The film business in the United States and Britain during the 1930s

Film was a most important product in the lives of the people during the 1930s. This paper sets out to analyse the underlying economic arrangements of the film industries of the U.S. and Britain during the decade in producing and diffusing this commodity-type to the population at large. In doing this, the paper finds a highly competitive industry that was built around showing films that audiences wanted to see, irrespective of the extent of vertical integration. It also examines the nature of the inter-relationship between the two industries and finds an asymmetry between the popularity of British films in the American market and that of American films in the British market. Our explanation for this is that the efforts of British firms on the American market were not sufficiently sustained to make a significant impact on American audiences

A pre-registered, multi-lab non-replication of the Action-sentence Compatibility Effect (ACE)

The Action-sentence Compatibility Effect (ACE) is a well-known demonstration of the role of motor activity in the comprehension of language. Participants are asked to make sensibility judgments on sentences by producing movements toward the body or away from the body. The ACE is the finding that movements are faster when the direction of the movement (e.g., toward) matches the direction of the action in the to-be-judged sentence (e.g., Art gave you the pen describes action toward you). We report on a pre- registered, multi-lab replication of one version of the ACE. The results show that none of the 18 labs involved in the study observed a reliable ACE, and that the meta-analytic estimate of the size of the ACE was essentially zero

Gravitational slopes, geomorphology, and material strengths of the nucleus of comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko from OSIRIS observations

We study the link between gravitational slopes and the surface morphology on the nucleus of comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko and provide constraints on the mechanical properties of the cometary material (tensile, shear, and compressive strengths). Methods. We computed the gravitational slopes for five regions on the nucleus that are representative of the different morphologies observed on the surface (Imhotep, Ash, Seth, Hathor, and Agilkia), using two shape models computed from OSIRIS images by the stereo-photoclinometry (SPC) and stereo-photogrammetry (SPG) techniques. We estimated the tensile, shear, and compressive strengths using different surface morphologies (overhangs, collapsed structures, boulders, cliffs, and Philae's footprint) and mechanical considerations. Results. The different regions show a similar general pattern in terms of the relation between gravitational slopes and terrain morphology: i) low-slope terrains (0-20°) are covered by a fine material and contain a few large (>10 m) and isolated boulders; ii) intermediate-slope terrains (20-45°) are mainly fallen consolidated materials and debris fields, with numerous intermediate-size boulders from <1 m to 10 m for the majority of them; and iii) high-slope terrains (45-90°) are cliffs that expose a consolidated material and do not show boulders or fine materials. The best range for the tensile strength of overhangs is 3-15 Pa (upper limit of 150 Pa), 4-30 Pa for the shear strength of fine surface materials and boulders, and 30-150 Pa for the compressive strength of overhangs (upper limit of 1500 Pa). The strength-to-gravity ratio is similar for 67P and weak rocks on Earth. As a result of the low compressive strength, the interior of the nucleus may have been compressed sufficiently to initiate diagenesis, which could have contributed to the formation of layers. Our value for the tensile strength is comparable to that of dust aggregates formed by gravitational instability and tends to favor a formation of comets by the accrection of pebbles at low velocities

Reading during the composition of multi-sentence texts: an eye-movement study

Writers composing multi-sentence texts have immediate access to a visual representation of what they have written. Little is known about the detail of writers’ eye movements within this text during production. We describe two experiments in which competent adult writers’ eye-movements were tracked while performing short expository writing tasks. These are contrasted with conditions in which participants read and evaluated researcher-provided texts. Writers spent a mean of around 13% of their time looking back into their text. Initiation of these look-back sequences was strongly predicted by linguistically important boundaries in their ongoing production (e.g., writers were much more likely to look back immediately prior to starting a new sentence). 36% of look-back sequences were associated with sustained reading and the remainder with less patterned forward and backward saccades between words ("hopping"). Fixation and gaze durations and the presence of word-length effects suggested lexical processing of fixated words in both reading and hopping sequences. Word frequency effects were not present when writers read their own text. Findings demonstrate the technical possibility and potential value of examining writers’ fixations within their just-written text. We suggest that these fixations do not serve solely, or even primarily, in monitoring for error, but play an important role in planning ongoing production

The interaction of visual and linguistic saliency during syntactic ambiguity resolution

Psycholinguistic research using the visual world paradigm has shown that the pro-cessing of sentences is constrained by the visual context in which they occur. Re-cently, there has been growing interest on the interactions observed when both lan-guage and vision provide relevant information during sentence processing. In three visual world experiments on syntactic ambiguity resolution, we investigate how vi-sual and linguistic information influence the interpretation of ambiguous sentences. We hypothesize that (1) visual and linguistic information both constrain which in-terpretation is pursued by the sentence processor, and (2) the two types of informa-tion act upon the interpretation of the sentence at different points during processing. In Experiment 1, we show that visual saliency is utilized to anticipate the upcoming arguments of a verb. In Experiment 2, we operationalize linguistic saliency using intonational breaks and demonstrate that these give prominence to linguistic refer-ents. These results confirm prediction (1). In Experiment 3, we manipulate visual and linguistic saliency together and find that both types of information are used, but at different points in the sentence, to incrementally update its current interpre-tation. This finding is consistent with prediction (2). Overall, our results suggest an adaptive processing architecture in which different types of information are used when they become available, optimizing different aspects of situated language pro-cessing

Vocabulary and grammar development in young learners of English as an additional language

Internationally, an increasing number of children learn English as an additional language (EAL). Children with EAL grow up in an environment where English is the majority language but are exposed to a different, minority language at home. Despite the increase in the number of EAL learners around the world, comparatively little is known about the development of their vocabulary and grammar at preschool age. Furthermore, the use of different methods in EAL studies can make research evidence difficult to summarize. The aim of this chapter is to provide a comprehensive review of EAL learners’ vocabulary and grammar development at preschool, drawing from studies that have used standardized tests, experimental tasks, or both. This review indicates that few studies have focused on preschool children with EAL. These suggest that, at the earliest stages of language learning, EAL learners generally know fewer words and acquire grammatical constructions at a slower pace than their English monolingual peers. These differences often persist throughout development, risking a negative impact on EAL learners’ academic attainment in an English-only school environment. Thus, this chapter also includes some suggestions for practice that could help children with EAL develop their vocabulary and grammar knowledge during and after preschool

Seeing Emotion with Your Ears: Emotional Prosody Implicitly Guides Visual Attention to Faces

Interpersonal communication involves the processing of multimodal emotional cues, particularly facial expressions (visual modality) and emotional speech prosody (auditory modality) which can interact during information processing. Here, we investigated whether the implicit processing of emotional prosody systematically influences gaze behavior to facial expressions of emotion. We analyzed the eye movements of 31 participants as they scanned a visual array of four emotional faces portraying fear, anger, happiness, and neutrality, while listening to an emotionally-inflected pseudo-utterance (Someone migged the pazing) uttered in a congruent or incongruent tone. Participants heard the emotional utterance during the first 1250 milliseconds of a five-second visual array and then performed an immediate recall decision about the face they had just seen. The frequency and duration of first saccades and of total looks in three temporal windows ([0–1250 ms], [1250–2500 ms], [2500–5000 ms]) were analyzed according to the emotional content of faces and voices. Results showed that participants looked longer and more frequently at faces that matched the prosody in all three time windows (emotion congruency effect), although this effect was often emotion-specific (with greatest effects for fear). Effects of prosody on visual attention to faces persisted over time and could be detected long after the auditory information was no longer present. These data imply that emotional prosody is processed automatically during communication and that these cues play a critical role in how humans respond to related visual cues in the environment, such as facial expressions

Demographic, clinical and antibody characteristics of patients with digital ulcers in systemic sclerosis: data from the DUO Registry

OBJECTIVES: The Digital Ulcers Outcome (DUO) Registry was designed to describe the clinical and antibody characteristics, disease course and outcomes of patients with digital ulcers associated with systemic sclerosis (SSc). METHODS: The DUO Registry is a European, prospective, multicentre, observational, registry of SSc patients with ongoing digital ulcer disease, irrespective of treatment regimen. Data collected included demographics, SSc duration, SSc subset, internal organ manifestations, autoantibodies, previous and ongoing interventions and complications related to digital ulcers. RESULTS: Up to 19 November 2010 a total of 2439 patients had enrolled into the registry. Most were classified as either limited cutaneous SSc (lcSSc; 52.2%) or diffuse cutaneous SSc (dcSSc; 36.9%). Digital ulcers developed earlier in patients with dcSSc compared with lcSSc. Almost all patients (95.7%) tested positive for antinuclear antibodies, 45.2% for anti-scleroderma-70 and 43.6% for anticentromere antibodies (ACA). The first digital ulcer in the anti-scleroderma-70-positive patient cohort occurred approximately 5 years earlier than the ACA-positive patient group. CONCLUSIONS: This study provides data from a large cohort of SSc patients with a history of digital ulcers. The early occurrence and high frequency of digital ulcer complications are especially seen in patients with dcSSc and/or anti-scleroderma-70 antibodies