The goal of this paper was to document how native (L1) speakers of a language with a two-way stop contrast acquire a three-way stop contrast in a second language (L2). Mandarin presents a two-way stop contrast cued primarily by VOT, whereas Korean presents a three-way stop contrast cued jointly by VOT and the f0 of the following vowel. Mandarin and Korean stop productions from 12 L1 Mandarin no...

Class 1 release factor in eukaryotes (eRF1) recognizes stop codons and promotes peptide release from the ribosome. The 'molecular mimicry' hypothesis suggests that domain 1 of eRF1 is analogous to the tRNA anticodon stem-loop. Recent studies strongly support this hypothesis and several models for specific interactions between stop codons and residues in domain 1 have been proposed. In this stud...

conclusions: premature stop codon in the s gene was observed in all countries with evaluable hbv genome sequences. co-existence of detectable hepatitis b surface antigen (hbsag) and s gene premature stop codon was inconsistent with other studies. investigations on yield truncated hbsag are suggested to determine if they can affect elisa hbsag results. background: we have previously reported on ...

OBJECTIVE To describe the trends in the prevalence of smoking, quitting and initiation among Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander men and women aged 18 years and over. METHODS Analysis of responses to smoking questions in national Indigenous surveys in 1994, 2002, 2004 and 2008. RESULTS Male Indigenous smoking prevalence fell significantly from 58.5% in 1994 to 52.6% in 2008, an absolute d...

Past research found that environmental uncertainty leads people to behave differently depending on their childhood environment. For example, economic uncertainty leads people from poor childhoods to become more impulsive while leading people from wealthy childhoods to become less impulsive. Drawing on life history theory, we examine the psychological mechanism driving such diverging responses t...

OBJECTIVE To describe the socioeconomic and geographic distribution of smoking behaviour in Canada among 19,383 individuals (51% women) aged 15-85 years. METHODS Current smoking and quitting were modeled using standard and multilevel logistic regression. Markers of socioeconomic status (SES) were education and occupation. Geography was defined by Canadian Provinces. RESULTS The adjusted pre...

AIMS To document accurately the amount of quitting, length of quit attempts and prevalence of plans and serious thought about quitting among smokers. DESIGN We used longitudinal data from 7 waves of the International Tobacco Control Policy Evaluation Four Country Survey (ITC-4). We considered point-prevalence data and cumulative prevalence over the 7 years of the study. We also derived annual...

This paper describes the system used by the LIPN-IIMAS team in the Task 2, Semantic Textual Similarity, at SemEval 2015, in both the English and Spanish sub-tasks. We included some features based on alignment measures and we tested different learning models, in particular Random Forests, which proved the best among those used in our participation.

Recent analyses suggest that cigarette excise taxes lower prenatal smoking. It is unclear, however, whether the association between taxes and prenatal smoking represents a decline among women of reproductive age or a particular response by pregnant women. We address this question directly with an analysis of quit and relapse behavior during and after pregnancy. We find that the price elasticity...

During production of glottal stops the glottal vibration has unequal cycles and is caused by laryngealization. While one can perceive the features of laryngealization in the speech, it is difficult to analyse the signal to detect these source features from the standard spectrum-based analysis methods. In this paper we propose methods to extract the voice source vibration characteristics, and sh...