Does event structure influence children's motion event expressions

This study focuses on understanding of event structure, in particular therelationship between Manner and Path. Narratives were elicited from twenty 3-year-olds and twenty adults using 6 animated motion events that were divided into two groups based on Goldberg's (1997) distinction between causal (Manner-inherent; e.g. roll down) and non-causal (Manner-incidental; e.g. spin while going up) relationships between Manner and Path. The data revealed that adults and children are sensitive to differences between inherent and incidental Manner. Adults significantly reduced use of canonical syntactic constructions for Manner-incidental events, employing other constructions. Children, however, while significantly reducing use of canonical syntactic constructionsfor Manner-incidental events, did not exploit alternative constructions. Instead, they omitted Manner from their speech altogether. A follow-up lexical task showed that children had knowledge of all omitted Manners. Given that this strategic omission of Manner is not lexically motivated, the results are discussed in relation to implications for pragmatics and memory load

Neurophysiological evidence for rapid processing of verbal and gestural information in understanding communicative actions

During everyday social interaction, gestures are a fundamental part of human communication. The communicative pragmatic role of hand gestures and their interaction with spoken language has been documented at the earliest stage of language development, in which two types of indexical gestures are most prominent: the pointing gesture for directing attention to objects and the give-me gesture for making requests. Here we study, in adult human participants, the neurophysiological signatures of gestural-linguistic acts of communicating the pragmatic intentions of naming and requesting by simultaneously presenting written words and gestures. Already at ~150 ms, brain responses diverged between naming and request actions expressed by word-gesture combination, whereas the same gestures presented in isolation elicited their earliest neurophysiological dissociations significantly later (at ~210 ms). There was an early enhancement of request-evoked brain activity as compared with naming, which was due to sources in the frontocentral cortex, consistent with access to action knowledge in request understanding. In addition, an enhanced N400-like response indicated late semantic integration of gesture-language interaction. The present study demonstrates that word-gesture combinations used to express communicative pragmatic intentions speed up the brain correlates of comprehension processes – compared with gesture-only understanding – thereby calling into question current serial linguistic models viewing pragmatic function decoding at the end of a language comprehension cascade. Instead, information about the social-interactive role of communicative acts is processed instantaneously

The use of discourse markers in adult and child Turkish oral narratives: Şey, yani and işte

Item does not contain fulltextThe 12th International Conference on Turkish Linguistics, 11 augustus 2004750 p

Doppler echocardiography in adenotonsillar hypertrophy

WOS: 000089043500004PubMed ID: 10960692Objective: Adenotonsillar hypertrophy causing upper airway obstruction may lead to the pulmonary hypertension and cor pulmonale. This study aimed to clarify the diagnostic methods of this complication, besides polysomnography, to find another objective criterion for surgical intervention and to demonstrate the curative effect of adenotonsillectomy on this complication using this objective criterion. Methods: We studied the outcomes of 17 children with pulmonary hypertension secondary to the adenotonsillar hypertrophy. Pulmonary arterial pressure measurement was performed noninvasively by Doppler echocardiography. Results: Mean preoperative pulmonary arterial pressure was 29.12 +/- 4.11 mmHg and decreased dramatically after relief of upper airway obstruction by adenoidectomy and/or tonsillectomy to the normal level of 12.06 +/- 3.09 mmHg. These results were analyzed by equal variances t-test and found very significant (P < 0.01). Regarding the symptoms of upper respiratory obstruction, symptom scores of these children decreased very significantly and were analyzed by equal variances t-test (P < 0.01) in the postoperative period. For all the symptoms individually (snoring, mouth-breathing during sleep and daytime, hyponasal voice, restless sleeping, daytime somnolence, enuresis nocturnal), comparing percentages of preoperative and postoperative symptoms by unequal variances t-test, we obtained very significant decrease (P < 0.01). Conclusions: This study illustrates that Doppler echocardiography is a safe, practical and noninvasive - method in diagnosing cardiovasculary disturbances - one of the complications of adenotonsillar hypertrophy and especially for measuring the pulmonary arterial pressure. All the symptoms and disorders due to the adenotonsillar hypertrophy may be reversible by performing early adeno- and/or tonsillectomy. (C) 2000 Elsevier Science Ireland Ltd. All rights reserved

Novel total antioxidant capacity index for dietary polyphenols and vitamins C and E, using their cupric ion reducing capability in the presence of neocuproine: CUPRAC method

The chemical diversity of antioxidants makes it difficult to separate and quantify antioxidants from the vegetable matrix. Therefore, it is desirable to establish a method that can measure the total antioxidant activity level directly from vegetable extracts. The current literature clearly states that there is no "total antioxidant" as a nutritional index available for food labeling because of the lack of standard quantitation methods. Thus, this work reports the development of a simple, widely applicable antioxidant capacity index for dietary polyphenols and vitamins C and E, utilizing the copper(II)-neocuproine [Cu(II)-Nc] reagent as the chromogenic oxidizing agent. Because the copper(II) (or cupric) ion reducing ability of polyphenols is measured, the method is named by our research group "cupric reducing antioxidant capacity" abbreviated as the CUPRAC method. This method should be advantageous over the ferric reducing antioxidant power (FRAP) method because the redox chemistry of copper(II)-as opposed to that of ferric ion-involves faster kinetics. The method comprises mixing of the antioxidant solution (directly or after acid hydrolysis) with a copper(II) chloride solution, a neocuproine alcoholic solution, and an ammonium acetate aqueous buffer at pH 7 and subsequent measurement of the developed absorbance at 450 nm after 30 min. Because the color development is fast for compounds such as ascorbic acid, gallic acid, and quercetin but slow for naringin and naringenin, the latter compounds were assayed after incubation at 50degreesC on a water bath for 20 min [after Cu(II)-Nc reagent addition] so as to force the oxidation reaction to reach completion. The flavonoid glycosides were hydrolyzed to their corresponding aglycons by refluxing in 1.2 M HCl-containing 50% MeOH so as to exert maximal reducing power toward Cu(II)-Nc. Certain compounds also needed incubation after acid hydrolysis to fully exhibit their reducing capability. The CUPRAC antioxidant capacities of synthetic mixtures of antioxidants were experimentally measured as Trolox equivalents and compared to those theoretically found by making use of the principle of additivity of absorbances assuming no chemical interaction between the mixture constituents. Because ascorbic acid is not resistant to elevated temperature incubation, it should be assayed initially by measuring the absorbance (at 450 nm) difference of original and ascorbate oxidase-added mixture solutions at the end of 1 min of Cu(II)-Nc reagent addition. Thus, the total CUPRAC antioxidant capacity of a mixture containing various antioxidants should be that finally measured after a suitable combination of hydrolysis and incubation procedures, added to the initially measured capacity due to ascorbate. The antioxidant polyphenolic compounds tested demonstrate that the highest capacities in the CUPRAC method were observed for epicatechin gallate, epigallocatechin gallate, quercetin, fisetin, epigallocatechin, catechin, and caffeic acid in this order, in accordance with theoretical expectations, because the number and position of the hydroxyl groups as well as the degree of conjugation of the whole molecule are important. The antioxidant potency of flavonoids is nearly proportional to the total number of -OH groups and is positively affected by the presence of an o-dihydroxy moiety in the B-ring. P-Carotene, which did not react with the CUPRAC reagent in alcoholic aqueous medium, could be assayed in dichloromethane solvent

CUPRAC total antioxidant capacity assay of lipophilic antioxidants in combination with hydrophilic antioxidants using the macrocyclic oligosaccharide methyl beta-cyclodextrin as the solubility enhancer

Antioxidants are important health beneficial compounds in regard to their ability to quench reactive O,N-species under 'oxidative stress' conditions. We recently reported a simple, low-cost, and widely applicable total antioxidant capacity assay for dietary polyphenols, vitamins C and E, and plasma antioxidants in alcoholic aqueous media utilizing the copper(II)-neocuproine (Nc) reagent as the chromogenic oxidant, which we named the CUPRAC method. Although this novel method was applied to synthetic mixtures of complex nature, plant extracts, human serum, and hydroxyl radical scavengers, lipophilic; antioxidants were normally treated separately from hydrophilic ones. With oil-soluble antioxidants like butylated hydroxyanisole (BHA), butylated hydroxytoluene (BHT), tert-butylhydroquinone (TBHQ), propyl gallate (PG), lauryl gallate (LG), and vitamin E (alpha-tocopherol), it was necessary to apply the CUPRAC method with dichloromethane extraction, which is not useful for hydrophilic antioxidants. Thus, as an improvement to classical CUPRAC methodology, this work reports the assay both lipophilic and hydrophilic antioxidants simultaneously, by making use of their 'host-guest' complexes with methyl beta-cyclodextrin (M-beta-CD), a cyclic oligosaccharide, in aqueous medium. The turbidity limit for (x-tocopherol, BHT, PG, and LG were 1:3 (v/v) alcohol-water solutions, but when these suspensions were mixed with equal volumes of 7% M-beta-CD) aqueous solution, clear solutions were obtained in which the CUPRAC assay could be directly performed. In addition to solubility enhancement, molecular spectroscopic evidence was also provided for the formation of (M-beta-CD + antioxidant) inclusion complexes. The calibration curves of individual (lipophilic and hydrophilic) antioxidants were constructed in such media, with their molar absorptivities and linear concentration ranges determined. Testing of synthetic ternary and quaternary mixtures of lipophilic and hydrophilic antioxidants in M-beta-CD-containing media yielded theoretically expected CUPRAC antioxidant capacities, considering the additivity of absorbances of constituents obeying Beer's law. Thus M-beta-CD served as the solubility enhancer host molecule to establish a modified CUPRAC method for the total antioxidant capacity assay of a mixture of diverse antioxidants of different lipophilicity levels in solutions rich in water content. The relative M-beta-CD concentration used to form the inclusion complex could be restricted so as not to significantly decrease the antioxidant capacity exhibited by the tested compounds. (c) 2007 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved