Japanese language learners of stress-timed languages like English (L2) or German (L3) have problems acquiring the prosody of these languages. The questions are, how to teach prosody in this context efficiently, and – specifically – what role visualizations play in the acquisition of accentuation. Therefore a reading experiment was undertaken, as reported here, in which students read out texts i...

In an event-related potential experiment with Chinese discourses as material, we investigated how and when accentuation influences spoken discourse comprehension in relation to the different information states of the critical words. These words could either provide new or old information. It was shown that variation of accentuation influenced the amplitude of the N400, with a larger amplitude f...

The goal of this paper is to shed new light on accentuation in French, more precisely to discuss the role of grammatical constraints and of phonetic factors implicated in the perception of French final and non-final accent. The study is based on the analysis of a 70-minute long corpus, including various speaking styles. The corpus has been annotated manually and automatically for prominence det...

It has been observed that the interpretation of pronouns can depend on their accentuation patterns in parallel sentences as “John hit Bill and then George hit him”, in which ‘him’ refers to Bill when unaccented but shifts to John when accented. While accentuation is widely regarded as a means of disambiguation, some studies have noticed that it also extends to unambiguous anaphors [7-10]. From ...

This paper presents VHDL-AMS model of an automotive vibration isolation seating system with an active electromechanical actuator. Five control algorithms for the actuator are implemented and their efficiencies are investigated by subjecting the system to a number of stimuli, such as a single jolt or noisy harmonic excitations. Simulations were carried out using the SystemVision simulator and re...

Pain is unique to every person, and difficult to quantify and treat. Whether it is delivered as a jolt or a persistent, dull ache, pain is guaranteed to affect one's quality of life. Our author examines how brain imaging is opening our eyes to the richness and complexity of the pain experience, giving us extraordinary insight into the neurochemistry, network activity, wiring, and structures rel...

I would like to report some of our recent work on the stimulation of rabbit interferon by the double-stranded complex of polyinosinic acid and polycytidylic acid (poly I:C). Most of the work I shall describe was done by Doctors Chris Tan, Yan-hsien Ke, Monto Ho, and myself. Our starting point was Vilcek's interesting work on the accentuation of interferon response in rabbit kidney cells by cycl...