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Dynamic Assessment (DA) is recommended for testing bilinguals as it tests the child’s learning potential and not her or his previously acquired language knowledge. Thus, it allows language difficulties to be distinguished from difficulties related to a lack of L2 exposure. This study presents the findings of DA of morphosyntax in French-speaking monolingual and bilingual children, both Typically Developing (TD) and with Developmental Language Disorder (DLD). We examined whether DA was able to distinguish TD from DLD in children, irrespective of their linguistic group (mono- versus bilingual). Morphosyntactic skills were assessed in a sample of 37 children with DLD (19 bilinguals) and 42 with TD (18 bilinguals), aged from 5 to 12. We assessed six syntactic structures: simple sentences (SVO) in present and past tense, subject relatives, accusative clitic pronouns, passives, and object relatives. We provided graduated prompts if children were not able to produce the target sentences. The results confirmed the accuracy of our morphosyntactic task to disentangle children with TD from children with DLD, regardless of their linguistic group. Moreover, cutoffs for each structure as well as for the total score, as determined via ROC curves, indicated high sensitivity and specificity for children with DLD who had a documented morphosyntactic deficit.

The end of the Palaeolithic represents one of the least-known periods in the history of western Africa, both in terms of its chronology and the identification of cultural assemblages entities based on the typo-technical analyses of its industries. In this context, the site of Fatandi V offers new data to discuss the cultural pattern during the Late Stone Age in western Africa. Stratigraphic, taphonomical and sedimentological analyses show the succession of three sedimentary units. Several concentrations with rich lithic material were recognized. An in situ occupation, composed of bladelets, segments, and bladelet and flake cores, is confirmed while others concentrations of lithic materials have been more or less disturbed by erosion and pedogenic post-depositional processes. The sequence is well-dated from 12 convergent OSL dates. Thanks to the dating of the stratigraphic units and an OSL date from the layer (11,300–9,200 BCE [13.3–11.2 ka at 68%, 14.3–10.3 ka at 95%]), the artefacts are dated to the end of Pleistocene or Early Holocene. Palaeoenvironmental data suggest that the settlement took place within a mosaic environment and more precisely at the transition between the open landscape of savanna on the glacis and the plateau, and the increasingly densely-wooded alluvial corridor. These humid areas must have been particularly attractive during the dry season by virtue of their rich resources (raw materials, water, trees, and bushes). The Fatandi V site constitutes the first stratified site of the Pleistocene/Holocene boundary in Senegal with both precise geochronological and palaeoenvironmental data. It complements perfectly the data already obtained in Mali and in the rest of western Africa, and thus constitutes a reference point for this period. In any case, the assemblage of Fatandi V, with its bladelets and segments and in the absence of ceramics and grinding material, fits with a cultural group using exclusively geometric armatures which strongly differs from another group characterized by the production of bifacial armatures, accompanied in its initial phase by ceramics (or stoneware) and grinding material.

Often associated with the monumental structures of the European Neolithic, megalithic structures are in fact found on almost all the continents of the globe. Far from being an exception, Africa is home to a vast diversity of monuments built with these blocks of up to several tonnes in weight. They can be both included within structures or erected around them, in the form of standing stones. In Africa, megalithic structures have been documented since the sixth millennium bce roughly until the contemporary period. They are recorded from North Africa to Madagascar, and from the Atlantic shores of West Africa to the Sahara and the Horn of Africa. Therefore, they correspond to very diverse cultural contexts and a wide range of uses. In addition to the funerary function often observed, megalithic monuments may also have a commemorative role or stand as territorial markers. African megaliths can be apprehended through different sources, whether they refer to past or present societies. In fact, unlike other regions of the world, modern and contemporary megalithic traditions are attested in Africa. Archaeology thus finds a possibility to broaden its perspectives by initiating a dialogue with ethnographic data.

The end of deep reading is a commonplace in public debates, whenever societies talk about youth, books, and the digital age. In contrast to this, we show for the first time and in detail, how intensively young readers write and comment literary texts at an unprecedented scale. We present several analyses of how fiction is transmitted through the social reading platform Wattpad, one of the largest platforms for user-generated stories, including novels, fanfiction, humour, classics, and poetry. By mixed quantitative and qualitative methods and scalable reading we scrutinise texts and comments on Wattpad, what themes are preferred in 13 languages, what role does genre play for readers behaviour, and what kind of emotional engagement is prevalent when young readers share stories. Our results point out the rise of a global reading culture in youth reading besides national preferences for certain topics and genres, patterns of reading engagement, aesthetic values and social interaction. When reading Teen Fiction social-bonding (affective interaction) is prevalent, when reading Classics social-cognitive interaction (collective intelligence) is prevalent. An educational outcome suggests that readers who engage in Teen Fiction learn to read Classics and to judge books not only in direct emotional response to character’s behaviour, but focusing more on contextualised interpretation of the text.

This paper describes the systems developed by the BiTeM team for the CLEF eRisk Task 1 and 2, 2019. The goal was to predict the risk of anorexia and self-harm from user-generated content on Reddit. Several approaches based on supervised learning were used to estimate the risk of anorexia and self-harm. The systems were able to achieve low to moderate results.

Abstract The spread of the Bell Beaker phenomenon across Europe is still strongly debated today. Small-scale technological studies investigating its integration in local contexts remain rare, even though these are crucial to observing disruptions in traditions. In this article, we studied the ceramic technology of Final Neolithic, Bell Beaker period, and Early Bronze Age settlements of the Upper Rhône valley in Switzerland (3300–1600 BCE). We reconstructed and compared their pottery traditions to those from the contemporaneous megalithic necropolis of Sion ‘Petit-Chasseur’, a major funerary and ritual site located in the centre of the valley. Our findings showed that the Bell Beaker period saw an abundance of simultaneous technical changes, mirroring disruptions identified by other fields, and confirmed that this cultural phenomenon did not blend seamlessly with the local context. More importantly, they revealed the role played by human mobility, with the arrival of potters shortly after 2500 BCE.