Production of English interdental fricatives by Dutch, German, and English speakers

Non-native (L2) speakers of English often experience difficulties in producing English interdental fricatives (e.g. the voiceless [θ]), and this leads to frequent substitutions of these fricatives (e.g. with [t], [s], and [f]). Differences in the choice of [θ]-substitutions across L2 speakers with different native (L1) language backgrounds have been extensively explored. However, even within one foreign accent, more than one substitution choice occurs, but this has been less systematically studied. Furthermore, little is known about whether the substitutions of voiceless [θ] are phonetically clear instances of [t], [s], and [f], as they are often labelled. In this study, we attempted a phonetic approach to examine language-specific preferences for [θ]-substitutions by carrying out acoustic measurements of L1 and L2 realizations of these sounds. To this end, we collected a corpus of spoken English with L1 speakers (UK-English), and Dutch and German L2 speakers. We show a) that the distribution of differential substitutions using identical materials differs between Dutch and German L2 speakers, b) that [t,s,f]-substitutes differ acoustically from intended [t,s,f], and c) that L2 productions of [θ] are acoustically comparable to L1 productions

Securing stability and growth in a post-crisis world.

Having experienced the worst financial and economic crisis of the past decades, the international community embarked on an ambitious reform agenda to secure strong, sustainable and balanced growth in a post-crisis world The most prominent issues on this agenda are the reform of financial regulation and the problem of macroeconomic imbalances. With regard to regulatory reform, a major step has already been taken by drawing up the Basel III framework. Nevertheless, there are still unresolved issues, such as the detailed treatment of systemically important financial institutions and an adequate approach to the shadow banking system. Global macroeconomic imbalances have to be addressed because they not only reflect underlying barriers to sustainable growth but, in themselves, pose a threat to stability. On a regional level, the euro area, while recording a balanced account vis-a-vis the rest of the world, is marked by divergencies between member states, which place a strain on the monetary union. In both cases, a sensible policy approach has to focus on structural reforms to address the underlying causes instead of just the symptoms. Therefore, direct interventions, such as the attempt to steer current accounts or exchange rates within specific target zones, are not advisable.

Testing Soils

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Exceptional solutions to the eight-vertex model and integrability of anisotropic extensions of massive fermionic models

We consider several anisotropic extensions of the Belavin model, and show that integrability holds also for the massive case for some specific relations between the coupling constants. This is done by relating the S-matrix factorization property to the exceptional solutions of the eight-vertex model. The relation of exceptional solutions to the XXZ and six-vertex models is also shown

The influence of the scene on linguistic expectations: Evidence from cross-model priming in visual worlds

- Numerous studies of utterance mediated gaze in visual scenes have demonstrated that sentence processing is not only incremental but also eager: During processing, listeners form expectations about upcoming arguments and make anticipatory eye movements to relevant displayed objects. - In particular, selectional information from verbs has been shown to guide visual attention to appropriate objects; upon hearing “the boy will eat”, listeners start looking at edible objects even before they are mentioned [1, 2]. - While these studies provide valuable insights into semantic processing, it is not clear whether anticipatory eye movements indeed reflect the purely linguistic activation of likely arguments or whether these anticipatory processes are influenced by the circumscribed visual context. - We present a German cross-modal priming experiment in which we examined listeners sensitivity to selectional restrictions between verbs and their object arguments