The acquisition of questions with long-distance dependencies

A number of researchers have claimed that questions and other constructions with long distance dependencies (LDDs) are acquired relatively early, by age 4 or even earlier, in spite of their complexity. Analysis of LDD questions in the input available to children suggests that they are extremely stereotypical, raising the possibility that children learn lexically specific templates such as WH do you think S-GAP? rather than general rules of the kind postulated in traditional linguistic accounts of this construction. We describe three elicited imitation experiments with children aged from 4;6 to 6;9 and adult controls. Participants were asked to repeat prototypical questions (i.e., questions which match the hypothesised template), unprototypical questions (which depart from it in several respects) and declarative counterparts of both types of interrogative sentences. The children performed significantly better on the prototypical variants of both constructions, even when both variants contained exactly the same lexical material, while adults showed prototypicality e¤ects for LDD questions only. These results suggest that a general declarative complementation construction emerges quite late in development (after age 6), and that even adults rely on lexically specific templates for LDD questions

Resisting Immune Exhaustion in HIV-1 Infection

Sarah Rowland-Jones and Thushan de Silva discuss a new study describing the fate of cytotoxic T lymphocytes responding to HIV-1 from very early through to chronic infection

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https://digitalcommons.library.umaine.edu/mmb-vp/5922/thumbnail.jp

Biodegradation of alkyl branched aromatic alkanoic naphthenic acids by Pseudomonas putida KT2440

The majority of the world's crude oil reserves consist of highly biodegraded heavy and super heavy crude oils and oil sands that have not yet been fully exploited. These vast resources contain complex mixtures of carboxylic acids known as naphthenic acids (NAs). NAs cause major environmental and economic problems, as they are recalcitrant, corrosive and toxic. Although aromatic acids make up a small proportion of most NA mixtures, they have demonstrable toxicities to some organisms (e.g. some bacteria and algae) and ideally need to be removed or reduced by remediation. The present study analysed the ability of Pseudomonas putida KT2440 to degrade highly recalcitrant aromatic acids, as exemplified by the alkyl phenylalkanoic acid (4'-t-butylphenyl)-4-butanoic acid (t-BPBA) and the more degradable (4'-n-butylphenyl)-4-butanoic acid (n-BPBA). n-BPBA was completely metabolized after 14 days, with the production of a persistent metabolite identified as (4'-n-butylphenyl)ethanoic acid (BPEA) which resulted from removal of two carbon atoms from the carboxyl side chain (beta-oxidation) as observed previously with a mixed consortium. However, when n-BPBA concentration was increased two-fold, degradation decreased by 56% with a concomitant six-fold decrease in cell numbers, suggesting that at greater concentrations, n-BPBA may be toxic to P. putida KT2440. In contrast, P. putida KT2440 was unable to degrade the highly recalcitrant t-BPBA even after 49 days. These findings have implications for NA bioremediation in the environment. © 2011

Children’s engagement and caregivers’ use of language-boosting strategies during shared book reading: A mixed methods approach

For shared book reading to be effective for language development, the adult and child need to be highly engaged. The current paper adopted a mixed-methods approach to investigate caregiver’s language-boosting behaviours and children’s engagement during shared book reading. The results revealed there were more instances of joint attention and caregiver’s use of prompts during moments of higher engagement. However, instances of most language-boosting behaviours were similar across episodes of higher and lower engagement. Qualitative analysis assessing the link between children’s engagement and caregiver’s use of speech acts, revealed that speech acts do seem to contribute to high engagement, in combination with other aspects of the interaction

Evaluation of MS kinect for elderly meal intake monitoring

Any form of eating disorder is detrimental for health. Having an eating disorder increases the risks for chronic diseases and general morbidity, leading to several health problems such as obesity, hypertension and cardio-vascular diseases. The risk is greater for elderly people, as ageing submits the body to several functional changes that affect health and nutrition conditions. Automatic monitoring systems can help to prevent these risks by supporting people to maintain appropriate eating behaviours. Ageing services based on ICT assistive services are increasing as a result of the awareness of the growing socio-economic relevance of this issue, especially when we consider the rural and very sparsely-populated areas. In order to assess these requirements, systems should be automatic, non-intrusive and low cost. This paper presents an evaluation test of the Microsoft Kinect sensor for monitoring older people's meal intake, with the aim of contributing to the development of an automatic diet monitoring system.The authors thank the FEUP – Faculdade de Engenharia da Universidade do Porto through the Project I-City for Future Mobility: NORTE-07-0124-FEDER-000064, and European Project FP7 - Future Cities: FP7-REGPOT-2012-2013-1