Early Form Based Morphological Decomposition in Tagalog: MEG Evidence from Reduplication, Infixation and Circumfixation

Neuro-and psycholinguistic experimentation supports the early decomposition of morphologically complex words within the ventral processing stream, which MEG has localized to the M170 response in the (left) visual word form area ( VWFA). Decomposition into an exhaustive parse of visual morpheme forms extends beyond words like farmer to those imitating complexity (e.g., brother; Lewis et al., 2011), and to “unique” stems occurring in only one word but following the syntax and semantics of their affix (e.g., vulnerable; Gwilliams & Marantz, 2018). Evidence comes primarily from suffixation; other morphological processes have been under-investigated. This study explores circumfixation, infixation, and reduplication in Tagalog. In addition to investigating whether these are parsed like suffixation, we address an outstanding question concerning semantically empty morphemes. Some words in Tagalog resemble English winter as decomposition is not supported (wint-er); these apparently reduplicated pseudoreduplicates lack the syntactic and semantic features of reduplicated forms. However, unlike winter, these words exhibit phonological behavior predicted only if they involve a reduplicating morpheme. If these are decomposed, this provides evidence that words are analyzed as complex, like English vulnerable, when the grammar demands it. In a lexical decision task with MEG, we find that VWFA activity correlates with stem:word transition probability for circumfixed, infixed, and reduplicated words. Furthermore, a Bayesian analysis suggests that pseudoreduplicates with reduplicate-like phonology are also decomposed; other pseudoreduplicates are not. These findings are consistent with an interpretation that decomposition is modulated by phonology in addition to syntax and semantics

A validation of Amazon Mechanical Turk for the collection of acceptability judgments in linguistic theory

Amazon’s Mechanical Turk (AMT) is a Web application that provides instant access to thousands of potential participants for survey-based psychology experiments, such as the acceptability judgment task used extensively in syntactic theory. Because AMT is a Web-based system, syntacticians may worry that the move out of the experimenter-controlled environment of the laboratory and onto the user-controlled environment of AMT could adversely affect the quality of the judgment data collected. This article reports a quantitative comparison of two identical acceptability judgment experiments, each with 176 participants (352 total): one conducted in the laboratory, and one conducted on AMT. Crucial indicators of data quality—such as participant rejection rates, statistical power, and the shape of the distributions of the judgments for each sentence type—are compared between the two samples. The results suggest that aside from slightly higher participant rejection rates, AMT data are almost indistinguishable from laboratory data

Extra embryos: The ethics of cryopreservation in Ecuador and elsewhere

Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/73714/1/ae.2007.34.1.181.pd

The forms of repetition in social and environmental reports: insights from Hume's notion of ?impressions?

This paper focuses on the use of repetition, both in narrative and visual forms, in social and environmental reports. It investigates the forms of repetition as a rhetorical device adopted by the preparer of a social and environmental report in helping the process of knowledge acquisition, as outlined by Hume (1739). Drawing from Hume?s (1739) philosophical idea of an ?impression?, and the work of Davison (2014a) we classify repetitions into ?identical?, ?similar? and ?accumulated? forms. It is argued that the rationale for distinguishing between the different forms of repetition can be linked to their different potential or intensity in acting on different stimuli with a view to enhance learning. The empirical element of this study is based on the stand-alone social and environmental reports of a sample of 86 cooperative banks in Northern Italy; the analysis of these reports indicates that repetition is widespread and that cooperative banks use all forms of repetition, albeit to a varying extent within the different reported themes. The paper contributes to the literature by offering an alternative interpretation of repetition using an interdisciplinary perspective and by providing new insights on social and environmental reporting practices in the cooperative banking sector

Impact of Diabetes on Postinfarction Heart Failure and Left Ventricular Remodeling

Diabetes mellitus, the metabolic syndrome, and the underlying insulin resistance are increasingly associated with diastolic dysfunction and reduced stress tolerance. The poor prognosis associated with heart failure in patients with diabetes after myocardial infarction is likely attributable to many factors, important among which is the metabolic impact from insulin resistance and hyperglycemia on the regulation of microvascular perfusion and energy generation in the cardiac myocyte. This review summarizes epidemiologic, pathophysiologic, diagnostic, and therapeutic data related to diabetes and heart failure in acute myocardial infarction and discusses novel perceptions and strategies that hold promise for the future and deserve further investigation