Conflicting opinions about the effectiveness of H. pakistanae as a biological control agent for hydrilla prompt researchers to find a method for assessing the fly's success. Developing a physiological age-grading system for the fly using ovarian morphology to detect changes in reproductive activity is useful for evaluating reproductive status of the fly in field populations. Changes in the appearance of follicular relics in ovaries with oviposition provide a reliable method to estimate fecundity. Characteristics of follicular relics were used to develop a system with eight physiological age classes, three nulliparous and five parous. Changes that occur in the fat body were used to assist in classification of nulliparous females or those with low egg counts.

This paper investigates the possible effect of age on quotative variation in spoken British English with focus on the innovative quotative constructions be like and go and the standard construction say. The study is corpus-based and uses the Spoken British National Corpus 2014 as its material. Using the search tools provided in the corpus, datasets were restricted to include material from female speakers only and for each age-bracket in isolation. The results of the study were analysed in apparent time and through real time comparisons with previous studies. Similarly to previous studies, it was found that be like constructions are still favoured by young speakers, but the results also indicate that be like is used at higher frequencies among middle-aged speakers than previous studies have demonstrated. This indicates that be like is indeed an example of language change and not just an age-graded feature. The second innovative quotative investigated was go. The frequency distribution demonstrated by go was very different to that of be like. The results indicate that the ratio of go in comparison to be like (and say) have decreased drastically in the past twenty years when the results of the present study were compared to previous studies. This may indicate that the presence of two or more quotative variants within a speaker community may lead to the reduction in use of one of these variants due to "linguistic competition". The results of this study strengthen previous arguments that the presence of be like may lead to a decrease in the use of quotative go. The standard form say is still the most common variant for most age-brackets, apart from adolescent and young-adult speakers. However, in comparison to earlier studies the ratios of say have decreased for middle-aged speakers and younger. This may be due to an increased choice of quotative variants which are available to the speaker.

Previous studies have shown that not only is there something called visual language through which we understand graphical expressions, but also that each culture has its own visual language. Furthermore, there are variances within these visual languages, denoted by genre, which can be interpreted to be dialects. In a similar fashion to a study by Neil Cohn and Sean Ehly in 2016, which uncovered the dialectical differences, this study has utilized 67 graphical schemas, known as visual morphemes, and a corpus of 20 volumes of Japanese comics, to investigate age-grading in the Japanese visual language. The corpus, consisting of 10 volumes aimed towards adults and 10 volumes aimed towards children, was searched for graphical schemas, and their relative frequencies were analyzed with independent samples t-tests. The results show great similarities between the populations, supporting the findings of previous studies indicating that there is a shared visual language between genres. However, there were also great differences in how the visual morphemes were used, with many morphemes being used in statistically different proportions between the populations. Further age-grading was also found in the absolute frequency and the meanings of the morphemes which were used, with children’s visual language appearing to be much more expressive. These results imply that there is significant age-grading in the Japanese visual language and that it can be characterized in several ways, including absolute frequency, content, and proportional use.

This paper aims to explore the linguistic features of the dialect in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan in the United States. The study sets out to define what the distinct features of the dialect are, and investigate frequencies among Upper Peninsula natives, specifically from Marquette County. The research conducted for this thesis is based on multiple recordings of a small number of native dialect speakers from this area. The results show that features such as pronunciation, and the vowel sounds in particular, as well as dialectal expressions play a large part in defining this characteristic dialect. Furthermore, analyses of consonant sounds, lexical items, dialect expressions such as eh and ya, and the matter of stress, are included in the study as well as a brief discussion on how age- grading may affect the dialect.

The relationship between community-wide change and patterns of variation and change within the individual is one of the cornerstones of variationist theorising. But while sociolinguistic theory makes clear and testable predictions regarding the use of stable vernacular features across the life-span of the individual, we lack real-time evidence on the age-graded nature of stable variability. Indeed, whereas apparent time research highlights the diachronic stability of (ing), only two research projects have explored its use within the individual speaker. Both report on pre-adult speakers. Our research expands the window of analysis by adding a later age-bracket to the investigation of age-graded variability. We consider the variable realisation of (ing) in a group of individuals between early adulthood and retirement.

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