The role of word frequency and morpho-orthography in agreement processing

Agreement attraction in comprehension (when an ungrammatical verb is read quickly if preceded by a feature-matching local noun) is well described by a cue-based retrieval framework. This suggests a role for lexical retrieval in attraction. To examine this, we manipulated two probabilistic factors known to affect lexical retrieval: local noun word frequency and morpho-orthography (agreement morphology realised with or without –s endings) in a self-paced reading study. Noun number and word frequency affected noun and verb region reading times, with higher-frequency words not eliciting attraction. Morpho-orthography impacted verb processing but not attraction: atypical plurals led to slower verb reading times regardless of verb number. Exploratory individual difference analyses further underscore the importance of lexical retrieval dynamics in sentence processing. This provides evidence that agreement operates via a cue-based retrieval mechanism over lexical representations that vary in their strength and association to number features

Book Review: Visions of the Land: Science, Literature, and the American Environment from the Era of Exploration to the Age of Ecology

Michael A. Bryson has undertaken an ambitious study of the connections between the representation of nature and the practice of science in America. Covering the hundred-and-thirty-year period from the 1840s to the 1960s, the author dissects the work of seven distinguished writers through a diverse array of documents, ranging from technical reports and exploration narratives to essays, utopian fiction, autobiography, and popular scientific literature. The seven whose visions of the land he seeks to capture are Richard Byrd, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Susan Cooper, Rachel Carson, John Charles Fremont, John Wesley Powell, and Loren Eiseley. While the work of the latter three is most directly related to the interests of this journal, Bryson\u27s skillful weaving together of the various skeins has rendered them all of a piece

A Comparison of the Success of Teaching Machines and the Programed Text to that of the Traditional Teaching Based on a Survey of Literature and Research Reports

Programmed learning, still in the embryonic stage, has brought with it new hope for some of the answers to our mass educational problems of a rapidly expanding curriculum, broadened individual differences, and an increasing pupil teacher ratio. Teaching efficiency may be brought to an optimum level by constructing teaching machines and programmed texts as developed by S. L. Pressey. This study attempted to compare the effectiveness of traditional educational practices with those using the programed text and the teaching machine. The survey of literature and the use of research findings were used as a basis for the comparison. The investigator feels that the programmed text will be of great value in helping to solve our educational problems. The programmed text effectively deals with the motivation ended for learning and decrease the time needed for mastery of given subject materials. It encompasses all studies and levels of learning. The results of the study as interpreted by the investigator would indicate that there is a need for additional classroom experiments of simple design and structure so that they can be objectively evaluated

Navicular Disease: New Developments With an Old Dilemma

Navicular disease (distal sesamoiditis, podotrochilitis, podotrochleosis, bursitis podotrochlearis) affects the distal sesamoid (navicular) bone and its surrounding structures in the equine limb. The disease is characterized by lameness of varied degrees, usually in the forelimbs. It is a difficult disease for clients to deal with because there is no known cure for navicular disease, and most treatments are only palliative

Dancing raisins: levitation and dynamics of bodies in supersaturated fluids

A body immersed in a supersaturated fluid like carbonated water can accumulate a dynamic field of bubbles upon its surface. If the body is mobile, the attached bubbles can lift it upward against gravity, but arrival at a free surface can clean the body of these lifting agents and the body may plummet. The process then begins anew, and continues for as long as the concentration of gas in the fluid supports it. In this work, experiments using fixed and free immersed bodies reveal fundamental features of force development and gas escape. A continuum model which incorporates the dynamics of a surface buoyancy field is used to predict the ranges of body mass and size, and fluid properties, for which the system is most dynamic, and those for which body excursions are suppressed. Simulations are then used to probe systems which are dominated by a small number of large bubbles. Body rotations at the surface are found to be critical for driving periodic vertical motions of large bodies, which in turn can produce body wobbling, rolling, and damped surface 'bouncing' dynamics.Comment: 29 pages, 9 figures. Movies are posted here: https://people.math.wisc.edu/~spagnolie/publications.htm

The Challenges of Capacity Building in the Aligning Forces for Quality Alliances

Summarizes the challenges and trade-offs in infrastructure and governance as well as stakeholder relations and participation, such as inclusive versus efficient decision making, in an alliance to coordinate regional healthcare improvement activities

Existence and stability of solitons for the nonlinear Schr\"odinger equation on hyperbolic space

We study the existence and stability of ground state solutions or solitons to a nonlinear stationary equation on hyperbolic space. The method of concentration compactness applies and shows that the results correlate strongly to those of Euclidean space.Comment: New: As noted in Banica-Duyckaerts (arXiv:1411.0846), Section 5 should read that for sufficiently large mass, sub-critical problems can be solved via energy minimization for all d \geq 2 and as a result Cazenave-Lions results can be applied in Section 6 with the same restriction. These requirements were addressed by the subsequent work with Metcalfe and Taylor in arXiv:1203.361