In the late 1990s, a new musical genre emerged in Trinidad called ragga soca. Ragga soca is described as the product of blending Trinidad's indigenous soca music with Jamaican dancehall. One peculiarity of ragga soca is the borrowing of Jamaican Creole English phonological features into the performance genre. Initially, there was much opposition to this genre as it challenged notions of Trinidadian identity and self. This paper considers the linguistic innovativeness of ragga soca artists, in particular, their use of Jamaican Creole English phonological borrowings, demonstrating that they have not only created a new performance genre, but have used Jamaican Creole English to mediate their Trinidadian identity.

Over the past few years, several recombinant ALVAC constructs have been used as delivery systems in various vaccine research studies and trials. The ALVAC-HIV vCP1521 vector has been used as a vaccine delivery system in the RV144 study, a phase III HIV study that displayed over 31% protective efficacy. One of the important parameters for evaluating the potency of an ALVAC construct is the stable expression of proteins encoded by the inserted genes. Herein, the expression of inserted gp120 and gag genes in two manufactured ALVAC-HIV vCP1521 lots have been determined by two immunoplaque methods (dish and plaque lift). Both methods were specific and robust and demonstrated that the ALVAC-HIV vCP1521 lots were able to express gp120 and gag proteins in over 99% of the infectious plaques.

This paper examines the extent to which fundamental frequency (F0) contributes to the stereotype that Indo-Trinidadians have a distinctive way of speaking, namely that they have high-pitched voices in contrast to Afro-Trinidadians, who are perceived as having voices with a low tone. We report the results of an experiment in which the F0 of voice samples of both Afro- and Indo-Trinidadians was acoustically modified to investigate this stereotype. Listeners were presented with unmodified as well as modified samples and were asked to identify the speaker’s ethnicity. Our results reveal that F0 is indeed one of the salient cues which Trinidadians rely on to distinguish ethnicity. In addition, phonation emerges as a potential ethnicity cue.

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