Lexical analyses of the function and phonology of Papuan Malay word stress.

The existence of word stress in Indonesian languages has been controversial. Recent acoustic analyses of Papuan Malay suggest that this language has word stress, counter to other studies and unlike closely related languages. The current study further investigates Papuan Malay by means of lexical (non-acoustic) analyses of two different aspects of word stress. In particular, this paper reports two distribution analyses of a word corpus, 1) investigating the extent to which stress patterns may help word recognition and 2) exploring the phonological factors that predict the distribution of stress patterns. The facilitating role of stress patterns in word recognition was investigated in a lexical analysis of word embeddings. The results show that Papuan Malay word stress (potentially) helps to disambiguate words. As for stress predictors, a random forest analysis investigated the effect of multiple morpho-phonological factors on stress placement. It was found that the mid vowels /ɛ/ and /ɔ/ play a central role in stress placement, refining the conclusions of previous work that mainly focused on /ɛ/. The current study confirms that non-acoustic research on stress can complement acoustic research in important ways. Crucially, the combined findings on stress in Papuan Malay so far give rise to an integrated perspective to word stress, in which phonetic, phonological and cognitive factors are considered.

Clinical relevance of quality-of-life data in laryngectomized patients.

OBJECTIVES/HYPOTHESIS: Statistically significant differences in health-related quality of life (HRQL) are not always clinically relevant. It is also plausible that patients perceive other changes to be relevant than health professionals do. The objective of this study was to find thresholds for HRQL that laryngectomees consider to be clinically relevant 1 year after surgery, (i.e., the level of HRQL that patients rate as satisfactory). A second aim was to investigate how many laryngectomized patients reached those targets. STUDY DESIGN: Multicenter cross-sectional study. METHODS: A total of 28 patients 1 year following laryngectomy and 24 healthcare professionals (HCPs) defined target values for the QLQ-C30 and QLQ-H&N35. In another sample of 157 laryngectomized patients 1 year following laryngectomy, we determined what percentage of patients reached these thresholds. RESULTS: Patients are the most accepting of sensory impairments (56.5), coughing (53.6), and dyspnea (44.0), whereas constipation (9.1) and nausea/vomiting (10.7) were rated as being the most troublesome symptoms. HCPs assessed more of the studied complaints as being tolerable than patients did, especially in psychosocial domains. Between 34.5% (senses) and 86.5% (constipation) of the reference group hit the predefined targets at different scales. CONCLUSIONS: Symptoms caused by disease are easier for patients to live with than more general nonspecific symptoms. Taking into account that some adverse effects of disease or therapy are partially irreversible, target values additional to changes of HRQL can be helpful when interpreting data.

[Perceived stigmatisation following laryngectomy]. / Stigmatisierungsgefühle nach Kehlkopfentfernung.

Patients who have had a cancer-related total laryngectomy (N = 217) were studied in order to investigate possible associations between perceived stigmatisation and such physical and social factors as: type and intelligibility of the replacement alaryngeal voice, mental health, and gender. The laryngectomees participated in structured interviews. The German questionnaire "Fragebogen zur pyschosozialen Anpassung nach Laryngectomie" (Questionnaire for Psychosocial Adjustment after Laryngectomy, FPAL) was used to measure patients' perceived stigmatisation. Speech intelligibility was measured both by using the Post-laryngectomy Telephone Intelligibility Test (PLTT) and by taking into account patients' own evaluation of how well they are able to speak. Patients' mental health was measured with the Hospital Anxiety and Depression Scale (HADS). Multi-factorial analysis of variance and covariance was used to test the effects of the parameters. Results show that stigmatisation is associated with anxiety (F = 5.992, p < 0.05 and F = 12.895, p < 0.001) but not with speech intelligibility, alaryngeal voice type, gender, or depression. There is a correspondence between the degree to which patients feel stigmatised because of their voice or tracheostomy and their sense of loneliness (F = 4.917, p < 0.05 and F = 6.271, p < 0.05). We can conclude that perceived stigmatisation is frequently accompanied by anxiety and loneliness. Men are apparently as often concerned as women. Stigmatisation is not increased when patients do use electronic devices for communication, and it is not lower in patients whose operation dates back several years.