Fungus-growing ants display symbiont preference in behavioral assays, both towards the fungus they cultivate for food and Actinobacteria they maintain on their cuticle for antibiotic production against parasites. These Actinobacteria, genus Pseudonocardia Henssen (Pseudonocardiacea: Actinomycetales), help defend the ants' fungal mutualist from specialized parasites. In Acromyrmex Mayr (Hymenopt...

Context speaking rate is an important cue in spoken-word recognition in a speaker’s native language [1], [2]. Native speakers entrain to the context rate; when they encounter ambiguous regions of speech, native speakers perceive fewer words and/or syllables when the surrounding speaking material is presented a relatively slow rate than when presented with a relatively fast context speaking rate...

This paper describes an experiment aimed at determining whether native and non-native speakers of Dutch significantly differ on a number of quantitative measures related to fluency and whether these measures can be successfully employed to predict fluency scores. Read speech of 20 native and 60 non-native speakers of Dutch was scored for fluency by nine experts and was then analyzed by means of...

Audiovisual material accompanied by interlingual subtitles is a powerful pedagogical tool which can help improve the vocabulary learning of second-language learners. This study was intended to determine whether or not the mode (standard and reversed) of subtitling affects the incidental vocabulary acquisition of Iranian L2 learners while watching TV programs. Forty-five participants were random...

This study investigates non-native speech rhythm in German. Three native speakers and 18 learners of German with three different native languages were recorded reading and re-telling a story. Vowel reduction and deletion was analyzed in one particular type of German suffix. Speech rhythm was investigated with the syllable ratio, a new measurement which determines the mean ratio of durational re...