance. Once these factors were removed, response rate or reaction time served as the dependent variables in the LMM model, incorporating fixed effects of subject group and experimental task, as well as their interaction.
For random effects, by-subject 56 levels and by-item 16 levels intercepts were included. In order to gain more insight into the individual variation of the data, the relationship between LDS and the task results response rates and reaction time was examined in a linear regression model, with LDS as an independent variable, and response rate or reaction time as a dependent field.
The statistical results of LMM are presented in Table 3. The LMM models showed efficiency with marginal R 2 of 0. It also reported the random effect of the by-subject intercept with a variance of For reaction time, the by-subject intercept showed a random effect with a variance of 0. In terms of response rates see in Table 3 , according to LMM, there was a significant main effect in the subject group and in the task type.
Moreover, LMM revealed an interaction between the subject group and task type, suggesting that native and non-native listeners performed differently across two ABX tasks.
In terms of reaction time, LMM reported a significant main effect in the subject group and in the task type. Furthermore, the subject group significantly interacted with the task type in LMM. To answer the first research question, we analyze the data of the segment-and-tone and report the results in section The Task of Segment-and-Tone.
Section The Task of Segment-or-Tone gives the results of the segment-or-tone and a comparison with that of segment-and-tone to answer the second research question. The mean percentage of response rates and reaction times for the native and bilingual groups are exhibited in Figure 3. However, the differences between the Cantonese native group and the Cantonese-dominant group were not statistically significant.
This suggests that generally, the Cantonese-dominant bilinguals were able to accurately identify Cantonese stimuli as quickly as the Cantonese native speakers did in the segment-and-tone condition. In other words, when both segmental and tonal information were provided in the task, the Cantonese-dominant bilingual speakers could process tones as phonologically as native speakers did. Figure 3. The minor y-axis shows the response time and the main y-axis illustrates the response rate.
This indicated that Cantonese proficiency and experience facilitated the Cantonese-dominant bilinguals to perceive L2 stimuli more phonologically. Generally, in the task of segment-and-tone, the speakers, whose maternal or dominant language is Cantonese, responded much more quickly and accurately than those who were dominant in Urdu. The mean percentage of response rates and reaction times for the native and bilingual groups are exhibited in Figure 4.
According to the post-hoc Tukey test, only The Cantonese-dominant bilinguals paid more attention to the segmental dimension, while the native speakers were more sensitive to the tonal information. Figure 4. Around Compared to the Cantonese-dominant bilinguals, the Urdu-dominant participants were evidently more attentive to the segmental information.
Thus, the language dominance influenced how the bilinguals distributed their attentional resources. The slow response for the Cantonese-dominants revealed a larger cognitive effort in making a decision on the stimuli. Urdu was their maternal language, and Cantonese was gradually becoming a strong language for them. On one hand, they did not feel able to ignore the attentional strategy attentive to segments in their L1, and on the other hand, they were not as immediately attentive to the tones as the Cantonese native speakers were.
Hence, they needed much more time to resist their L1 strategy and produce a L2 attentional strategy. No statistical difference was reported in reaction time between the Urdu-dominant bilinguals and the native speakers, suggesting that the Urdu-dominants were not necessarily subject to interference by the weaker language. Both groups responded immediately according to their native patterns of attention distribution. In the task of segment-or-tone, Cantonese native speakers distributed their attention mainly along tonal dimensions, while the bilinguals classified the stimuli mostly along segmental dimensions.
In the segment-and-tone task, both accurate tonal and segmental information were provided, resulting in a comparatively low cognitive demand for the listeners. As predicted, most of the Cantonese native speakers as well as the bilinguals accurately identified the Cantonese stimuli, with accuracy ranging from In terms of the mean accuracy and reaction time, no statistical difference was detected between the Cantonese-dominant bilinguals and the Cantonese native speakers.
In contrast, when one of the tonal and segmental dimensions was mismatched in the stimuli, as was the case in the task of segment-or-tone, all the subject groups, including the Cantonese native speakers, showed a much longer reaction time in making a decision than in the task of segment-and-tone.
The more cognitively demanding task cost the listeners more time to process the tonal or segmental mismatch in the stimuli. These results demonstrate that both native and bilingual speakers find it easy to make quick and accurate responses to the stimuli when there is no mismatch in the tonal or segmental dimension.
This finding is in line with prior research on bilingualism Antoniou et al. Native and non-native speakers might perform comparably in a task with a low cognitive requirement, while the perceptual difference might be revealed by a comparatively high cognitively demanding task. For example, Amengual showed that Spanish-dominants and Catalan-dominants whose L1 is Spanish, could both categorically perceive the Catalan vowels in an categorical perceptual task where the speech sounds in the continuum varied along acoustic aspects of syllable duration and vowel formants.
The reason is that the categorical perceptual task mainly examined the general auditory ability of listeners. However, when Amengual's bilinguals conducted a lexicon decision task, and had to attend to their long-memory of the lexicon system, a perceptual difficulty emerged for the early bilinguals. In addition, our research supports the findings of Strange , indicating that when an easy perception task is conducted, it is possible for bilinguals to obtain a performance comparable with that of native speakers, because they have enough time and attentional resources to extract sufficient information to make an accurate decision.
With regard to the question as to how bilinguals distribute attention to tones and segments, the native and bilingual speakers, as discussed above, were able to rapidly make accurate responses in the task of segment-and-tone, since both tonal and segmental information were matched in the stimuli. As the task of segment-or-tone forced the listeners to respond along only one accurate phonetic dimension, the comparison between the results of the two tasks allows us to examine how the listeners distribute their attention toward tonal and segmental dimensions.
The results showed that on average around In Cantonese, tones convey lexical meanings in a syllable, so in order to extract the meanings carried by tones, Cantonese speakers are required to pay much of their attention to the tonal aspect. This result coincides with the findings in Braun and Johnson and Zou et al. This illustrates that compared with the tonal native speakers, the bilingual speakers paid more attention to the segments than to the tones, which was similar to the performance of the Mandarin learners in Zou et al.
Although the current study obtains the similar results with that of Zou et al. The observations from the current study can make contribution to the field of second language acquisition and Chinese language teaching and learning. In the task of segment-and-tone, no statistical difference was detected between the performance of the Cantonese-dominants and that of the Cantonese natives, while the Urdu-dominant bilinguals achieved significantly lower accuracy and required far more reaction time to make responses compared with the other two subject groups.
This is because L2-dominant bilinguals are usually more proficient and experienced in their L2 language use, age of learning, and LOR Flege and Fletcher, ; Piske et al. In the task of segment-or-tone, This indicates that the Urdu-dominants had far more interference from their L1 attentional strategy, depending more on segments than the Cantonese-dominants did in processing Cantonese stimuli. In comparison, Zou et al. Therefore, the result of the Urdu-dominants in our study is closer to that of the advanced learners in Zou et al.
Furthermore, the results of the Cantonese-dominants are different from tonal native speakers who focused mainly on tones, and from the beginner and advanced learners of Mandarin in Zou et al.
This supports the statement in Antoniou et al. The results also showed that in the task of segment-or-tone the Cantonese-dominant group had a far longer reaction time in processing the mismatched tones and segments, than did the other two subject groups. This may be partly because although the Cantonese-dominants have mastered a certain awareness and knowledge of attentional strategy in Cantonese, it is not as automatic as it is for the Cantonese natives. Consequently, they are not able to respond as fast as native speakers in the task of segment-or-tone.
In accommodating two language-specific attentional strategies at one time the Cantonese-dominants spend more time weighing up the strategies. In comparison, the Urdu-dominants are influenced more by their mother language, which dominates their language systems, so they activate attentional strategy to L1 very quickly, without necessarily spending extra time weighing between Urdu and Cantonese.
In considering how the experience of Urdu influences the bilinguals' processing of Cantonese stimuli, both the phonological impact and higher-order strategical influence were included in the current study.
According to PAM-S, bilingual speakers may assimilate the low-rising Cantonese tone as Urdu question intonation, due to the similarity of rising pitch contours. Similarly, the Cantonese low-falling tone may be categorized as Urdu statement intonation, as it is comparable to a low-falling pitch tail and a descending pitch tendency at the end of a statement sentence So and Best, PAM-L2 predicts that if listeners assimilate non-native sounds into different L1 categories, they will find it very easy to distinguish non-native sounds.
Therefore, the phonological impact, if it indeed exists, would facilitate the processing of Cantonese for the bilinguals, and the perceptual differences shown in the task of segment-or-tone, would result from the impediment of the attentional strategy overtly used in the listeners' L1.
In Urdu, segments are used to classify a syllable, and it is suggested that such segment-dependent attentional strategy for non-tonal speakers would largely impede their processing of a tonal language Zou et al. Therefore, bilinguals are not as sensitive as native speakers are when processing tonal information. The current study supports the prior findings on selective attention for native and non-native language listeners Strange and Shafer, ; Steinhauer et al. We agree with these observations, since well-developed Urdu and Cantonese phonology systems enabled the bilinguals in our study to perceive phonologically the Cantonese stimuli in the task of segment-and-tone, whilst the overlap between languages allowed the bilinguals to co-activate different attentional strategies, as shown in the task of segment-or-tone.
Due to the language overlap, the segment-dependent strategy the bilinguals used in Urdu system hindered the attention distribution of Cantonese segmental and tonal dimensions.
As discussed previously, the Cantonese-dominants performed similarly to the Cantonese natives in the task of segment-and-tone, and showed differences from the native speakers when exposed to the segment-or-tone task. Therefore, the Cantonese-dominants can be regarded as Cantonese speakers in the first task, and they shift to bilingual status in the second task.
However, the English-dominants shifted their role to bilinguals when they were required to assimilate English and Greek initial stops in the assimilation task.
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