Using a translanguaging framework to examine language production in a trilingual person with aphasia

When language abilities in aphasia are assessed in clinical and research settings, the standard practice is to examine each language of a multilingual person separately. But many multilingual individuals, with and without aphasia, mix their languages regularly when they communicate with other speakers who share their languages. We applied a novel approach to scoring language production of a multilingual person with aphasia. Our aim was to discover whether the assessment outcome would differ meaningfully when we count accurate responses in only the target language of the assessment session versus when we apply a translanguaging framework, that is, count all accurate responses, regardless of the language in which they were produced. The participant is a Farsi-German-English speaking woman with chronic moderate aphasia. We examined the participant's performance on two picture-naming tasks, an answering wh-question task, and an elicited narrative task. The results demonstrated that scores in English, the participant's third-learned and least-impaired language did not differ between the two scoring methods. Performance in German, the participant's moderately impaired second language benefited from translanguaging-based scoring across the board. In Farsi, her weakest language post-CVA, the participant's scores were higher under the translanguaging-based scoring approach in some but not all of the tasks. Our findings suggest that whether a translanguaging-based scoring makes a difference in the results obtained depends on relative language abilities and on pragmatic constraints, with additional influence of the linguistic distances between the languages in question.

Scattering of electromagnetic waves by spheroidal particles: a novel approach exploiting the T matrix computed in spheroidal coordinates

A method other than the extended-boundary-condition method (EBCM) to compute the T matrix for electromagnetic scattering is presented. The separation-of-variables method (SVM) is used to solve the electromagnetic scattering problem for a spheroidal particle and to derive its T matrix in spheroidal coordinates. A transformation is developed for transforming the T matrix in spheroidal coordinates into the corresponding T matrix in spherical coordinates. The T matrix so obtained can be used for analytical calculation of the optical properties of ensembles of randomly oriented spheroids of arbitrary shape by use of an existing method to average over orientational angles. The optical properties obtained with the SVM and the EBCM are compared for different test cases. For mildly aspherical particles the two methods yield indistinguishable results. Small differences appear for highly aspherical particles. The new approach can be used to compute optical properties for arbitrary values of the aspect ratio. To test the accuracy of the expansion coefficients of the spheroidal functions for arbitrary arguments, a new testing method based on the completeness relation of the spheroidal functions is developed.