We examine the referential choices (pronouns/zeros vs. names/descriptions) made by high-functioning children and adolescents with autism and a well-matched typically developing control group as they relate a narrative. The process of choosing appropriate referring expressions has been proposed to require mentalizing abilities. Given reports that autism is associated with mentalizing deficits, i...

Often managers spot a chance to do something valuable for their company, but for some reason, they cannot get started. Even if they begin the project, they give up when they see the first big hurdle. The inability to take purposeful action seems to be pervasive across companies. Managers tend to ignore or postpone dealing with crucial issues which require reflection, systematic planning, creati...

Communicative language use largely entails regular patterns consisting of pre-constructed phrases or sequences. These sequences have been examined by many researchers to find the situation-based formulas which may help L2 learners follow a possibly more target-like speaking system. This study, therefore, explored two categories of formulaic expressions including speech formulas and situation-bo...

γδ T cells are considered to be innate-like lymphocytes that respond rapidly to stress without clonal selection and differentiation. Here we use next-generation sequencing to probe how this paradigm relates to human Vδ2neg T cells, implicated in responses to viral infection and cancer. The prevalent Vδ1 T cell receptor (TCR) repertoire is private and initially unfocused in cord blood, typically...

In the northeast United States, control of West Nile virus (WNV) vectors has been unfocused because of a lack of accurate knowledge about the roles different mosquitoes play in WNV transmission. We analyzed the risk posed by 10 species of mosquitoes for transmitting WNV to humans by using a novel risk-assessment measure that combines information on the abundance, infection prevalence, vector co...

The aim of this paper is to examine effects on syllable prominence exerted by word and phrase boundaries, lexical stress, and sentence focus, and by the interactions between these factors. In a production study, German verb prefixes potentially forming prosodic minimal word pairs were systematically placed in a set of different contexts. Acoustic analyses showed a consistent effect of lexical s...

blind source separation technique separates mixed signals blindly without any information on the mixing system. in this paper, we have used two evolutionary algorithms, namely, genetic algorithm and particle swarm optimization for blind source separation. in these techniques a novel fitness function that is based on the mutual information and high order statistics is proposed. in order to evalu...

This paper examines predictions made by two theories of the relationship between pitch accent and focus. The empirical evidence presented suggests that listeners are sensitive to a variety of factors that may affect the focus projection ability of pitch accents, that is the ability of a pitch accent on one word to mark focus on a larger constituent. The findings suggest that listeners' interpre...

The phrase adjacent to ‘i ’ is prosodically contrasted, and is interpreted as an unexpected undergoer of the event. The focused phrase can be displaced, as shown in (2b), which shows that no coordinate constituent is formed. If this is what is going on in (1), then one can argue that HC does not exist. However, the examples in (1) can be interpreted without the focus reading. They can occur unf...

Developing reading comprehension ability is an important aspect in acquisition of a language. The  present  study  focused  on  improving  reading  comprehension  ability  through  Task-based Instruction  (TBI).  TBI  is  a  methodology  that  develops  from  a  focus  on  classroom  tasks.  The participants of the study were 135 Iranian female students at different levels selected from high sc...