Zeitschriftenartikel zum Thema „Spelling Soft and Hard Consonants“

Рассматривается вопрос преподавания русского языка как иностранного в техническом вузе России. Актуальность темы обусловлена ростом числа иностранных студентов в российских вузах и необходимостью скорейшего овладения ими русским языком. Описаны особенности изучения русской научной лексики, терминологического аппарата технических дисциплин, в частности языка математики, иностранными студентами, обучающимися на подготовительном отделении Томского государственного архитектурно-строительного университета. Проведен лингвистический эксперимент, в ходе которого студентам был предложен диктант, изобилующий научной лексикой; описаны результаты, а также нарушения произношения и написания терминов, так как главную трудность представляет именно изучение лексики научного стиля речи. Выявлены и описаны, структурированы особенности отступлений от нормы, предложены варианты работы по реализации программы отработки навыков нормативного письма иностранными студентами. Достаточно трудным является определение границы слова, написание букв в конце слова, восприятие шипящих согласных, парных согласных по глухости/звонкости, мягкости/твердости; определение рода имен существительных (в большинстве языков народов бывшего Советского Союза нет категории рода). В связи с этим возникает необходимость тщательно продумывать типы упражнений в соответствии с потребностью учащихся и их последовательность. The issue of teaching Russian as a foreign language in a technical university in Russia is considered. The relevance is due both to the increase in the number of foreign students in Russian universities and the need for them to master the Russian language as soon as possible in order to continue their studies in Russian. The aim of the work is to describe the features of mastering Russian scientific vocabulary, the terminology of technical disciplines, in particular, the language of mathematics by foreign students studying at the preparatory department of the Tomsk State University of Architecture and Civil Engineering (Building). A linguistic experiment was carried out, when students were offered to write a dictation, replete with scientific vocabulary. The results, as well as violations of pronunciation and spelling of terms have been described, since the main difficulty is precisely the study of the vocabulary of the scientific style of speech. The peculiarities of deviations from the standard were also identified, structured, and described. Options for the implementation of the program for the development of normative writing skills by foreign students were proposed. Rather difficult is the definition of the word boundary, writing letters at the end of a word, the perception of hissing consonants, paired consonants (unvoiced – voiced), soft – hard; determination of the gender of a noun (in most languages of the former Soviet Union there is no category of gender). This requires the necessity of elaborate thinking over the exercise types and their sequence in accordance with students’ needs. This work continues a series of methodical publications, the main aim of which is improving the quality of foreign student education in technical universities of Russia.

This paper describes the former Klaipėda region Highlanders area (from Smaliniñkai (Jùrbarkas region) to Juknáičiai (Šilùtė region)) dialectal situation and usage characteristics of consonants in the specific habitat in the beginning of the 21st century. Recent observations suggest that most of consonant changes (hardening of consonants, usage of middle l’, aspirated and slightly voiceless voiced consonants and etc.) described in the previous works of dialectologists captured in the beginning of 21st century. In the old local population language the use cases of hard consonants in the positions of iota softening before suffixes and endings appear quite often. Consonant hardening begins at about Viešvilė surrounding area (Jùrbarkas region) and stronger going westward, mostly hardening cases recorded in the central area of descriptive dialects of Rukai, Pagėgiai, Bitėnai. The most common hardened consonants in the positions of iota softness are r, v, n, example: tràktọrùs ~ traktorius ‘tractor’, keturu∙ ~ keturių ‘of four’; daržõ∙vu. ~ daržovių ‘of vegetables’, lietùvu. ~ lietuvių ‘of Lithuanians’; ˈran.kinu ~ rankiniu ‘manual’, žinuõ∙s ~ žinios ‘news’. A much less often consonants hardening occurs in the root, example: trùš’u. ~ triušių ‘of rabbits’, gro∙vi∙s ~ griovys ‘ditch’, suntini ~ siuntinį ‘parcel’. In the dialects of the 21st century “middle” l’, common for Klaipėda residents is systematically preserved. In common position of hard l usage in general language this consonant sounds as soft by ear, example: l’a.pαi ~ lapai ‘leafs’, bl’o.gã.i. ~ blogai ‘bad’, kul’dava ~ kuldavo ‘whacked’. In those positions, where in general language it is normal to pronounce the soft l’, example: in iota softening positions this consonant sounds almost as hard l: kõ∙kl’u∙ ~ koklių ‘of tiles’, kaul’ukùs ~ kauliukus ‘dices’, *š’auluõs ~ Šiauliuose ‘in Šiauliai’. Also other consonant changes occur sometimes in described area: non-motivated softness, aspiration, contraposition neutralization of voiceless and voiced consonants and etc. To be highlighted, as it was earlier as in the presence all described consonant changes are not systematic (are variable) in dialect. Consonant hardening phenomenon is undoubtedly related to the West Lithuanian area of dialects which are characterized by the declination of soft stems.

This work is motivated by graphic and orthographic difficulties in preparing Koryak texts for publication in the “Monuments of Folklore of the Peoples of Siberia and the Far East.” Koryak language spelling difficulties are analyzed for the first time, particularly non-trivial cases of ambiguous spelling requiring comprehension and codification. For example, the spelling of equivocal vowel sound [ә] proves a problem. The normative spelling not allowing two conso- nants at the beginning of a word is due to the historical reconstruction of the Koryak phonological system. However, the indefinite vowel [ә] sometimes is reduced so as not to be identified by the modern Koryak speakers, with its designation with the letter ы [ә] causing reading mistakes. Also, the spelling of йи [ji] or йы [jә] is complicated, with the choice between these two variants based on morphologic principle and defined by this syllable position in the word: root morpheme, affix or in between two morphemes. The spelling of soft consonant followed by equivocal sound [ә], designated in writing by ы [ә], remains to be identified. This combination provokes orthographic variability observed in th-ɣe publications in Koryak. Variability appears in spellings of word forms with -гыйӈ [-ɣәjŋ], -ӈыйт [-ŋәjt] and in spellings of double consonants between two morphemes. The orthographic variability in Koryak publications is due to the conflict in phonemic and morphologic principles relevant for Koryak spelling. Moreover, given the dominant bilingualism, Koryak writing is strongly influenced by the Russian spelling, making the possibility of developing a national writing culture questionable.

Objective This study was conducted to evaluate the relationship between size of residual clefts in the hard palate and speech. Subjects Fifteen 7-year-old children born with complete cleft lip and palate were investigated. Methods All of the children were treated according to a surgical regimen involving early soft palate repair and delayed hard palate closure. Measures were taken of the area, length, and maximal width of the residual cleft in the hard palate about a year before Its closure and correlated with a perceptual judgment of several speech variables. Results Significant positive correlations were obtained between the size of the cleft and two variables: weak pressure consonants and hypernasality. Nasal escape was very common among the patients, and almost half the children had retracted palatal or velar articulation of dental stop consonants. Neither of these two variables correlated with the size of the residual cleft. Conclusion Perceived oral pressure and, perhaps, resonance seem to be related to size of the opening of the residual cleft, whereas audible nasal escape and articulatory compensations are not, at least not the latter once established.

Objective To investigate speech outcome between children with isolated cleft palate undergoing palatoplasty with and without muscle reconstruction and to compare speech outcomes between cleft and noncleft children. The number of subsequent velopharyngeal flaps was compared with respect to surgical techniques and cleft extent. Design Cross-sectional retrospective study. Participants One hundred four children aged 4 years, 0 months to 6 years, 0 months, 33 with isolated cleft of the soft palate, 53 with isolated cleft of the hard and soft palate, and 18 noncleft children. Interventions Two primary palate repair techniques: minimal incision technique (MIT) and minimal incision technique including muscle reconstruction (MITmr). Main Outcome Measures Perceptual judgment of seven speech parameters assessed on a five-point scale. Results No significant differences in speech outcomes were found between MIT and MITmr surgery groups. The number of velopharyngeal flaps was significantly lower after MITmr surgery compared to MIT surgery. The number of flaps was also significantly lower in children with cleft of the soft palate compared to children with cleft of the hard and soft palate. Children with cleft of the soft palate had significantly less glottal articulation and weak pressure consonants compared to children with cleft of the hard and soft palate. Conclusions The MITmr surgery technique was not significantly superior to the MIT technique regarding speech outcomes related to velopharyngeal competence, but had fewer velopharyngeal flaps, which is contradictory. Until a larger sample can be studied, we will continue to use MITmr for primary palate repair.

Objective: To compare speech outcome following different sequencing of hard and soft palate closure between arms and centers within trial 3 and compare results to peers without cleft palate. Design: A prospective randomized clinical trial. Setting: Two Norwegian and 2 British centers. Participants: One hundred thirty-six 5-year-olds with unilateral cleft lip and palate were randomized to either lip and soft palate closure at 3 to 4 months and hard palate closure at 12 months (arm A) or lip and hard palate closure at 3 to 4 months and soft palate closure at 12 months (arm D). Main Outcome Measures: A composite measure of velopharyngeal competence (VPC), overall assessment of VPC from connected speech (VPC-Rate). Percentage of consonants correct (PCC), active cleft speech characteristics (CSCs), subdivided by oral retracted and nonoral errors, and developmental speech characteristics (DSCs). Results: Across the trial, 47% had VPC, with no statistically significant difference between arms within or across centers. Thirty-eight percent achieved a PCC score of >90%, with no difference between arms or centers. In one center, significantly more children in arm A produced ≥3 active CSCs ( P < .05). Across centers, there was a statistically significant difference in active CSCs (arm D), oral retracted CSCs (arm D), and DSCs (arms A and D). Conclusions: Less than half of the 5-year-olds achieved VPC and around one-third achieved age-appropriate PCC scores. Cleft speech characteristics were more common in arm A, but outcomes varied within and across centers. Thus, outcome of the same surgical method can vary substantially across centers.

The article deals with variant words in the Turkic languages. From the historical point of view the significance of synharmonic variants and parallels is in the following: the phenomenon plays a special role in a methodological aspect in order to restore ancient roots and phonemes in their previous forms. We vividly observe the fact when we compare words pronounced via forelingual vowels with words pronounced via backlingual vowels. Comparing words pronounced through forelingual vowels with words pronounced through backlingual vowels we have made the following conclusions. In the result of language development during a long period of time backlingual and midlingual vowels and consonants moved to the front part of a tongue. Indisputably this is the influence of natural conditions, the change of physical qualities of a man (height fall, constitution decrease, etc.) We have analysed hard variants of words having become softened in the Kazakh literary language or its dialects may present much more materials in this respect. Historical written memorials that reached our time prove the absence of soft pronounced sounds and the usage of their hard variants. Having researched and analysed carefully the words pronounced with soft vowels in Turkic (including Kazakh) languages we can restore almost all of them in their hard forms as in ancient Turkic because hard variants pronounced softly at present can be observed in one or other Turkic languages, their dialects, set expressions, onomastics, toponimics, historical writings, etc. This article analyzes controversial issues in the study of variant words in the Turkic languages

Objective: To evaluate speech in 5-year-olds with cleft palate with or without cleft lip (CP±L) treated with primary palatal surgery in 1 stage with muscle reconstruction according to Sommerlad at about 12 months of age. Design: Retrospective study. Setting: Primary care university hospital. Participants: Eight 5-year-olds with cleft soft palate (SP), 22 with cleft soft/hard palate (SHP), 33 with unilateral cleft lip and palate, and 17 with bilateral CLP (BCLP). Main Outcome Measures: Percent oral consonants correct (POCC), percent consonants correct adjusted for age (PCC-A), percent oral errors, percent nonoral errors, and variables related to velopharyngeal function were analyzed from assessments of audio recordings by 3 independent speech-language pathologists. Results: The median POCC was 75.4% (range: 22.7%-98.9%), median PCC-A 96.9% (range: 36.9%-100%), median percent oral errors 3.4% (range: 0%-40.7%), and median percent nonoral errors 0% (range: 0%-20%), with significantly poorer results in children with more extensive clefts. The SP group had significantly less occurrence of audible nasal air leakage than the SHP and the BCLP groups. Before age 5 years, 1.3% of the children underwent fistula surgery and 6.3% secondary speech improving surgery. At age 5 years, 15% of the total group was perceived as having incompetent velopharyngeal function. Conclusions: Speech was poorer in many children with more extensive clefts. Children with CP±L had poorer speech compared to normative data of peers without CP±L, but the results indicated relatively good speech compared to speech of children with CP±L in previous studies.

Among the most important tasks of linguists-dialectologists at the present time is the study of the territorial forms of existence of the national language due to the shrinking space of their functioning. This work gives an idea of ​​one dialect of the Central Black Earth Region of Russia. The purpose of this study was to identify in a specific language the disappearing farm Redkodub of the Alekseevsky district of the Belgorod region the distinctive features of phonetics and morphology that characterize the state of the local subdialect in the 21st century, not previously studied. To achieve a goal, the author uses the following methods: interviewing, observation (identifying facts and determining their features), interpretation, comparison and analysis. The object of exploration interest was the speech of the old residents of the surveyed settlement, unique in its kind. The work considers the phonetic and morphological features of the dialect. Its following characteristic features were found: acania; use of hard consonants in place of soft ones before “e”, “and”; “G” of fricative education; using “x” in place of “k”; the use of “хв”, “хф” in place of “f”; “And” in place of “yat”; simplification of sounds in different parts of the word; loss of a consonant at the beginning of a word and a vowel at the end of a word; iotaatsiya - the appearance of the consonant sound “y” in different parts of the word; cases of lengthening of the final syllable in words; the appearance of an inserted vowel; no transition from “e” to “o” after soft consonants; the use of the vowel “y” in place of “in” and “in” in place of “y”; epenthesis; replacing “c” with “s”; maintaining the softness of consonants before “and” in place of “e” and “o”; stunning voiced consonants in the middle and at the end of words; transfer of stress in words; the ending “-я” in the nominative plural; the ending “-y” for nouns in the genitive singular; the endings “-iv”, “-in-” in the genitive plural; destruction of the category of the genus; the use of the postfix “-sya” in place of “-s” in reflexive verbs, etc. It is concluded that the present subdialect has the properties of the Russian dialect and Ukrainian language systems. The author believes that the dialect of the disappearing farm Redkodub can be attributed to a mixed Russian-Ukrainian and argues that the most valuable thing for us is the original folk speech, which is not very influenced by the literary language.

Objective: To investigate in-depth speech results in the Scandcleft Trial 2 with comparisons between surgical protocols and centers and with benchmarks from peers without cleft palate. Design: A prospective randomized clinical trial. Setting: Two Swedish and one Finnish Cleft Palate center. Participants: One hundred twelve participants were 5-years-old born with unilateral cleft lip and palate randomized to either lip repair and soft palate closure at 4 months and hard palate closure at 12 months or lip repair at 3 to 4 months (Arm A), or a closure of both the soft and hard palate at 12 months (Arm C). Main Outcome Measures: A composite measure dichotomized into velopharyngeal competency (VPC) or velopharyngeal incompetency (VPI), overall assessment of velopharyngeal function (VPC-Rate), percentage of consonants correct (PCC score), and consonant errors. In addition, number of speech therapy visits, average hearing thresholds, and secondary surgeries were documented to assess burden of treatment. Results: Across the trial, 53.5% demonstrated VPC and 46.5% VPI with no significant differences between arms or centers. In total, 27% reached age-appropriate PCC scores with no statistically significant difference between the arms. The Finnish center had significantly higher PCC scores, the Swedish centers had higher percentages of oral consonant errors. Number of speech therapy visits was significantly higher in the Finnish center. Conclusion: At age 5, poor speech outcomes with some differences between participating centers were seen but could not be attributed to surgical protocol. As one center had very few participants, the results from that center should be interpreted with caution.

The article deals with the language of valuable reminders of the official style – Middle-Age letters. With the help of the end-to-end analysis of the XV century documents there were investigated the special aspects of consonantism of the Old Ukrainian language of that time, the territorial specificity of the witnessed phonetic phenomena was determined. On the basis of the developed methodology for the analysis of written monuments, the first attempt in the Ukrainian studies of systematic investigation of variational phonetic elements was made, the causes of language fluctuations were clarified, the role of dialects, foreign-language influences in the emergence of phonetic and morphological variability of written monuments of the specified period was identified, the place of linguistic parallelism in the formation of a specific literary-written system in the Ukrainian and adjacent territories of XV century was determined. Many important sound changes were observed: the hardening of the consonant [p’], typical of the south-western Ukrainian dialects; the hardening of sibilants, typical of the Ukrainian language system; frequent examples of the hard consonant [ų], characteristic of the North-Ukrainian sub-dialects; assimilation by the soft apical consonants of the neighboring [j], reflected in the modern Ukrainian language; assimilation in the combinations of “sonant + voiceless” and “voiceless + sonant”; simplification in the groups of consonants, present in Ukrainian nowadays; diverse specificity of reflexes of the sound combinations *dj, *zdj; signs of transition [мj]> [мн], typical of the south-western sub-dialects; reflection of sounds [г] and [ґ], etc. Various consequences of the phonemic implementation have led to the development of variability in the consonant system of the Old Ukrainian language of the XV century.

Objectives: To describe speech based on perceptual evaluation in a group of 10-year-old children with cleft palate. A secondary aim was to investigate the reliability of speech-language pathologists’ perceptual assessment of cleft palate speech. Design: Retrospective cross-sectional study in children with cleft palate. External raters made assessments from randomized speech recordings. Subjects: Thirty-eight children with unilateral cleft lip and palate (UCLP) or cleft palate only (CPO) and 10 children in a comparison group. Main Outcome Measures: Ratings of hypernasality, hyponasality, audible nasal air leakage, weak pressure consonants, and articulation. Exact agreement and weighted kappa values were used for reliability. Results: Hypernasality was found in 25% of children with a cleft of the soft palate (CSP), 33% of children with a cleft of the hard and soft palate (CHSP), and 67% of children with a UCLP. Similar results were found for audible nasal air leakage. Articulation errors were found in 6% of the CHSP group and 25% of the UCLP group, whereas no child in the CSP group had articulation errors. The reliability was moderate to good for different variables, with lowest values for hypernasality. Conclusions: Speech results in this series seem less satisfactory than those reported in other published international studies, but it is difficult to draw any certain conclusions about speech results because of large methodological differences. Further developments to ensure high reliability of perceptual ratings of speech are called for.

This article discusses variant words spoken through front-lingual vowels, with words spoken through back-lingual vowels that have the same meaning. As a result of the development of languages ​​over an infinitely long time, rear-lingual and middle-lingual, both vowels and consonants, moved to the front of the tongue. This, of course, was influenced by natural conditions, changes in the physical data of a person (decrease in growth, decrease in his complexion, etc.). In the article, by means of comparative historical study, the ancient forms of variant words are restored, which in linguistics are called “syngarmonic variants and parelli”.Singharmonic variants are more often found in monosyllables in modern languages, which indicates the historical nature of this phenomenon. The number of synarmonic variants increases sharply if we compare and compare competing roots in a separate language or Turkic languages ​​and their dialects, which are formed as a result of the free exchange of vowels, which do not differ in the lexical and semantic sense. Therefore, in order to prove that the ancient roots of the Kazakh-Turkic words were pronounced with solid vowels, we paid special attention to the correspondence of hard and soft vowels in syngarmonic variants

P. H. Zhytetskyi’sbook «Очерк звуковой истории малорусского наречия» became a valuable contribution into Ukrainian and Slavonic studies. Zhytetskyi is credited with posing the problem of the relationship between vocalism and consonantism in the history of the Ukrainian language, and thus in the history of the Slavonic languages in general. Zhytetskyi’s thesis about «the poor» vocalism combining with «the rich» consonantism and vice versa in the Slavonic languages and in their history set the grounds of the historical typology of the Slavonic languages (on the phonological level) and proved to be really effective in the XXth ct. linguistics. It provided the principles of the Slavonic languages division into two types – a vocal and a consonant ones, which were interpreted both synchronically and diachronically (A. V. Isachenko, K. V. Horshkova, V. V. Ivanov, V. V. Kolesov). Zhytetskyi reconstructed the systems of archytypes and the systems of phonetic rules with the similar mechanism (united by a common cause). This resulted in Zhytetskyi’s understanding of the Ukrainian phonetic system history as a chain of causally related phonetic processes on the level of the subsystems (vocalism and consonantism) and the sound categories (strong and weak, voiced and unvoiced, hard and soft consonants). Therefore, Zhytetskyi’s concept of the relationship between vocalism and consonantism in the history of the Ukrainian language has retained its relevance in comparative and typological linguistiscs of the XX-th ct. – early XXIst ct.

Objective: To describe speech production longitudinally in a group of children with unilateral cleft lip and palate (UCLP). Participants: Twenty consecutive children with UCLP and nine age-matched children without clefts in a comparison group. Intervention: A two-stage palatal repair procedure with soft palate closure at 6 months and hard palate repair at 3 to 4 years. Main Outcome Measures: Percent correct consonants (PCC), percent correct places (PCP), and percent correct manners (PCM) at 3, 5, and 7 years of age. Cleft speech errors at the same ages. Previously collected data on number of consonant tokens, consonant types, frequency of occurrence of places and manners of articulation at 18 months. Results: PCC and PCP were significantly lower in the UCLP group than in the comparison group at all ages. Number of consonant types and frequency of occurrence of dental plosives at 18 months correlated significantly with PCC at age 3. A high frequency of velar plosives at 18 months correlated significantly with a high prevalence of retracted oral articulation (dental/alveolar to palatal or velar) at both 3 and 5 years of age. Conclusions: The UCLP group performed worse than the comparison group at all ages. A high occurrence of dental plosives as well as a high number of consonant types in babbling and first words seem to be good indicators for better consonant production in later speech. The same prevalence of retracted oral articulation as in previous studies is attributed to the surgical technique.

Introduction. This article is based on the results of a comparison of a number of Serbo-Croatian/Slovenian lexemes with a palatal lateral approximant [ʎ] and Western Slavic lexemes with a velarized lateral approximant [ɫ] with related lexemes in Slavic and other Indo-European (IE) languages. It is shown that the Balkan-Slavic [ʎ] irregularly corresponds to the phonemes [l'] and [j] of other Slavic languages and even some IE languages beyond the Slavic group. It is also shown that the West Slavic [ɫ] irregularly corresponds to the phonemes [l] and [w]/[v] of other Slavic and IE languages. Because of this irregularity, these phonetic correspondences are difficult to explain with local dialect features.Methodology and sources. A model based on the generalization of instrumental studies that showed that palatal sounds are characterized by instability of articulation is proposed. This leads to their divergent evolution, transformation into sounds with different stable zones of articulation.In the proposed model, the Proto-Indo-European (PIE) voiced lateral approximants *[ɫ] and *[ʎ], forming the opposition "hard consonant - soft consonant", in the process of phonetic evolution in IE languages were split into variants with a clearer articulation: velarized *[ɫ] > solid alveolar lateral [l] and bilabial fricative [w]; palatal *[ʎ] > soft alveolar lateral [l'] and palatal approximant [j]. Besides, the original consonants have survived in a number of languages.Results and discussion. Examples of correspondences are given to suggest the presence of *[ɫ] and *[ʎ] in PIE and Common Slavic prototypes. The newly discovered etymological links, such as the links between Russian lexemes баня 'bath' and балий, бальник 'healer, sorcerer' are being discussed.Conclusion. With the help of the mechanism of divergent evolution of the palatal lateral approximant *[ʎ] and the velarized lateral approximant *[ɫ] the irregularity of phonetic correspondences of voiced lateral approximants in Slavic languages can be uniformly explained.Besides, the acceptance of *[ʎ] and *[ɫ] in PIE phonology also lets us to establish some previously undetected etymological relations.

A 3D/4D ultrasound study of Russian stressed vowels in the context of ‘soft’ (phonetically palatalized or palatal) versus ‘hard’ consonants reveals that vowels in these two contexts differ systematically in terms of the position of the tongue root while the tongue dorsum is less consistently modified depending on the speaker, vowel or consonant context. This paper proposes that the observed vowel allophony, as well as the softness contrast in Russian consonants, and the contrast between front and central high vowels, are all defined in terms of the feature [ATR].

Objective: To compare speech outcome and self-reported speech and communicative ability (SOK) in young adults treated with one-stage (OS) or two-stage (TS) palatal repair. Furthermore, to compare with normative data on individuals without cleft lip and palate and to study the relationship between patients’ and experts’ judgments. Design: A cross-sectional group comparison study with long-term follow-up. Participants: Patients born with unilateral cleft lip and palate treated at 2 cleft centers; 17 with OS at 14 months and 25 with TS, soft palate repair at 7 months and hard palate repair at 6.2 years. Pharyngeal flap surgery was performed in 53% (OS) and 24% (TS) of patients. Main Outcome Measure(s): Speech characteristics were blindly assessed by speech and language pathologist from audio recordings, SOK at 19 years of age. Results: No group differences were found. Although the occurrence of nasality symptoms was low in both groups, only 60% (OS)/65% (TS) were assessed with competent velopharyngeal function (VPC). Articulation proficiency (percentage of consonants correct [PCC]) was 91%/97%, the /s/-sound specifically 87%/91%. Good intelligibility was found in 91%/87%. Patient opinion was in agreement with norms and significantly associated with intelligibility ( rs = 0.436, P < .01), PCC ( rs = −0.534, P < .01), and correct /s/ ( rs = −0.354, P < .05). Conclusions: No differences in speech outcome were related to operation method. The low prevalence of VPC was not clearly reflected in nasality symptoms. Patient opinion was related to articulation and intelligibility. A higher burden of care in terms of pharyngeal flap surgery was seen after the OS technique.

IntroductionCoffee, as a stimulant, and the spaces in which it is has been consumed, have long played a vital role in fostering communication, creativity, and sociality. This article explores the interrelationship of café space, communication, creativity, and materialism. In developing these themes, this article is structured in two parts. The first looks back to the coffee houses of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries to give a historical context to the contemporary role of the café as a key site of creativity through its facilitation of social interaction, communication and information exchange. The second explores the continuation of the link between cafés, communication and creativity, through an instance from the mid-twentieth century where this process becomes individualised and is tied more intrinsically to the material surroundings of the café itself. From this, we argue that in order to understand the connection between café space and creativity, it is valuable to consider the rich polymorphic material and aesthetic composition of cafés. The Social Life of Coffee: London’s Coffee Houses While the social consumption of coffee has a long history, here we restrict our focus to a discussion of the London coffee houses of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. It was during the seventeenth century that the vogue of these coffee houses reached its zenith when they operated as a vibrant site of mercantile activity, as well as cultural and political exchange (Cowan; Lillywhite; Ellis). Many of these coffee houses were situated close to the places where politicians, merchants, and other significant people congregated and did business, near government buildings such as Parliament, as well as courts, ports and other travel route hubs (Lillywhite 17). A great deal of information was shared within these spaces and, as a result, the coffee house became a key venue for communication, especially the reading and distribution of print and scribal publications (Cowan 85). At this time, “no coffee house worth its name” would be without a ready selection of newspapers for its patrons (Cowan 173). By working to twenty-four hour diurnal cycles and heightening the sense of repetition and regularity, coffee houses also played a crucial role in routinising news as a form of daily consumption alongside other forms of habitual consumption (including that of coffee drinking). In Cowan’s words, “restoration coffee houses soon became known as places ‘dasht with diurnals and books of news’” (172). Among these was the short-lived but nonetheless infamous social gossip publication, The Tatler (1709-10), which was strongly associated with the London coffee houses and, despite its short publication life, offers great insight into the social life and scandals of the time. The coffee house became, in short, “the primary social space in which ‘news’ was both produced and consumed” (Cowan 172). The proprietors of coffee houses were quick to exploit this situation by dealing in “news mongering” and developing their own news publications to supplement their incomes (172). They sometimes printed news, commentary and gossip that other publishers were not willing to print. However, as their reputation as news providers grew, so did the pressure on coffee houses to meet the high cost of continually acquiring or producing journals (Cowan 173; Ellis 185-206). In addition to the provision of news, coffee houses were vital sites for other forms of communication. For example, coffee houses were key venues where “one might deposit and receive one’s mail” (Cowan 175), and the Penny Post used coffeehouses as vital pick-up and delivery centres (Lillywhite 17). As Cowan explains, “Many correspondents [including Jonathan Swift] used a coffeehouse as a convenient place to write their letters as well as to send them” (176). This service was apparently provided gratis for regular patrons, but coffee house owners were less happy to provide this for their more infrequent customers (Cowan 176). London’s coffee houses functioned, in short, as notable sites of sociality that bundled together drinking coffee with news provision and postal and other services to attract customers (Cowan; Ellis). Key to the success of the London coffee house of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries was the figure of the virtuoso habitué (Cowan 105)—an urbane individual of the middle or upper classes who was skilled in social intercourse, skills that were honed through participation in the highly ritualised and refined forms of interpersonal communication, such as visiting the stately homes of that time. In contrast to such private visits, the coffee house provided a less formalised and more spontaneous space of sociality, but where established social skills were distinctly advantageous. A striking example of the figure of the virtuoso habitué is the philosopher, architect and scientist Robert Hooke (1635-1703). Hooke, by all accounts, used the opportunities provided by his regular visits to coffee houses “to draw on the knowledge of a wide variety of individuals, from servants and skilled laborers to aristocrats, as well as to share and display novel scientific instruments” (Cowan 105) in order to explore and develop his virtuoso interests. The coffee house also served Hooke as a place to debate philosophy with cliques of “like-minded virtuosi” and thus formed the “premier locale” through which he could “fulfil his own view of himself as a virtuoso, as a man of business, [and] as a man at the centre of intellectual life in the city” (Cowan 105-06). For Hooke, the coffee house was a space for serious work, and he was known to complain when “little philosophical work” was accomplished (105-06). Sociality operates in this example as a form of creative performance, demonstrating individual skill, and is tied to other forms of creative output. Patronage of a coffee house involved hearing and passing on gossip as news, but also entailed skill in philosophical debate and other intellectual pursuits. It should also be noted that the complex role of the coffee house as a locus of communication, sociality, and creativity was repeated elsewhere. During the 1600s in Egypt (and elsewhere in the Middle East), for example, coffee houses served as sites of intensive literary activity as well as the locations for discussions of art, sciences and literature, not to mention also of gambling and drug use (Hattox 101). While the popularity of coffee houses had declined in London by the 1800s, café culture was flowering elsewhere in mainland Europe. In the late 1870s in Paris, Edgar Degas and Edward Manet documented the rich café life of the city in their drawings and paintings (Ellis 216). Meanwhile, in Vienna, “the kaffeehaus offered another evocative model of urban and artistic modernity” (Ellis 217; see also Bollerey 44-81). Serving wine and dinners as well as coffee and pastries, the kaffeehaus was, like cafés elsewhere in Europe, a mecca for writers, artists and intellectuals. The Café Royal in London survived into the twentieth century, mainly through the patronage of European expatriates and local intellectuals such as Wyndham Lewis, Ezra Pound, T. S. Elliot, and Henri Bergson (Ellis 220). This pattern of patronage within specific and more isolated cafés was repeated in famous gatherings of literary identities elsewhere in Europe throughout the twentieth century. From this historical perspective, a picture emerges of how the social functions of the coffee house and its successors, the espresso bar and modern café, have shifted over the course of their histories (Bollerey 44-81). In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the coffee house was an important location for vibrant social interaction and the consumption and distribution of various forms of communication such as gossip, news, and letters. However, in the years of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the café was more commonly a site for more restricted social interaction between discrete groups. Studies of cafés and creativity during this era focus on cafés as “factories of literature, inciters to art, and breeding places for new ideas” (Fitch, The Grand 18). Central in these accounts are bohemian artists, their associated social circles, and their preferred cafés de bohème (for detailed discussion, see Wilson; Fitch, Paris Café; Brooker; Grafe and Bollerey 4-41). As much of this literature on café culture details, by the early twentieth century, cafés emerge as places that enable individuals to carve out a space for sociality and creativity which was not possible elsewhere in the modern metropolis. Writing on the modern metropolis, Simmel suggests that the concentration of people and things in cities “stimulate[s] the nervous system of the individual” to such an extent that it prompts a kind of self-preservation that he terms a “blasé attitude” (415). This is a form of “reserve”, he writes, which “grants to the individual a [certain] kind and an amount of personal freedom” that was hitherto unknown (416). Cafés arguably form a key site in feeding this dynamic insofar as they facilitate self-protectionism—Fitch’s “pool of privacy” (The Grand 22)—and, at the same time, produce a sense of individual freedom in Simmel’s sense of the term. That is to say, from the early-to-mid twentieth century, cafés have become complex settings in terms of the relationships they enable or constrain between living in public, privacy, intimacy, and cultural practice. (See Haine for a detailed discussion of how this plays out in relation to working class engagement with Paris cafés, and Wilson as well as White on other cultural contexts, such as Japan.) Threaded throughout this history is a clear celebration of the individual artist as a kind of virtuoso habitué of the contemporary café. Café Jama Michalika The following historical moment, drawn from a powerful point in the mid-twentieth century, illustrates this last stage in the evolution of the relationship between café space, communication, and creativity. This particular historical moment concerns the renowned Polish composer and conductor Krzysztof Penderecki, who is most well-known for his avant-garde piece Threnody to the Victims of Hiroshima (1960), his Polymorphia (1961), and St Luke Passion (1963-66), all of which entailed new compositional and notation techniques. Poland, along with other European countries devastated by the Second World War, underwent significant rebuilding after the war, also investing heavily in the arts, musical education, new concert halls, and conservatoria (Monastra). In the immediate post-war period, Poland and Polish culture was under the strong ideological influence exerted by the Soviet Union. However, as Thomas notes, within a year of Stalin’s death in 1953, “there were flickering signs of moderation in Polish culture” (83). With respect to musical creativity, a key turning point was the Warsaw Autumn Music Festival of 1956. “The driving force” behind the first festival (which was to become an annual event), was Polish “composers’ overwhelming sense of cultural isolation and their wish to break the provincial nature of Polish music” at that time (Thomas 85). Penderecki was one of a younger generation of composers who participated in, and benefited from, these early festivals, making his first appearance in 1959 with his composition Strophes, and successive appearances with Dimensions of Time and Silence in 1960, and Threnody in 1961 (Thomas 90). Penderecki married in the 1950s and had a child in 1955. This, in combination with the fact that his wife was a pianist and needed to practice daily, restricted Penderecki’s ability to work in their small Krakow apartment. Nor could he find space at the music school which was free from the intrusion of the sound of other instruments. Instead, he frequented the café Jama Michalika off the central square of Krakow, where he worked most days between nine in the morning and noon, when he would leave as a pianist began to play. Penderecki states that because of the small space of the café table, he had to “invent [a] special kind of notation which allowed me to write the piece which was for 52 instruments, like Threnody, on one small piece of paper” (Krzysztof Penderecki, 2000). In this, Penderecki created a completely new set of notation symbols, which assisted him in graphically representing tone clustering (Robinson 6) while, in his score for Polymorphia, he implemented “novel graphic notation, comparable with medical temperature charts, or oscillograms” (Schwinger 29) to represent in the most compact way possible the dense layering of sounds and vocal elements that is developed in this particular piece. This historical account is valuable because it contributes to discussions on individual creativity that both depends on, and occurs within, the material space of the café. This relationship is explored in Walter Benjamin’s essay “Polyclinic”, where he develops an extended analogy between the writer and the café and the surgeon and his instruments. As Cohen summarises, “Benjamin constructs the field of writerly operation both in medical terms and as a space dear to Parisian intellectuals, as an operating table that is also the marble-topped table of a café” (179). At this time, the space of the café itself thus becomes a vital site for individual cultural production, putting the artist in touch with the social life of the city, as many accounts of writers and artists in the cafés of Paris, Prague, Vienna, and elsewhere in Europe attest. “The attraction of the café for the writer”, Fitch argues, “is that seeming tension between the intimate circle of privacy in a comfortable room, on the one hand, and the flow of (perhaps usable) information all around on the other” (The Grand 11). Penderecki talks about searching for a sound while composing in café Jama Michalika and, hearing the noise of a passing tram, subsequently incorporated it into his famous composition, Threnody (Krzysztof Penderecki, 2000). There is an indirect connection here with the attractions of the seventeenth century coffee houses in London, where news writers drew much of their gossip and news from the talk within the coffee houses. However, the shift is to a more isolated, individualistic habitué. Nonetheless, the aesthetic composition of the café space remains essential to the creative productivity described by Penderecki. A concept that can be used to describe this method of composition is contained within one of Penderecki’s best-known pieces, Polymorphia (1961). The term “polymorphia” refers not to the form of the music itself (which is actually quite conventionally structured) but rather to the multiple blending of sounds. Schwinger defines polymorphia as “many formedness […] which applies not […] to the form of the piece, but to the broadly deployed scale of sound, [the] exchange and simultaneous penetration of sound and noise, the contrast and interflow of soft and hard sounds” (131). This description also reflects the rich material context of the café space as Penderecki describes its role in shaping (both enabling and constraining) his creative output. Creativity, Technology, Materialism The materiality of the café—including the table itself for Penderecki—is crucial in understanding the relationship between the forms of creative output and the material conditions of the spaces that enable them. In Penderecki’s case, to understand the origins of the score and even his innovative forms of musical notation as artefacts of communication, we need to understand the material conditions under which they were created. As a fixture of twentieth and twenty-first century urban environments, the café mediates the private within the public in a way that offers the contemporary virtuoso habitué a rich, polymorphic sensory experience. In a discussion of the indivisibility of sensation and its resistance to language, writer Anna Gibbs describes these rich experiential qualities: sitting by the window in a café watching the busy streetscape with the warmth of the morning sun on my back, I smell the delicious aroma of coffee and simultaneously feel its warmth in my mouth, taste it, and can tell the choice of bean as I listen idly to the chatter in the café around me and all these things blend into my experience of “being in the café” (201). Gibbs’s point is that the world of the café is highly synaesthetic and infused with sensual interconnections. The din of the café with its white noise of conversation and overlaying sounds of often carefully chosen music illustrates the extension of taste beyond the flavour of the coffee on the palate. In this way, the café space provides the infrastructure for a type of creative output that, in Gibbs’s case, facilitates her explanation of expression and affect. The individualised virtuoso habitué, as characterised by Penderecki’s work within café Jama Michalika, simply describes one (celebrated) form of the material conditions of communication and creativity. An essential factor in creative cultural output is contained in the ways in which material conditions such as these come to be organised. As Elizabeth Grosz expresses it: Art is the regulation and organisation of its materials—paint, canvas, concrete, steel, marble, words, sounds, bodily movements, indeed any materials—according to self-imposed constraints, the creation of forms through which these materials come to generate and intensify sensation and thus directly impact living bodies, organs, nervous systems (4). Materialist and medium-oriented theories of media and communication have emphasised the impact of physical constraints and enablers on the forms produced. McLuhan, for example, famously argued that the typewriter brought writing, speech, and publication into closer association, one effect of which was the tighter regulation of spelling and grammar, a pressure toward precision and uniformity that saw a jump in the sales of dictionaries (279). In the poetry of E. E. Cummings, McLuhan sees the typewriter as enabling a patterned layout of text that functions as “a musical score for choral speech” (278). In the same way, the café in Penderecki’s recollections both constrains his ability to compose freely (a creative activity that normally requires ample flat surface), but also facilitates the invention of a new language for composition, one able to accommodate the small space of the café table. Recent studies that have sought to materialise language and communication point to its physicality and the embodied forms through which communication occurs. As Packer and Crofts Wiley explain, “infrastructure, space, technology, and the body become the focus, a move that situates communication and culture within a physical, corporeal landscape” (3). The confined and often crowded space of the café and its individual tables shape the form of productive output in Penderecki’s case. Targeting these material constraints and enablers in her discussion of art, creativity and territoriality, Grosz describes the “architectural force of framing” as liberating “the qualities of objects or events that come to constitute the substance, the matter, of the art-work” (11). More broadly, the design features of the café, the form and layout of the tables and the space made available for individual habitation, the din of the social encounters, and even the stimulating influences on the body of the coffee served there, can be seen to act as enablers of communication and creativity. Conclusion The historical examples examined above indicate a material link between cafés and communication. They also suggest a relationship between materialism and creativity, as well as the roots of the romantic association—or mythos—of cafés as a key source of cultural life as they offer a “shared place of composition” and an “environment for creative work” (Fitch, The Grand 11). We have detailed one example pertaining to European coffee consumption, cafés and creativity. While we believe Penderecki’s case is valuable in terms of what it can tell us about forms of communication and creativity, clearly other cultural and historical contexts may reveal additional insights—as may be found in the cases of Middle Eastern cafés (Hattox) or the North American diner (Hurley), and in contemporary developments such as the café as a source of free WiFi and the commodification associated with global coffee chains. Penderecki’s example, we suggest, also sheds light on a longer history of creativity and cultural production that intersects with contemporary work practices in city spaces as well as conceptualisations of the individual’s place within complex urban spaces. References Benjamin, Walter. “Polyclinic” in “One-Way Street.” One-Way Street and Other Writings. Trans. Edmund Jephcott and Kingsley Shorter. London: Verso, 1998: 88-9. Bollerey, Franziska. “Setting the Stage for Modernity: The Cosmos of the Coffee House.” Cafés and Bars: The Architecture of Public Display. Eds. Christoph Grafe and Franziska Bollerey. New York: Routledge, 2007. 44-81. Brooker, Peter. Bohemia in London: The Social Scene of Early Modernism. Houndmills, Hamps.: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007. Cohen, Margaret. Profane Illumination: Walter Benjamin and the Paris of Surrealist Revolution. Berkeley: U of California P, 1995. Cowan, Brian. The Social Life of Coffee: The Emergence of the British Coffeehouse. New Haven: Yale UP, 2005. Ellis, Markman. The Coffee House: A Cultural History. London: Weidenfeld & Nicholson, 2004. Fitch, Noël Riley. Paris Café: The Sélect Crowd. Brooklyn: Soft Skull Press, 2007. -----. The Grand Literary Cafés of Europe. London: New Holland Publishers (UK), 2006. Gibbs, Anna. “After Affect: Sympathy, Synchrony, and Mimetic Communication.” The Affect Theory Reader. Eds. Melissa Gregg and Gregory J. Siegworth. Durham: Duke University Press, 2010. 186-205. Grafe, Christoph, and Franziska Bollerey. “Introduction: Cafés and Bars—Places for Sociability.” Cafés and Bars: The Architecture of Public Display. Eds. Christoph Grafe and Franziska Bollerey. New York: Routledge, 2007. 4-41. Grosz, Elizabeth. Chaos, Territory, Art: Deleuze and the Framing of the Earth. New York: Columbia UP, 2008. Haine, W. Scott. The World of the Paris Café. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1996. Hattox, Ralph S. Coffee and Coffeehouses: The Origins of a Social Beverage in the Medieval Near East. Seattle: U of Washington P, 1985. Hurley, Andrew. Diners, Bowling Alleys and Trailer Parks: Chasing the American Dream in the Postwar Consumer Culture. New York: Basic Books, 2001. Krzysztof Penderecki. Dir. Andreas Missler-Morell. Spektrum TV production and Telewizja Polska S.A. Oddzial W Krakowie for RM Associates and ZDF in cooperation with ARTE, 2000. Lillywhite, Bryant. London Coffee Houses: A Reference Book of Coffee Houses of the Seventeenth, Eighteenth, and Nineteenth Centuries. London: George Allen & Unwin, 1963. McLuhan, Marshall. Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man. London: Abacus, 1974. Monastra, Peggy. “Krzysztof Penderecki’s Polymorphia and Fluorescence.” Moldenhauer Archives, [US] Library of Congress. 12 Jan. 2012 ‹http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/collections/moldenhauer/2428143.pdf› Packer, Jeremy, and Stephen B. Crofts Wiley. “Introduction: The Materiality of Communication.” Communication Matters: Materialist Approaches to Media, Mobility and Networks. New York, Routledge, 2012. 3-16. Robinson, R. Krzysztof Penderecki: A Guide to His Works. Princeton, NJ: Prestige Publications, 1983. Schwinger, Wolfram. Krzysztof Penderecki: His Life and Work. Encounters, Biography and Musical Commentary. London: Schott, 1979. Simmel, Georg. The Sociology of Georg Simmel. Ed. and trans. Kurt H. Wolff. Glencoe, IL: The Free P, 1960. Thomas, Adrian. Polish Music since Szymanowski. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2005. White, Merry I. Coffee Life in Japan. Berkeley: U of California P, 2012. Wilson, Elizabeth. “The Bohemianization of Mass Culture.” International Journal of Cultural Studies 2.1 (1999): 11-32.

In a media saturated world, doodles have recently received the kind of attention usually reserved for coverage of racy extra marital affairs, corrupt governance, and product malfunction. Former British Prime Minister Blair’s private doodling at a World Economic Forum meeting in 2005 raised suspicions that he, according to one keen graphologist, struggled “to maintain control in a confusing world," which infers he was attempting to cohere a scattershot, fragmentary series of events (Spiegel). However, placid-faced Microsoft CEO Bill Gates, who sat nearby, actually scrawled the doodles. In this case, perhaps the scrawls mimicked the ambience in the room: Gates might have been ‘tuning’–registering the ‘white noise’ of the participants, letting his unconscious dictate doodles as a way to cope with the dissonance trekking in with the officialspeak. The doodles may have documented and registered the space between words, acting like deposits from his gestalt.Sometimes the most intriguing doodles co-exist with printed texts. This includes common vernacular graffiti that lines public and private books and magazines. Such graffiti exposes tensions in the role of readers as well as horror vacui: a fear of unused, empty space. Yet, school children fingering fresh pages and stiff book spines for the first few times often consider their book pages as sanctioned, discreet, and inviolable. The book is an object of financial and cultural investment, or imbued both with mystique and ideologies. Yet, in the e-book era, the old-fashioned, physical page is a relic of sorts, a holdover from coarse papyrus culled from wetland sage, linking us to the First Dynasty in Egypt. Some might consider the page as a vessel for typography, a mere framing device for text. The margins may reflect a perimeter of nothingness, an invisible borderland that doodles render visible by inhabiting them. Perhaps the margins are a bare landscape, like unmarred flat sand in a black and white panchromatic photo with unique tonal signature and distinct grain. Perhaps the margins are a mute locality, a space where words have evaporated, or a yet-to-be-explored environment, or an ambient field. Then comes the doodle, an icon of vernacular art.As a modern folklorist, I have studied and explored vernacular art at length, especially forms that may challenge and fissure aesthetic, cultural, and social mores, even within my own field. For instance, I contend that Grandma Prisbrey’s “Bottle Village,” featuring millions of artfully arranged pencils, bottles, and dolls culled from dumps in Southern California, is a syncretic culturescape with underlying feminist symbolism, not merely the product of trauma and hoarding (Ensminger). Recently, I flew to Oregon to deliver a paper on Mexican-American gravesite traditions. In a quest for increased multicultural tolerance, I argued that inexpensive dimestore objects left on Catholic immigrant graves do not represent a messy landscape of trinkets but unique spiritual environments with links to customs 3,000 years old. For me, doodles represent a variation on graffiti-style art with cultural antecedents stretching back throughout history, ranging from ancient scrawls on Greek ruins to contemporary park benches (with chiseled names, dates, and symbols), public bathroom latrinalia, and spray can aerosol art, including ‘bombing’ and ‘tagging’ hailed as “Spectacular Vernaculars” by Russell Potter (1995). Noted folklorist Alan Dundes mused on the meaning of latrinalia in Here I Sit – A Study of American Latrinalia (1966), which has inspired pop culture books and web pages for the preservation and discussion of such art (see for instance, www.itsallinthehead.com/gallery1.html). Older texts such as Classic American Graffiti by Allen Walker Read (1935), originally intended for “students of linguistics, folk-lore, abnormal psychology,” reveal the field’s longstanding interest in marginal, crude, and profane graffiti.Yet, to my knowledge, a monograph on doodles has yet to be published by a folklorist, perhaps because the art form is reconsidered too idiosyncratic, too private, the difference between jots and doodles too blurry for a taxonomy and not the domain of identifiable folk groups. In addition, the doodles in texts often remain hidden until single readers encounter them. No broad public interaction is likely, unless a library text circulates freely, which may not occur after doodles are discovered. In essence, the books become tainted, infected goods. Whereas latrinalia speaks openly and irreverently, doodles feature a different scale and audience.Doodles in texts may represent a kind of speaking from the ‘margin’s margins,’ revealing the reader-cum-writer’s idiosyncratic, self-meaningful, and stylised hieroglyphics from the ambient margins of one’s consciousness set forth in the ambient margins of the page. The original page itself is an ambient territory that allows the meaning of the text to take effect. When those liminal spaces (both between and betwixt, in which the rules of page format, design, style, and typography are abandoned) are altered by the presence of doodles, the formerly blank, surplus, and soft spaces of the page offer messages coterminous with the text, often allowing readers to speak, however haphazardly and unconsciously, with and against the triggering text. The bleached whiteness can become a crowded milieu in the hands of a reader re-scripting the ambient territory. If the book is borrowed, then the margins are also an intimate negotiation with shared or public space. The cryptic residue of the doodler now resides, waiting, for the city of eyes.Throughout history, both admired artists and Presidents regularly doodled. Famed Italian Renaissance painter Filippo Lippi avoided strenuous studying by doodling in his books (Van Cleave 44). Both sides of the American political spectrum have produced plentiful inky depictions as well: roughshod Democratic President Johnson drew flags and pagodas; former Hollywood fantasy fulfiller turned politician Republican President Reagan’s specialty was western themes, recalling tropes both from his actor period and his duration acting as President; meanwhile, former law student turned current President, Barack Obama, has sketched members of Congress and the Senate for charity auctions. These doodles are rich fodder for both psychologists and cross-discipline analysts that propose theories regarding the automatic writing and self-styled miniature pictures of civic leaders. Doodles allow graphologists to navigate and determine the internal, cognitive fabric of the maker. To critics, they exist as mere trifles and offer nothing more than an iota of insight; doodles are not uncanny offerings from the recesses of memory, like bite-sized Rorschach tests, but simply sloppy scrawls of the bored.Ambient music theory may shed some light. Timothy Morton argues that Brian Eno designed to make music that evoked “space whose quality had become minimally significant” and “deconstruct the opposition … between figure and ground.” In fact, doodles may yield the same attributes as well. After a doodle is inserted into texts, the typography loses its primacy. There is a merging of the horizons. The text of the author can conflate with the text of the reader in an uneasy dance of meaning: the page becomes an interface revealing a landscape of signs and symbols with multiple intelligences–one manufactured and condoned, the other vernacular and unsanctioned. A fixed end or beginning between the two no longer exists. The ambient space allows potential energies to hover at the edge, ready to illustrate a tension zone and occupy the page. The blank spaces keep inviting responses. An emergent discourse is always in waiting, always threatening to overspill the text’s intended meaning. In fact, the doodles may carry more weight than the intended text: the hierarchy between authorship and readership may topple.Resistant reading may take shape during these bouts. The doodle is an invasion and signals the geography of disruption, even when innocuous. It is a leveling tool. As doodlers place it alongside official discourse, they move away from positions of passivity, being mere consumers, and claim their own autonomy and agency. The space becomes co-determinant as boundaries are blurred. The destiny of the original text’s meaning is deferred. The habitus of the reader becomes embodied in the scrawl, and the next reader must negotiate and navigate the cultural capital of this new author. As such, the doodle constitutes an alternative authority and economy of meaning within the text.Recent studies indicate doodling, often regarded as behavior that announces a person’s boredom and withdrawal, is actually a very special tool to prevent memory loss. Jackie Andrade, an expert from the School of Psychology at the University of Plymouth, maintains that doodling actually “offsets the effects of selective memory blockade,” which yields a surprising result (quoted in “Doodling Gets”). Doodlers exhibit 29% more memory recall than those who passively listen, frozen in an unequal bond with the speaker/lecturer. Students that doodle actually retain more information and are likely more productive due to their active listening. They adeptly absorb information while students who stare patiently or daydream falter.Furthermore, in a 2006 paper, Andrew Kear argues that “doodling is a way in which students, consciously or not, stake a claim of personal agency and challenge some the values inherent in the education system” (2). As a teacher concerned with the engagement of students, he asked for three classes to submit their doodles. Letting them submit any two-dimensional graphic or text made during a class (even if made from body fluid), he soon discovered examples of “acts of resistance” in “student-initiated effort[s] to carve out a sense of place within the educational institution” (6). Not simply an ennui-prone teenager or a proto-surrealist trying to render some automatic writing from the fringes of cognition, a student doodling may represent contested space both in terms of the page itself and the ambience of the environment. The doodle indicates tension, and according to Kear, reflects students reclaiming “their own self-recognized voice” (6).In a widely referenced 1966 article (known as the “doodle” article) intended to describe the paragraph organisational styles of different cultures, Robert Kaplan used five doodles to investigate a writer’s thought patterns, which are rooted in cultural values. Now considered rather problematic by some critics after being adopted by educators for teacher-training materials, Kaplan’s doodles-as-models suggest, “English speakers develop their ideas in a linear, hierarchal fashion and ‘Orientals’ in a non-liner, spiral fashion…” (Severino 45). In turn, when used as pedagogical tools, these graphics, intentionally or not, may lead an “ethnocentric, assimilationist stance” (45). In this case, doodles likely shape the discourse of English as Second Language instruction. Doodles also represent a unique kind of “finger trace,” not unlike prints from the tips of a person’s fingers and snowflakes. Such symbol systems might be used for “a means of lightweight authentication,” according to Christopher Varenhorst of MIT (1). Doodles, he posits, can be used as “passdoodles"–a means by which a program can “quickly identify users.” They are singular expressions that are quirky and hard to duplicate; thus, doodles could serve as substitute methods of verifying people who desire devices that can safeguard their privacy without users having to rely on an ever-increasing number of passwords. Doodles may represent one such key. For many years, psychologists and psychiatrists have used doodles as therapeutic tools in their treatment of children that have endured hardship, ailments, and assault. They may indicate conditions, explain various symptoms and pathologies, and reveal patterns that otherwise may go unnoticed. For instance, doodles may “reflect a specific physical illness and point to family stress, accidents, difficult sibling relationships, and trauma” (Lowe 307). Lowe reports that children who create a doodle featuring their own caricature on the far side of the page, distant from an image of parent figures on the same page, may be experiencing detachment, while the portrayal of a father figure with “jagged teeth” may indicate a menace. What may be difficult to investigate in a doctor’s office conversation or clinical overview may, in fact, be gleaned from “the evaluation of a child’s spontaneous doodle” (307). So, if children are suffering physically or psychologically and unable to express themselves in a fully conscious and articulate way, doodles may reveal their “self-concept” and how they feel about their bodies; therefore, such creative and descriptive inroads are important diagnostic tools (307). Austrian born researcher Erich Guttman and his cohort Walter MacLay both pioneered art therapy in England during the mid-twentieth century. They posited doodles might offer some insight into the condition of schizophrenics. Guttman was intrigued by both the paintings associated with the Surrealist movement and the pioneering, much-debated work of Sigmund Freud too. Although Guttman mostly studied professionally trained artists who suffered from delusions and other conditions, he also collected a variety of art from patients, including those undergoing mescaline therapy, which alters a person’s consciousness. In a stroke of luck, they were able to convince a newspaper editor at the Evening Standard to provide them over 9,000 doodles that were provided by readers for a contest, each coded with the person’s name, age, and occupation. This invaluable data let the academicians compare the work of those hospitalised with the larger population. Their results, released in 1938, contain several key declarations and remain significant contributions to the field. Subsequently, Francis Reitman recounted them in his own book Psychotic Art: Doodles “release the censor of the conscious mind,” allowing a person to “relax, which to creative people was indispensable to production.”No appropriate descriptive terminology could be agreed upon.“Doodles are not communications,” for the meaning is only apparent when analysed individually.Doodles are “self-meaningful.” (37) Doodles, the authors also established, could be divided into this taxonomy: “stereotypy, ornamental details, movements, figures, faces and animals” or those “depicting scenes, medley, and mixtures” (37). The authors also noted that practitioners from the Jungian school of psychology often used “spontaneously produced drawings” that were quite “doodle-like in nature” in their own discussions (37). As a modern folklorist, I venture that doodles offer rich potential for our discipline as well. At this stage, I am offering a series of dictums, especially in regards to doodles that are commonly found adjacent to text in books and magazines, notebooks and journals, that may be expanded upon and investigated further. Doodles allow the reader to repopulate the text with ideogram-like expressions that are highly personalised, even inscrutable, like ambient sounds.Doodles re-purpose the text. The text no longer is unidirectional. The text becomes a point of convergence between writer and reader. The doodling allows for such a conversation, bilateral flow, or “talking back” to the text.Doodles reveal a secret language–informal codes that hearken back to the “lively, spontaneous, and charged with feeling” works of child art or naïve art that Victor Sanua discusses as being replaced in a child’s later years by art that is “stilted, formal, and conforming” (62).Doodling animates blank margins, the dead space of the text adjacent to the script, making such places ripe for spontaneous, fertile, and exploratory markings.Doodling reveals a democratic, participatory ethos. No text is too sacred, no narrative too inviolable. Anything can be reworked by the intimate graffiti of the reader. The authority of the book is not fixed; readers negotiate and form a second intelligence imprinted over the top of the original text, blurring modes of power.Doodles reveal liminal moments. Since the reader in unmonitored, he or she can express thoughts that may be considered marginal or taboo by the next reader. The original subject of the book itself does not restrict the reader. Thus, within the margins of the page, a brief suspension of boundaries and borders, authority and power, occurs. The reader hides in anonymity, free to reroute the meaning of the book. Doodling may convey a reader’s infantalism. Every book can become a picture book. This art can be the route returning a reader to the ambience of childhood.Doodling may constitute Illuminated/Painted Texts in reverse, commemorating the significance of the object in hitherto unexpected forms and revealing the reader’s codex. William Blake adorned his own poems by illuminating the skin/page that held his living verse; common readers may do so too, in naïve, nomadic, and primitive forms. Doodling demarcates tension zones, yielding social-historical insights into eras while offering psychological glimpses and displaying aesthetic values of readers-cum-writers.Doodling reveals margins as inter-zones, replete with psychogeography. While the typography is sanctioned, legitimate, normalised, and official discourse (“chartered” and “manacled,” to hijack lines from William Blake), the margins are a vernacular depository, a terminus, allowing readers a sense of agency and autonomy. The doodled page becomes a visible reminder and signifier: all pages are potentially “contested” spaces. Whereas graffiti often allows a writer to hide anonymously in the light in a city besieged by multiple conflicting texts, doodles allow a reader-cum-writer’s imprint to live in the cocoon of a formerly fossilised text, waiting for the light. Upon being opened, the book, now a chimera, truly breathes. Further exploration and analysis should likely consider several issues. What truly constitutes and shapes the role of agent and reader? Is the reader an agent all the time, or only when offering resistant readings through doodles? How is a doodler’s agency mediated by the author or the format of texts in forms that I have to map? Lastly, if, as I have argued, the ambient space allows potential energies to hover at the edge, ready to illustrate a tension zone and occupy the page, what occurs in the age of digital or e-books? Will these platforms signal an age of acquiescence to manufactured products or signal era of vernacular responses, somehow hitched to html code and PDF file infiltration? Will bytes totally replace type soon in the future, shaping unforeseen actions by doodlers? Attached Figures Figure One presents the intimate graffiti of my grandfather, found in the 1907 edition of his McGuffey’s Eclectic Spelling Book. The depiction is simple, even crude, revealing a figure found on the adjacent page to Lesson 248, “Of Characters Used in Punctuation,” which lists the perfunctory functions of commas, semicolons, periods, and so forth. This doodle may offset the routine, rote, and rather humdrum memorisation of such grammatical tools. The smiling figure may embody and signify joy on an otherwise machine-made bare page, a space where my grandfather illustrated his desires (to lighten a mood, to ease dissatisfaction?). Historians Joe Austin and Michael Willard examine how youth have been historically left without legitimate spaces in which to live out their autonomy outside of adult surveillance. For instance, graffiti often found on walls and trains may reflect a sad reality: young people are pushed to appropriate “nomadic, temporary, abandoned, illegal, or otherwise unwatched spaces within the landscape” (14). Indeed, book graffiti, like the graffiti found on surfaces throughout cities, may offer youth a sense of appropriation, authorship, agency, and autonomy: they take the page of the book, commit their writing or illustration to the page, discover some freedom, and feel temporarily independent even while they are young and disempowered. Figure Two depicts the doodles of experimental filmmaker Jim Fetterley (Animal Charm productions) during his tenure as a student at the Art Institute of Chicago in the early 1990s. His two doodles flank the text of “Lady Lazarus” by Sylvia Plath, regarded by most readers as an autobiographical poem that addresses her own suicide attempts. The story of Lazarus is grounded in the Biblical story of John Lazarus of Bethany, who was resurrected from the dead. The poem also alludes to the Holocaust (“Nazi Lampshades”), the folklore surrounding cats (“And like the cat I have nine times to die”), and impending omens of death (“eye pits “ … “sour breath”). The lower doodle seems to signify a motorised tank-like machine, replete with a furnace or engine compartment on top that bellows smoke. Such ominous images, saturated with potential cartoon-like violence, may link to the World War II references in the poem. Meanwhile, the upper doodle seems to be curiously insect-like, and Fetterley’s name can be found within the illustration, just like Plath’s poem is self-reflexive and addresses her own plight. Most viewers might find the image a bit more lighthearted than the poem, a caricature of something biomorphic and surreal, but not very lethal. Again, perhaps this is a counter-message to the weight of the poem, a way to balance the mood and tone, or it may well represent the larval-like apparition that haunts the very thoughts of Plath in the poem: the impending disease of her mind, as understood by the wary reader. References Austin, Joe, and Michael Willard. “Introduction: Angels of History, Demons of Culture.” Eds. 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Morton, Timothy. “‘Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star’ as an Ambient Poem; a Study of Dialectical Image; with Some Remarks on Coleridge and Wordsworth.” Romantic Circles Praxis Series (2001). 6 Jan. 2009 ‹http://www.rc.umd.edu/praxis/ecology/morton/morton.html›. Potter, Russell A. Spectacular Vernaculars: Hip Hop and the Politics of Postmodernism. Albany: State University of New York, 1995. Read, Allen Walker. Classic American Graffiti: Lexical Evidence from Folk Epigraphy in Western North America. Waukesha, Wisconsin: Maledicta Press, 1997. Reitman, Francis. Psychotic Art. London: Routledge, 1999. Sanua, Victor. “The World of Mystery and Wonder of the Schizophrenic Patient.” International Journal of Social Psychiatry 8 (1961): 62-65. Severino, Carol. “The ‘Doodles’ in Context: Qualifying Claims about Contrastive Rhetoric.” The Writing Center Journal 14.1 (Fall 1993): 44-62. Van Cleave, Claire. Master Drawings of the Italian Rennaissance. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard UP, 2007. 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