Generally prosody is described as the rhythmic, dynamic and melodic features of language. Prosody is further often described as suprasegmental, since its properties go beyond vowels and consonants, which are segmental characteristics of language. A relationship between prosody and music has been noticed and described for several decades. At present, there are several studies proving relationship between prosodic and musical abilities. The aim of the present study was to construct a test for prosodic non-linguistic perception and production regarding intonation and rhythm. The test was tried out on 16 children with typical language development aged 4;6-7;6 years. Before testing of ITAP each participant were asked about musical experience.

The process of European Integration and creation of the single market revealed many questions and boundaries on the development and improvement of the European Social Policy. Pension?s sustainability has become the priority issue especially during the EU enlargement processes. Different policy instruments and institutions available to governments of Member States in realization of social objectives resulted in a growing diversity of pension polices which produced different combinations of public and private provisions - ?private-public hybrids? , with the state exercising different degrees of influence in their development.

The aim of this Master?s thesis is to deepen the understandingof how discourses on reading are manifested in Swedishdaily press 2007-2010. The empirical material is based on76 articles from four national newspapers. The questionsasked are: what categorizations emerge on reading; whatpossible themes can be discerned; which discourses onreading appear in newspapers and how are these defined;and what consequences may the discourses have?The study examines how reading is described and how perceptionsand images of reading emerge and the factors affectingthis, through critical Discourse Analyse according toErnesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe.

Gunnebo House and Gardens was designed during the late 18th century by architect Carl Wilhelm Carlberg as a summer residence for the wealthy merchant John Hall Sr. and his family. The garden consists of formal garden, kitchen garden and English park. For the first two parts several original drawings have been preserved and here a lot of restoration work has been carried out. This paper aims to examine how the English park might have been implemented during John Hall Sr.?s time and to create a plant scheme for the area called ?Engelska kullen? (The English hill).

The study aims to describe, compare, and analyze how managers and basic staff in disability care reflects on education and competence in the organization and from an organizational context explain how the professionalization efforts can be understood at different levels of disability care. Highlighting these questions can stimulate discussion within this field when it comes to the evaluation of competence and skills of staff working with people with various disabilities, which is also sought after in society even more today. The study is qualitative and the result is based on five semi-structured interviews with managers and basic staff in disability care. The interview questions were categorized according to the concepts that are central in this essay: competence, training, professionalism and organization.The results show that there is some doubt about what a higher competence of personnel in direct contact with the users would mean. Among the basic staff uncertainty seems to be highest.

This thesis explores how the concept of ?legal corruption? manifests itself within the European Investment Bank with a modern approach to the theoretical understanding of anticorruption efforts. This approach conceptualises the idea of complementing theories based on contextual applicability rather than focusing on their competing qualities. The European Investment Bank (EIB), as the world?s largest multilateral lender, is an underexplored yet vital organ of the European Union, which has recently faced criticism for its alleged lack of transparency and dubious application of policy.

Objective: For a long-term and viable economic development to take place in a country it needs to promote creativity and innovation in enterprises. The study applies the process model to study the process of innovation in innovative companies in Sweden. The study also applies the technology commercialization model to indicate the ability of companies to commercialize the technology to the market.Main purpose: The purpose of this work is to study how companies in Sweden proceed with an idea generation and if they manage to commercialize these ideas.Method: This study used a qualitative approach. Multiple case studies & interviews.Conclusion: The innovative ideas in innovative SME:s in Sweden is emerged from randomly events and from systematic developments. Consumer chock is the trigger who draws focus on the idea.

TPB, The Swedish Library of Talking Books and Braille, has requested a study to investigate the organization and content of a possible future Swedish web portal for users with reading disabilities. The aim of this thesis is to conduct such a study, with an emphasis on knowledge organization. The main aspects studied are formal description, representation, search and retrieval, document retrieval, and additionally also aspects related to content. The following questions are answered in this thesis: - How are web portals, online databases and Internet libraries for users with reading disabilities constructed, from an organization of knowledge point of view? - How can these solutions for knowledge organization be incorporated into a possible Swedish web portal? - With regards to content, which additional aspects are present in the studied web portals, online databases and Internet libraries? The questions are addressed through a detailed study of ten web portals, online databases and Internet libraries from Nordic and Anglo-American parts of the world.

Since July 2005 the major companies listed on the Swedish stock exchanges are required to apply the Swedish Code of Corporate Governance. The code states that companies shall have a nomination committee responsible for nominating new board candidates and seek to obtain gender equality in the Board of Directors. This paper examines the trend of board as well as nomination committee composition among Sweden's 60 largest publicly traded companies between 2005 and 2008. Our overall finding is that neither the board nor the nomination committee composition has changed to a notable extent during the period and that the share of newly appointed female board members has actually decreased. However, the trends vary between different sectors.

This case study has been conducted within the Swedish fitness chain World Class to explore the opportunities for knowledge development and transfers within franchise networks. We have interviewed the product manager at the World Class headquarter, the owner of a franchise club and a local product manager from the same facility. Our finding indicates that various forms of knowledge transfer occur within the World Class network, particularly in product development and sales. The transfer occurs within the framework set by World Class with regularly scheduled meetings. In addition informal networks provide other means of knowledge exchange between some units.

Regionalisation has become an increasingly important phenomenon in a globalized world. As models of regional integration, the European Union (EU) and the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) are two prominent examples. This thesis seeks to explore through a comparative analysis, the different mechanisms and institutions for handling breaches against fundamental values within the two regional organizations. Inter-linked with the issue of the legal-institutional framework is that of what values the mechanisms are designed to protect. The method used for the analysis is first and foremost that of public international and European law, but the thesis also attempts to give a broader picture of the issues presented.

The aim of the present study is to describe and analyse how an inter-cultural perspective presents itself in the didactic considerations and in the practice of preschool teachers on a multiethnic preschool.The theoretical perspective upon which the study is founded is social constructivism, but in addition to this Ingegerd Municio?s idea of two existing discourses present within the institutions in the Swedish educational system, as well as René León?s concept of a diversified normality, has been used as theoretical tools and points of departure.The empirical investigation consists of a qualitative field study at a multi-ethnic preschool, where participating observation and group interviews have been used to collect data. In these teachers from the preschool have participated.The results and the analysis of the data show that an inter-cultural perspective surfaces in the didactic considerations and in the practice of the preschool teachers in their construction of a diversified normality. The diversified normality thus constructed is constituted through different social processes. I have here identified the following ones: the preschool teachers emphasize differences among the children in general, they allow that the children behave differently and they allow them to be different; they recognize ?cultural? differences, differences in origin, and frames of reference, and they recognize that the children at the preschool are bilingual..

The purpose of this essay was to study the implementation of a policy document, which concerns questions of integration, in a municipality with an indirect government. I have especially focused on issues regarding how civil servants describe the usage of a specific policy document and to what extent their autonomy and the indirect government have had an impact on implementation, and to what extent signals from surrounding institutions have had an impact on the creation of the policy document. The study was based on qualitative interviews in groups, pairs and with single individuals with twenty-seven civil servants and politicians working with issues concerning the specific policy document.One of the conclusions of my study is that the reason for producing the document in the first place is that the municipality as an organization strives to acquire a sense of legitimacy. The intentions of the document have only partly been implemented by the civil servants and politicians, since the document is not used in their daily work. Here, their autonomy has played an important part, as the choice to not use the document is the servants' own.

A qualitative study is presented concerning children?s participation in the local decisionmaking in Swedish municipalities. The study also aims at finding out what are considered to be successful factors and obstacles connected to the implementation of children?s participation in local decision-making. The study contains a summary of the convention on the rights of the child, focusing on article 12, as well as previous research findings concerning children?s participation and factors enabling respectively hindering participation.

The purpose of this study was to examine social workers apprehensions about institutional placement of youths and what determines when these proceedings are used. When research not always shows that institutional placements lead to positive changes for youngsters, we wondered how social workers act on their assessment to institutional placement. We wanted to find out if the social workers meet any dilemmas along the way. To find out about that we used qualitative interviews with ten social workers, who worked in social service and came from different places in the southern parts of Sweden. To analyze our material we used the theory of human service organization and street-level bureaucrats work situation.