CHAPTER 3. QUANTITATIVE PERSPECTIVES TO THE STUDY OF WRITING ACROSS THE LIFESPAN: A CONCEPTUAL OVERVIEW AND FOCUS ON STRUCTURAL EQUATION MODELING

As echoed throughout this edited collection, writing researchers are well aware of the complexities involved when adopting lifespan approaches to the study of written language. Writing researchers come from a wide array of fields (e.g., composition studies, rhetoric, psychology, education, and special education) that adopt different methodological approaches to answer a variety of research questions. A central issue to unpacking the complexities underlying the development of written language across the lifespan requires examining the available tools and methods offered by different research designs to pose and answer different types of research questions

CHAPTER 12. INFORMING INQUIRY INTO WRITING ACROSS THE LIFESPAN FROM PERSPECTIVES ON STUDENTS WITH LEARNING DISABILITIES OR AUTISM SPECTRUM DISORDER

The value of writing is not limited to single points of time in our lives but serves many different purposes across the lifespan (Bazerman et al., 2018). For instance, young children begin to experiment with writing as early as two years of age, using it as a vehicle for play, communication, and self-expression (Rowe, 2008). With the advent of school, the purposes for writing expand greatly to include writing to inform, persuade, describe, summarize, learn, and narrate to identify just some of the ways children, adolescents, and young adults learn to write and use writing as part of their education. During adulthood, writing is a staple of life at both work and home. White and blue collar workers commonly use writing to perform their jobs (Light, 2001), and adults frequently use writing throughout the day to initiate and maintain personal connections, as they tweet, text, email, and connect with each other using a variety of social networks and media (Freedman et al., 2016)

The ‘PINIT’ motif, of a newly identified conserved domain of the PIAS protein family, is essential for nuclear retention of PIAS3L

AbstractPIAS proteins, cytokine-dependent STAT-associated repressors, exhibit intrinsic E3-type SUMO ligase activities and form a family of transcriptional modulators. Three conserved domains have been identified so far in this protein family, the SAP box, the MIZ-Zn finger/RING module and the acidic C-terminal domain, which are essential for protein interactions, DNA binding or SUMO ligase activity. We have identified a novel conserved domain of 180 residues in PIAS proteins and shown that its ‘PINIT’ motif as well as other conserved motifs (in the SAP box and in the RING domain) are independently involved in nuclear retention of PIAS3L, the long form of PIAS3, that we have characterized in mouse embryonic stem cells

A fast and easy approach to the simulation of binary mixtures sorption kinetics

Diffusivity of a component in a binary mixture is affected by the presence of a second component. The knowledge of the influence on each other component diffusivity is very useful for the prediction of sorption kinetics of binary mixtures. In this work kinetic studies of Cr(VI) and Cu(II) binary mixtures sorption onto exhausted coffee encapsulated in calcium alginate beads were carried out in both bench and pilot scale experiments. The spectroscopic analysis evidenced the complexity of the process since different mechanisms such as adsorption, redox reaction and ion exchange are involved. Experimental data were fitted to the Linear Adsorption Model (LAM). An empirical quadratic model was developed to estimate LAM parameters (De) and α = Cf/(Ci − Cf) as a function of the initial concentration of metals in the mixture. The empirical model developed enables to estimate the LAM parameters (De and α) of metal ions binary mixtures provided that the initial concentration of the metal ions is included in the range of concentrations studied. The estimated parameters introduced in LAM equation allow simulating the corresponding binary mixtures sorption kinetics. This study constitutes a fast and easy approach to the modelling of sorption kinetics of complex systems in which different processes take place simultaneously

Modulation of alpha and gamma oscillations related to retrospectively orienting attention within working memory

Selective attention mechanisms allow us to focus on information that is relevant to the current behavior and, equally important, ignore irrelevant information. An influential model proposes that oscillatory neural activity in the alpha band serves as an active functional inhibitory mechanism. Recent studies have shown that, in the same way that attention can be selectively oriented to bias sensory processing in favor of relevant stimuli in perceptual tasks, it is also possible to retrospectively orient attention to internal representations held in working memory. However, these studies have not explored the associated oscillatory phenomena. In the current study, we analysed the patterns of neural oscillatory activity recorded with magnetoencephalography while participants performed a change detection task, in which a spatial retro-cue was presented during the maintenance period, indicating which item or items were relevant for subsequent retrieval. Participants benefited from retro-cues in terms of accuracy and reaction time. Retro-cues also modulated oscillatory activity in the alpha and gamma frequency bands. We observed greater alpha activity in a ventral visual region ipsilateral to the attended hemifield, thus supporting its suppressive role, i.e. a functional disengagement of task-irrelevant regions. Accompanying this modulation, we found an increase in gamma activity contralateral to the attended hemifield, which could reflect attentional orienting and selective processing. These findings suggest that the oscillatory mechanisms underlying attentional orienting to representations held in working memory are similar to those engaged when attention is oriented in the perceptual space. © 2014 The Authors

La adaptacion del locutor al interlocutor : dinamica del sistema vocalico del español en función de las caracteristicas de los participantes en la conversacion

peer reviewedThe paper is focused on the hypothesis that the linguistic behaviour of a speaker would depend on how he/she perceives the linguistic status of a person he/she is speaking to. This hypothesis is particularly interesting to study as an index of the mental representation that a determined group has of another, that is to say, the way a speaker adjusts his or her linguistic behaviour to that of the person he or she is speaking to will reflect how the latter is perceived by the speaker being the subject of our study. This paper presents an exploratory study of the dynamics of the Spanish vocalic system under the effect of the linguistic status variations of the interlocutor. A single speaker, native speaker of Spanish, was recorded on 3 situations in which the differences in the status of the person spoken to are clearly marked: a conversation with a native speaker of Spanish, a conversation with a non-native speaker of Spanish, and a reading task of isolated words. The assessment of the system's degree of organization in each speaking style was studied using various Índices: the 8 index to assess the variation of the degree of centralization of the vowel system under the speaking style variations, the index, which allows better discrimination between the three speaking styles than the discriminant analysis, to quantify the ratio of the inter vocalic class variability compared to the intra vocalic class variability in each speaking style. The results show both that significant inter-style acoustical differences do exist, and that they can better be stressed by the use of the index

Three-dimensional assessment of vascular cooling effects on hepatic microwave ablation in a standardized ex vivo model

The aim of this study was a three-dimensional analysis of vascular cooling effects on microwave ablation (MWA) in an ex vivo porcine model. A glass tube, placed in parallel to the microwave antenna at distances of 2.5, 5.0 and 10.0 mm (A-V distance), simulated a natural liver vessel. Seven flow rates (0, 1, 2, 5, 10, 100, 500 ml/min) were evaluated. Ablations were segmented into 2 mm slices for a 3D-reconstruction. A qualitative and quantitative analysis was performed. 126 experiments were carried out. Cooling effects occurred in all test series with flow rates >= 2 ml/min in the ablation periphery. These cooling effects had no impact on the total ablation volume (p > 0.05) but led to changes in ablation shape at A-V distances of 5.0 mm and 10.0 mm. Contrary, at a A-V distance of 2.5 mm only flow rates of >= 10 ml/min led to relevant cooling effects in the ablation centre. These cooling effects influenced the ablation shape, whereas the total ablation volume was reduced only at a maximal flow rate of 500 ml/min (p = 0.002). Relevant cooling effects exist in MWA. They mainly depend on the distance of the vessel to the ablation centre

Morphometric and microstructural characteristics of hippocampal subfields in mesial temporal lobe epilepsy and their correlates with mnemonic discrimination.

Pattern separation (PS) is a fundamental aspect of memory creation that defines the ability to transform similar memory representations into distinct ones, so they do not overlap when storing and retrieving them. Experimental evidence in animal models and the study of other human pathologies have demonstrated the role of the hippocampus in PS, in particular of the dentate gyrus (DG) and CA3. Patients with mesial temporal lobe epilepsy with hippocampal sclerosis (MTLE-HE) commonly report mnemonic deficits that have been associated with failures in PS. However, the link between these impairments and the integrity of the hippocampal subfields in these patients has not yet been determined. The aim of this work is to explore the association between the ability to perform mnemonic functions and the integrity of hippocampal CA1, CA3, and DG in patients with unilateral MTLE-HE. To reach this goal we evaluated the memory of patients with an improved object mnemonic similarity test. We then analyzed the hippocampal complex structural and microstructural integrity using diffusion weighted imaging. Our results indicate that patients with unilateral MTLE-HE present alterations in both volume and microstructural properties at the level of the hippocampal subfields DG, CA1, CA3, and the subiculum, that sometimes depend on the lateralization of their epileptic focus. However, none of the specific changes was found to be directly related to the performance of the patients in a pattern separation task, which might indicate a contribution of various alterations to the mnemonic deficits or the key contribution of other structures to the function. we established for the first time the alterations in both the volume and the microstructure at the level of the hippocampal subfields in a group of unilateral MTLE patients. We observed that these changes are greater in the DG and CA1 at the macrostructural level, and in CA3 and CA1 in the microstructural level. None of these changes had a direct relation to the performance of the patients in a pattern separation task, which suggests a contribution of various alterations to the loss of function