The dose-response effects of platelet-derived growth factor BB (PDGF-BB) on rat dermal fibroblast (RDF) behavior in mechanically stressed and unstressed type I collagen and fibrin were investigated using quantitative assays developed in our laboratory. In chemotaxis experiments, RDFs responded optimally (P < 0.05) to a gradient of 10 ng/ml PDGF-BB in both collagen and fibrin. In separate experi...

OBJECTIVE Blood glucose concentrations of type 1 diabetic rats are vulnerable, especially to stress and trauma. The present study aimed to investigate the fasting endogenous glucose production and skeletal muscle glucose uptake of Streptozotocin induced type 1 diabetic rats using an unstressed vein and artery implantation of catheters at the tails of the rats as a platform. RESEARCH DESIGN AN...

In addition to typological, turn-taking or sociolinguistic factors, presence of creaky voice in spontaneous interaction is also influenced by the syntactic and phonological properties of speech. For example, creaky voice is reportedly more frequent in function words than content words, has been observed to accompany unstressed syllables and ends of phrases, and is associated with relaxation and...

The acoustic realization of vowels with lexical stress generally differs substantially from their unstressed counterparts, which are more reduced in spectral quality, shorter in duration, weaker in intensity and tend to have a flatter spectral tilt. Therefore, in a continuous speech recognizer (CSR) it would appear profitable to train separate models for the stressed and unstressed variants of ...

Preclinical data indicate the antidepressant activity of zinc and the involvement of the brain-derived neurotrophic factor (BDNF) in this mechanism. The present study investigates the effect of chronic (16 days) combined treatment with zinc (15 mg/kg zinc hydroaspartate) and imipramine (5 mg/kg) in chronic unpredictable stress (CUS) on the BDNF mRNA level in the rat brain. Moreover, serum zinc ...

This paper proposes a new technique for acoustic modeling of stressed/unstressed syllables in sentence utterances of American English. Here, relative differences of acoustic features between two consecutive syllables characterizing “stressed” or “unstressed” were introduced into the HMM-based acoustic modeling. This is because syllables can be identified as stressed or unstressed only after com...

Recent phonological approaches incorporate phonetic principles in the motivation of phonological regularities, e.g. vowel reduction and neutralization in unstressed position by target undershoot. So far, evidence for this hypothesis is based on impressionistic and acoustic data but not on articulatory data. The major goal of this study is to compare formant spaces and lingual positions during t...

Prosody in speech is manifested by variations of loudness, exaggeration of pitch, and specific phonetic variations of prosodic segments. For example, in the stressed and unstressed syllables, there are differences in place or manner of articulation, vowels in unstressed syllables may have a more central articulation, and vowel reduction may occur when a vowel changes from a stressed to an unstr...

BACKGROUND syllable deletion (SD) frequently occurs in Specific Language Impairment and can indicate a deviant factor in the phonologic acquisition process of these subjects. AIM to verify the occurrence of SD in the spontaneous speech of children with SLI and to verify the influence of word extension and syllable stress in this process. METHODS participants were 27 children with SLI, aged ...

UNLABELLED The purpose of the present study was to investigate whether there is a relationship between stuttering on stressed syllables and the duration of these syllables. Sixteen adults who stutter read a text consisting of 226 syllables. The relative stress of each syllable was rated, and syllables were categorized into long- and short-stressed syllables, unstressed syllables and intermediat...