403 research outputs found
Individual mentalizing ability boosts flexibility toward a linguistic marker of social distance: An ERP investigation
Sentence-final particles (SFPs) as bound morphemes in Japanese have no obvious effect on the truth conditions of a sentence. However, they encompass a diverse range of usages, from typical to atypical, according to the context and the interpersonal relationships in the specific situation. The most frequent particle,-ne, is typically used after addressee-oriented propositions for information sharing, while another frequent particle,-yo, is typically used after addresser-oriented propositions to elicit a sense of strength. This study sheds light on individual differences among native speakers in flexibly understanding such linguistic markers based on their mentalizing ability (i.e., the ability to infer the mental states of others). Two experiments employing electroencephalography (EEG) consistently showed enhanced early posterior negativities (EPN) for atypical SFP usage compared to typical usage, especially when understanding-ne compared to -yo, in both an SFP appropriateness judgment task and a content comprehension task. Importantly, the amplitude of the EPN for atypical usages of-ne was significantly higher in participants with lower mentalizing ability than in those with a higher mentalizing ability. This effect plausibly reflects low-ability mentalizers' stronger sense of strangeness toward atypical-ne usage. While high-ability mentalizers may aptly perceive others' attitudes via their various usages of-ne, low-ability mentalizers seem to adopt a more stereotypical understanding. These results attest to the greater degree of difficulty low-ability mentalizers have in establishing a smooth regulation of interpersonal distance during social encounters
Tuning the electrically evaluated electron Lande g factor in GaAs quantum dots and quantum wells of different well widths
We evaluate the Lande g factor of electrons in quantum dots (QDs) fabricated
from GaAs quantum well (QW) structures of different well width. We first
determine the Lande electron g factor of the QWs through resistive detection of
electron spin resonance and compare it to the enhanced electron g factor
determined from analysis of the magneto-transport. Next, we form laterally
defined quantum dots using these quantum wells and extract the electron g
factor from analysis of the cotunneling and Kondo effect within the quantum
dots. We conclude that the Lande electron g factor of the quantum dot is
primarily governed by the electron g factor of the quantum well suggesting that
well width is an ideal design parameter for g-factor engineering QDs
Is pitch accent necessary for comprehension by native Japanese speakers? - An ERP investigation
Not unlike the tonal system in Chinese, Japanese habitually attaches pitch accents to the production of words. However, in contrast to Chinese, few homophonic word-pairs are really distinguished by pitch accents (Shibata & Shibata, 1990). This predicts that pitch accent plays a small role in lexical selection for Japanese language comprehension. The present study investigated whether native Japanese speakers necessarily use pitch accent in the processing of accent-contrasted homophonic pairs (e.g., ame [LH] for 'candy' and ame [HI] for 'rain') measuring electroencephalographic (EEG) potentials. Electrophysiological evidence (i.e., N400) was obtained when a word was semantically incorrect for a given context but not for incorrectly accented homophones. This suggests that pitch accent indeed plays a minor role when understanding Japanese. (C) 2013 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved
Disorder Induced Ferromagnetism in CaRuO3
The magnetic ground state of perovskite structure CaRuO3 has been enigmatic
for decades. Here we show that paramagnetic CaRuO3 can be made ferromagnetic by
very small amounts of partial substitution of Ru by Ti. Magnetic hysteresis
loops are observed at 5 K for as little as 2% Ti substitution. Ti is
non-magnetic and isovalent with Ru, indicating that the primary effect of the
substitution is the disruption of the magnetic ground state of CaRuO3 through
disorder. The data suggest that CaRuO3 is poised at a critical point between
ferromagnetic and paramagnetic ground states
The multiple pronunciations of Japanese kanji: A masked priming investigation
English words with an inconsistent grapheme-to-phoneme conversion or with more than one pronunciation (homographic heterophones; e.g., lead-/l epsilon d/, /lid/) are read aloud more slowly than matched controls, presumably due to competition processes. In Japanese kanji, the majority of the characters have multiple readings for the same orthographic unit: the native Japanese reading (KUN) and the derived Chinese reading (ON). This leads to the question of whether reading these characters also shows processing costs. Studies examining this issue have provided mixed evidence. The current study addressed the question of whether processing of these kanji characters leads to the simultaneous activation of their KUN and ON reading, This was measured in a direct way in a masked priming paradigm. In addition, we assessed whether the relative frequencies of the KUN and ON pronunciations (dominance ratio, measured in compound words) affect the amount of priming. The results of two experiments showed that: (a) a single kanji, presented as a masked prime, facilitates the reading of the (katakana transcriptions of) their KUN and ON pronunciations; however, (b) this was most consistently found when the dominance ratio was around 50% (no strong dominance towards either pronunciation) and when the dominance was towards the ON reading (high-ON group). When the dominance was towards the KUN reading (high-KUN group), no significant priming for the ON reading was observed. Implications for models of kanji processing are discussed
Scaling of the anomalous Hall effect in SrCaRuO
The anomalous Hall effect (AHE) of ferromagnetic thin films of
SrCaRuO (0 0.4) is studied as a function of
and temperature . As increases, both the transition temperature
and the magnetization are reduced and vanish near 0.7. For all
compositions, the transverse resistivity varies non-monotonously
with , and even changes sign, thus violating the conventional expression
( is the magnetic induction, while
and are the ordinary and anomalous Hall coefficients). From the rather
complicated data of , we find a scaling behavior of the transverse
conductivity with , which is well reproduced by the
first-principles band calculation assuming the intrinsic origin of the AHE.Comment: REVTeX 4 style; 5 pages, 3 figures; revised 23/2 and accepted for
publicatio
Investigation of turbulence in reversed field pinch plasma by using microwave imaging reflectometry
Turbulence in the reversed field pinch (RFP) plasma has been investigated by using the microwave
imaging reflectometry in the toroidal pinch experiment RX (TPE-RX). In conventional RFP
plasma, the fluctuations are dominated by the intermittent blob-like structures. These structures are
accompanied with the generation of magnetic field, the strong turbulence, and high nonlinear coupling
among the high and low k modes. The pulsed poloidal current drive operation, which
improves the plasma confinement significantly, suppresses the dynamo, the turbulence, and the
blob-like structures.This work is supported by the NINS Imaging Science
Project (Grant No. NIFS08KEIN0021), SOKENDAI (Grant
No. NIFS08GLPP003), and the Budget for Nuclear Research
of the Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and
Technology of Japan
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