Bilingual parsing strategies in Basque and Spanish

Over the last several years, one area of sentence processing research that has received considerable attention is how native speakers resolve structural ambiguities while reading, as in Someone shot the servant of the actress who was on the balcony (e.g., Cuetos and Mitchell 1988). Cross-linguistic research on this kind of ambiguous relative clause (RC) attachment has revealed that speakers of some languages prefer to attach the RC who was on the balcony to the first noun phrase (the servant), whereas speakers of other languages prefer attachment to the second noun phrase (the actress). From the perspective of bilingual sentence processing, research on RC attachment can provide insight into a number of important issues related to language transfer, language attrition, and processing efficiency. The present study, therefore, seeks to build upon some of these lines of research by examining the on-line parsing strategies among native speakers of Basque (N = 17) on two self-paced reading tasks in Basque and Spanish. Our purpose was to investigate which parsing routines these bilinguals utilized for each language in order to determine whether they maintained separate strategies or adopted one strategy for both languages. Analyses of reading times at critical regions in experimental sentences suggest that this group of bilinguals employed a single parsing strategy in Basque and Spanish. The findings are discussed within recent proposals of monolingual and bilingual sentence processing

Phonon modes of magnetic vortex lattices in finite isospin chiral perturbation theory

We study phonon modes associated with magnetic vortex lattices of finite isospin chiral perturbation theory near the upper critical point by introducing quasimomentum fluctuations to the lattice and calculate dispersion relations associated with the optical and acoustic modes. We find that one of the acoustic modes is massless and that its energy for small transverse quasimomentum is quartic (due the presence of an isospin chemical potential), which is significantly softer than the "supersoft" (quadratic) massless mode of the Abelian Higgs Model (AHM). Due to the presence of derivative interactions, which is absent in the AHM, the speed of the longitudinal mode depends on both the isospin chemical potential and the external magnetic field. Our results suggest that the standard assumption of an ordered lattice in finite isospin QCD should be revisited and the existence of a disordered spaghetti phase of a vortex liquid or gas, should be considered.Comment: 8 pages, 4 figures, improved discussion, matches published versio

Gutgläubiger Erwerb von GmbH-Geschäftsanteilen nach dem Regierungsentwurf des MoMiG

Die Arbeit befasst sich mit dem gutgläubigen Erwerb von GmbH-Geschäftsanteilen nach dem Regierungsentwurf MoMiG. Die Reform des deutschen GmbH-Rechts ist am 01.11.2008 in Kraft getreten. Der Autor untersucht die neue Gutglaubensregelung des § 16 Abs. 3 GmbH, deren Voraussetzungen und Rechtsfolgen und wirft die Frage auf, ob diese Regelung zum Schutz des Rechtsverkehrs ausreichend ist, oder ob nicht ein gutgläubig lastenfreier Erwerb sowie ein Erwerb von nichtexistenten und nicht-so-wie-eingetragen existenten Geschäftsanteilen möglich sein sollte

Accelerating phase unwrapping and affine transformations for optical quadrature microscopy using CUDA

Optical Quadrature Microscopy (OQM) is a process which uses phase data to capture information about the sample being studied. OQM is part of an imaging framework developed by the Optical Science Laboratory at Northeastern University. In one particular application of interest, the framework is used to extract phase information from the image of an embryo to determine embryo viability. Phase Unwrapping is the process of reconstructing the real phase shift (propagation delay) of a sample from the measured “wrapped“ representation which is between −π and +π. Unwrapping can be done using the Minimum L P Norm Phase Unwrap algorithm. Images are first preprocessed using an Affine Transform before they are unwrapped. Both of these steps are time consuming and would benefit greatly from parallelization and acceleration. Faster processing would lower many research barriers (in terms of throughpu