This chapter deals with the Swedish regulation of prenatal diagnosis and the various arguments posed for or against such regulation, including whether there should be any changes in the legislation of late-term abortions. Using the metaphor ‘moral landscape,’ it explores how actors such as physicians, disability organizations, and women’s organizations negotiated their position on an issue that waThis chapter deals with the Swedish regulation of prenatal diagnosis and the various arguments posed for or against such regulation, including whether there should be any changes in the legislation of late-term abortions. Using the metaphor ‘moral landscape,’ it explores how actors such as physicians, disability organizations, and women’s organizations negotiated their position on an issue that wa

There is an ever-increasing demand for structural metals with higher strength. Metals can be strengthened by reducing grain size in their microstructure, but ductility is also concomitantly reduced. High strength and ductility are a desirable combination of properties for most structural engineering materials. By arranging fine grains in a continuous network that surrounds islands of coarse grains

Diversification of plant chemical phenotypes is typically associated with spatially and temporally variable plant–insect interactions. Floral scent is often assumed to be the target of pollinator-mediated selection, whereas foliar compounds are considered targets of antagonist-mediated selection. However, floral and vegetative phytochemicals can be biosynthetically linked and may thus evolve as i

The extraordinary diversity of flowering plants has long captivated biologists andevolutionary ecologists. Plant-insect relationships are recognized as a major driverof this diversity, with pollinators playing a crucial role in angiosperm speciation andtrait diversification. Numerous observational and experimental studies have shownthat pollinators influence the evolution of floral traits—such as

Background: In recent years, a discourse on how to systematically consider and report threats to validity started to gain momentum within the empirical software engineering community. Aims: With this study, we aim to systematically underpin the current state of threats to validity practices in software engineering research. Method: We conduct a literature review comprising 91 papers awarded with t

PurposeThis paper aims to investigate the emergence of blockchain-enabled traceability in complex multi-tiered supply chains, focusing on the perspective of upstream suppliers. Blockchain technology receives attention for its potential to enable better traceability and thus sustainability risk management, yet there is limited empirical evidence on how actual implementation unfolds. We aim to under

In research on music conducting, there is a lack of studies concerning conductors’ score-reading. The present investigation explored the reading strategies of four Swedish choral conductors. Two interconnected studies addressed the conductors’ explicit conceptions about score reading and their silent-reading strategies in actual reading situations. All conductors emphasized overviewing and script-

Third-party payers often reimburse health care providers based on prospectively set prices. Although a key motivation of prospective payment is to contain costs, this paper shows that this aspect crucially depends on the design of the pricing scheme due to the well-known incentives of patient selection (or “dumping”). This paper provides a general theoretical framework where heterogeneous users ar

This study investigates the accents of German-Italian school children (6–10 years old)in their two languages. We ask whether accents in the bilingual children’s two lan-guages are related and how foreign accentedness is associated with proficiency in other areas of language (speech rate, vocabulary size) and extralinguistic factors (formal and informal exposure and AoO in the majority language). D

This study focuses on the contexts of language experience in relation to language dominance in eighty-seven Italian–German primary school children in Germany using the MAIN narrative task. We compare current language experience in the heritage language (Italian) and the majority language (German) in both formal and informal settings, and we examine the respective impact on micro- and macrostructur

Rhetorical questions (RhQs) are a complex phenomenon at the interface of pragmatics, prosody and syntax, which requires reasoning on intentions and goals, and which involves a mismatch between literal and intended meaning. In Italian, RhQs can be marked by optional particles and verbal morphology. We investigated when children aged 6-9 acquire the relevant patterns of optional modification and exp

In this article we investigate transfer in the ab-initio acquisition of grammatical gender in two groups of multilingual learners. The first group knows two gender languages (German and French), which can potentially act as transfer sources; the second group knows three (German, French and Italian). Both groups had to assign gender to nouns in Franco-Provençal, a Romance language which is new to t

Few studies have examined global foreign accent (GFA) in bilingual children, and little is known about how GFA changes over time and what factors determine change. Here, we examine GFA trajectories in Japanese–English bilingual returnees (Japanese children who returned to Japan after having lived in a majority English environment for several years). In two accent-rating tasks, first language (L1)

Italian dialects, especially in the south of Italy, have been stigmatised for a long time. Despite more recent revalorization, dialect speakers may still have negative attitudes towards their own variety as a result of internalized prejudices. By comparing Sicilian and Venetan, two of the most spoken dialects in Italy, this study aims to investigate what attitudes dialect speakers have towards the

We present a case study of a heritage speaker of German, Luisa, who is growing up in an English-speaking part of Canada, focussing on the acquisition of grammatical gender in German. While German has cues to gender assignment, the acquisition of gender in this setting is compromised by the magnitude of gender cues and form syncretism, and the absence of gender in English. We present longitudinal,

The Sámi people stand out as the only Indigenous minority in an egalitarian European context, namely the Nordic Countries. Therefore, inequalities that they may face are worth closer inspection. Drawing on the distinction between inequalities among individuals (vertical) and between groups (horizontal), we investigate how different types of inequalities affect the Sámi today. We formulate a series