Lexically specific accumulation in memory of word and segment speech rates

Variability abounds in speech. According to usage-based accounts, lexical representations reflect phonetic variants of words resulting from contextual conditioning. Because faster speech contexts promote durational shortening of words and segments, words that occur more often in fast speech may be more reduced than words commonly used in slow speech, independent of the target&rsquo;s contextual speech rate. To test this, linear mixed-effects models including a word form&rsquo;s ratio of conditioning by fast speech contexts (FRCRATE) are used to predict the duration of Spanish /s/ and words containing /s/ in a corpus of spoken Spanish. Results show that words&rsquo; cumulative exposure to relatively fast speech affects phonetic realizations independent of factors operative in the production contexts. Thus, word and segment rates reflect cumulative (lexicalized) effects of words&rsquo; experience in fast speech contexts. The results suggest that lexically specific cumulative measures should be incorporated into models of linguistic variation and change. &nbsp;</p

Genome-Wide Meta-Analyses of Breast, Ovarian, and Prostate Cancer Association Studies Identify Multiple New Susceptibility Loci Shared by at Least Two Cancer Types.

UNLABELLED: Breast, ovarian, and prostate cancers are hormone-related and may have a shared genetic basis, but this has not been investigated systematically by genome-wide association (GWA) studies. Meta-analyses combining the largest GWA meta-analysis data sets for these cancers totaling 112,349 cases and 116,421 controls of European ancestry, all together and in pairs, identified at P < 10(-8) seven new cross-cancer loci: three associated with susceptibility to all three cancers (rs17041869/2q13/BCL2L11; rs7937840/11q12/INCENP; rs1469713/19p13/GATAD2A), two breast and ovarian cancer risk loci (rs200182588/9q31/SMC2; rs8037137/15q26/RCCD1), and two breast and prostate cancer risk loci (rs5013329/1p34/NSUN4; rs9375701/6q23/L3MBTL3). Index variants in five additional regions previously associated with only one cancer also showed clear association with a second cancer type. Cell-type-specific expression quantitative trait locus and enhancer-gene interaction annotations suggested target genes with potential cross-cancer roles at the new loci. Pathway analysis revealed significant enrichment of death receptor signaling genes near loci with P < 10(-5) in the three-cancer meta-analysis. SIGNIFICANCE: We demonstrate that combining large-scale GWA meta-analysis findings across cancer types can identify completely new risk loci common to breast, ovarian, and prostate cancers. We show that the identification of such cross-cancer risk loci has the potential to shed new light on the shared biology underlying these hormone-related cancers. Cancer Discov; 6(9); 1052-67. ©2016 AACR.This article is highlighted in the In This Issue feature, p. 932.The Breast Cancer Association Consortium (BCAC), the Prostate Cancer Association Group to Investigate Cancer Associated Alterations in the Genome (PRACTICAL), and the Ovarian Cancer Association Consortium (OCAC) that contributed breast, prostate, and ovarian cancer data analyzed in this study were in part funded by Cancer Research UK [C1287/A10118 and C1287/A12014 for BCAC; C5047/A7357, C1287/A10118, C5047/A3354, C5047/A10692, and C16913/A6135 for PRACTICAL; and C490/A6187, C490/A10119, C490/A10124, C536/A13086, and C536/A6689 for OCAC]. Funding for the Collaborative Oncological Gene-environment Study (COGS) infrastructure came from: the European Community's Seventh Framework Programme under grant agreement number 223175 (HEALTH-F2-2009-223175), Cancer Research UK (C1287/A10118, C1287/A 10710, C12292/A11174, C1281/A12014, C5047/A8384, C5047/A15007, C5047/A10692, and C8197/A16565), the US National Institutes of Health (CA128978) and the Post-Cancer GWAS Genetic Associations and Mechanisms in Oncology (GAME-ON) initiative (1U19 CA148537, 1U19 CA148065, and 1U19 CA148112), the US Department of Defence (W81XWH-10-1-0341), the Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR) for the CIHR Team in Familial Risks of Breast Cancer, Komen Foundation for the Cure, the Breast Cancer Research Foundation, and the Ovarian Cancer Research Fund [with donations by the family and friends of Kathryn Sladek Smith (PPD/RPCI.07)]. Additional financial support for contributing studies is documented under Supplementary Financial Support.This is the author accepted manuscript. The final version is available from the American Association for Cancer Research via http://dx.doi.org/10.1158/2159-8290.CD-15-122

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From comic conventions to disbanded dioceses, courts continue to struggle with a unique but puzzling question of trademark law. Federal law protects certain terms that refer to a product or service from a specific producer instead of to a product generally. Terms that refer to products are considered generic and cannot receive protection. Courts have also held that a term that was generic at the time the party adopted the mark cannot receive protection, even if the public later views it as being specific to a particular producer. But, many marks were adopted decades or centuries ago. As a result, courts and parties have struggled to find tools that will let them explore what the public understood a term to mean at the time of its adoption. Current methods, such as dictionaries, have fatal flaws. This paper proposes a new and empirical method to make this determination: corpus linguistics. Corpus linguistics is the study of the meaning of words and phrases using large databases of language use. It allows the user to understand how people used certain words or phrases at a specific point in time instead of being limited to how people understand them now. Using two recent cases as examples, this paper shows how corpus linguistics can provide parties and courts with concrete data on the meaning of a term when the party adopted it, eliminating guess work and other unreliable sources

Generic \u3cem\u3eAb Initio\u3c/em\u3e

From comic conventions to disbanded dioceses, courts continue to struggle with a unique but puzzling question of trademark law. Federal law protects certain terms that refer to a product or service from a specific producer instead of to a product generally. Terms that refer to products are considered generic and cannot receive protection. Courts have also held that a term that was generic at the time the party adopted the mark cannot receive protection, even if the public later views it as being specific to a particular producer. But, many marks were adopted decades or centuries ago. As a result, courts and parties have struggled to find tools that will let them explore what the public understood a term to mean at the time of its adoption. Current methods, such as dictionaries, have fatal flaws. This paper proposes a new and empirical method to make this determination: corpus linguistics. Corpus linguistics is the study of the meaning of words and phrases using large databases of language use. It allows the user to understand how people used certain words or phrases at a specific point in time instead of being limited to how people understand them now. Using two recent cases as examples, this paper shows how corpus linguistics can provide parties and courts with concrete data on the meaning of a term when the party adopted it, eliminating guess work and other unreliable sources