This study compared sentence intonation of L1 Mandarin by native speakers and L2 Mandarin by Cantonese learners, with both acoustic analysis and perceptual experiment. Three types of sentences (i.e., statement, intonation question, and particle question) ending with different tones and in different lengths were investigated. The perceptual experiment showed that declarative intonation in L2 spe...

This study compares patterns of consonant-to-consonant timing at word boundaries in English and Russian and investigates the roles of transfer and the emergence of linguistic universals in second language (L2) articulation. Native Russian speakers learning English and native English speakers learning Russian produced phrases in English and Russian contrasting VC#CV, VC#V, and V#CV sequences. Th...

1.1 Disfluencies in L2 speech For most of us, speaking a second language (L2) is a challenging task. Even if we call ourselves ‘fluent’ in the L2, we may at times find ourselves unsure about the grammar or at a loss for the right words. In fact, we are often not so fluent at all. The most obvious reason for this lack of fluency is a lack of proficiency, that is, a speaker has insufficient knowl...

The acquisition and incorporation of genetic material between nonmating species, or horizontal gene transfer (HGT), has been frequently described for phylogenetically related organisms, but far less evidence exists for HGT between highly divergent organisms. Here we report the identification and characterization of a horizontally transferred fragment of the human long interspersed nuclear eleme...

Exhaustion of chronically stimulated CD8(+) T cells is a significant obstacle to immune control of chronic infections or tumors. Although coinhibitory checkpoint blockade with anti-programmed death ligand 1 (PD-L1) Ab can restore functions to exhausted T cell populations, recovery is often incomplete and dependent upon the pool size of a quiescent T-bet(high) subset that expresses lower levels ...

Antibodies specific for neutralizing epitopes in either Human papillomavirus (HPV) capsid protein L1 or L2 can mediate protection from viral challenge and thus their accurate and sensitive measurement at high throughput is likely informative for monitoring response to prophylactic vaccination. Here we compare measurement of L1 and L2-specific neutralizing antibodies in human sera using the stan...

OBJECTIVES Naked DNA vaccines can be manufactured simply and are stable at ambient temperature, but require improved delivery technologies to boost immunogenicity. Here we explore in vivo electroporation for multivalent codon-optimized human papillomavirus (HPV) L1 and L2 DNA vaccination. METHODS Balb/c mice were vaccinated three times at two week intervals with a fusion protein comprising L2...

Exogenous transfer RNAs (tRNAs) favor translation of bovine papillomavirus 1 wild-type (wt) L1 mRNA in in vitro translation systems (Zhou et al. 1999, J. Virol., 73, 4972-4982). We, therefore, investigated whether papillomavirus (PV) wt L1 protein expression could be enhanced in eukaryotic cells following exogenous tRNA supplementation. Both Chinese hamster ovary (CHO) and Cos1 cells, transfect...

The focus of this study is the role previously acquired languages in acquisition a third language (L3). It focused on cross-linguistic influences (CLI) German/Spanish lan- guage (TLA) by learners with Croatian first (L1) and English second (L2). Participants were third-year undergraduate students at Roch- ester Institute Technology’s subsidiary Croatia (RIT Croatia). All participants had exclus...

Increased remissions in multiple sclerosis (MS) during late pregnancy may result from high levels of sex steroids such as estrogen and estriol. Estrogen (E2=17β-estradiol) protects against experimental autoimmune encephalomyelitis (EAE), but the cellular basis for E2-induced protection remains unclear. Treatment with relatively low doses of E2 can protect against clinical and histological signs...