Insulin promotes glucose uptake into skeletal muscle through recruitment of glucose transporter 4 (GLUT4) to the plasma membrane. Rab GTPases are molecular switches mobilizing intracellular vesicles, and Rab13 is necessary for insulin-regulated GLUT4-vesicle exocytic translocation in muscle cells. We show that Rab13 engages the scaffold protein MICAL-L2 in this process. RNA interference-mediate...

This longitudinal study tracked the neuro-cognitive changes associated with second language (L2) grammar learning in adults in order to investigate how L2 processing is shaped by a learner's first language (L1) background and L2 proficiency. Previous studies using event-related potentials (ERPs) have argued that late L2 learners cannot elicit a P600 in response to L2 grammatical structures that...

This study examined the relation between musical ability and second-language (L2) proficiency in adult learners. L2 ability was assessed in four domains: receptive phonology, productive phonology, syntax, and lexical knowledge. Also assessed were various other factors that might explain individual differences in L2 ability, including age of L2 immersion, patterns of language use and exposure, a...

The paper presents a novel learning algorithm for the class of L2 Support Vector Machines classifiers dubbed Direct L2 SVM. The proposed algorithm avoids solving the quadratic programming problem and yet, it produces both the same exact results as the classic quadratic programming based solution in a significantly shorter CPU time. The connections between various L2 SVM algorithms will be highl...

In the field of second language (L2) production, phonetic investigations of L2 fricatives are rare due to the complexity of establishing similarities and differences between L1 and L2 fricatives. The study of English /s/ production by L2 Thai learners has not received much attention, as researchers on L2 English have typically believed that learners would produce this sound with ease due to the...

Following several decades of research on native language (L1) processing, psycholinguists have more recently begun to investigate how non-native language (L2) speakers comprehend and process language in real time. Regarding the traditional assumption that L2 learners have 'difficulty with grammar', this new research has revealed some unexpected similarities and differences between L1 and L2 pro...

the present study attempts to investigate parsing preferences (early vs. late closure) of native and l2 learners of both english and persian when they read ambiguous relative clauses. the purpose is to find out if l2 learners process l2 linguistic input in the way monolingual speakers of that language do. the participants took tests including 10 test sentences plus 10 distractors, each followed...

Previous research has provided evidence that second language (L2) learners use gesture to enhance spoken communication with interlocutors, and that gesture facilitates L2 word learning. The current study investigates how L2 learners use gesture to communicate in conversational settings, and whether their gesturing in these settings facilitates L2 acquisition beyond the immediate context. The re...

Language proficiency is predicted to modulate orthographic-semantic association in second language (L2) vocabulary acquisition, in accordance with the assumptions of the Developmental Bilingual Interactive-Activation model (BIA-d) (Grainger et al., 2010). The current study explored this modulation during pre-attentive L2 orthographic perception. ERPs were recorded from Chinese-English bilingual...