Prosodiegeleitete Grammatik: Zum Erwerb der Pluralflexion im Deutschen.

Der Erwerb der Pluralmorphologie geh\uf6rt zu den schwierigsten Kapiteln beim Erwerb des Deutschen, weil viele verschiedene Faktoren (wie das Genus, die Semantik oder die Deklinationsklasse) ber\ufccksichtigt werden m\ufcssen. Die vorliegende Studie m\uf6chte in Erfahrung bringen, ob und in welchem Ma fe die Prosodie die Auswahl aus den verschiedenen Pluralallomorphen lenkt. Die Hypothese ist, dass die Lautstruktur eine gro fe Rolle spielt und deshalb auch st\ue4rker im Unterricht ber\ufccksichtigt werden sollte

A Study of the Characteristics Affecting Organizational Behavior of Nursing Homes and Related Home Care Facilities During Emergency Evacuations

Both emergency planners and disaster researchers cite the lack of empirical data on the problems and needs of special populations during emergency evacuations. Although most evacuations of nursing homes and related care facilities are carried out successfully, the effectiveness of an evacuation (as measured by time to evacuate) appears limited by certain constraints. Among the factors affecting such evacuations are resources (such as the number of staff available at the time of the evacuation), type and number of clients, and community characteristics such as population density. This study describes selected organizational characteristics of nursing homes and related care facilities which have recently experienced either a partial or complete evacuation of their facilities. After discussing the theoretical aspects of organizations in evacuations and the methodology used for the study, the study discusses both the quantitative and qualitative factors affecting organizational behavior during evacuation.It is evident from the findings that the continuity of responsible care for clients is of critical concern to both management and staff during an evacuation. The findings suggest that individuals within specialized populations are unlike other disaster victims and may require different management strategies on the part of agencies assisting in the evacuation

Conditioning a current source using OCCII-GIC for EIT systems

Multi-Frequency EIT has been developed to evaluate the permittivity spectrum of a medium using an improved Howland source. Stray capacitance reduces the output impedance, bandwidth of the data collection leading to erroneous measurements. To address this, we have designed a current source, which uses a novel OCCII - GIC to cancel stray capacitance. The system achieves high output impedance over a 5 MHz frequency range

Experience-driven meaning affects lexical choices during language production

The role of meaning facets based on sensorimotor experiences is well investigated in comprehension but has received little attention in language production research. In two experiments, we investigated whether experiential traces of space influenced lexical choices when participants completed visually presented sentence fragments (e.g., “You are at the sea and you see a . . .”) with spoken nouns (e.g., “dolphin,” “palm tree”). The words were presented consecutively in an ascending or descending direction, starting from the centre of the screen. These physical spatial cues did not influence lexical choices. However, the produced nouns met the spatial characteristics of the broader sentence contexts such that the typical spatial locations of the produced noun referents were predicted by the location of the situations described by the sentence fragments (i.e., upper or lower sphere). By including distributional semantic similarity measures derived from computing cosine values between sentence nouns and produced nouns using a web-based text corpus, we show that the meaning dimension of “location in space” guides lexical selection during speaking. We discuss the relation of this spatial meaning dimension to accounts of experientially grounded and usage-based theories of language processing and their combination in hybrid approaches. In doing so, we contribute to a more comprehensive understanding of the many facets of meaning processing during language production and their impact on the words we select to express verbal messages.Peer Reviewe

Evidence for the relevance of secondary stress in German : prosodic restrictions in verbal prefixation with ver-

This contribution deals with secondary stress in Modern Standard German (MSG) and its relevance in affixation using the verbal prefix ver-. While the pattern ver+stressed syllable or ver+schwa is allowed, ver+unstressed syllable is avoided in contemporary German (see also Kaltenbacher 1999). Diachronical data reveals that in earlier stages this prosodic restriction was not as strong as in MSG. The consistency with which verbs with the pattern ver+unstressed syllable are discarded in MSG (confirmed by look-ups in corpora and dictionaries) is a strong argument for the hypothesis that the relinquishment is due to a form of blocking related to the stress properties of the direct base: The affix ver- needs a direct base with some initial prominence, that is with primary or secondary stress. The only (apparent) exception to this stress condition is a base containing a schwa syllable which seems to be "invisible" for the stress-seeking prefix. Verbal derivation with the prefix ver- demonstrates that the stress properties of the base have to be taken into account also with regard to secondary stress. The data provided in this paper can count as further evidence for the existence and relevance of secondary stress in Modern Standard German and its interaction with morphology

Dissociating memory networks in early Alzheimer's disease and frontotemporal lobar degeneration - a combined study of hypometabolism and atrophy

Introduction: We aimed at dissociating the neural correlates of memory disorders in Alzheimer’s disease (AD) and frontotemporal lobar degeneration (FTLD). Methods: We included patients with AD (n = 19, 11 female, mean age 61 years) and FTLD (n = 11, 5 female, mean age 61 years) in early stages of their diseases. Memory performance was assessed by means of verbal and visual memory subtests from the Wechsler Memory Scale (WMS-R), including forgetting rates. Brain glucose utilization was measured by [18F]fluorodeoxyglucose positron emission tomography (FDG-PET) and brain atrophy by voxel-based morphometry (VBM) of T1-weighted magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) scans. Using a whole brain approach, correlations between test performance and imaging data were computed separately in each dementia group, including a group of control subjects (n = 13, 6 female, mean age 54 years) in both analyses. The three groups did not differ with respect to education and gender. Results: Patients in both dementia groups generally performed worse than controls, but AD and FTLD patients did not differ from each other in any of the test parameters. However, memory performance was associated with different brain regions in the patient groups, with respect to both hypometabolism and atrophy: Whereas in AD patients test performance was mainly correlated with changes in the parieto-mesial cortex, performance in FTLD patients was correlated with changes in frontal cortical as well as subcortical regions. There were practically no overlapping regions associated with memory disorders in AD and FTLD as revealed by a conjunction analysis. Conclusion: Memory test performance may not distinguish between both dementia syndromes. In clinical practice, this may lead to misdiagnosis of FTLD patients with poor memory performance. Nevertheless, memory problems are associated with almost completely different neural correlates in both dementia syndromes. Obviously, memory functions are carried out by distributed networks which break down in brain degeneration

Non-Final Focus Accents in The Speech of Advanced Italian Learners of German

This study investigates the prosodic marking of focus in non-native German. Ten proficient learners of German with Italian L1 were recorded reading aloud 40 sentences containing mostly non-final focused constituents embedded in an adequate question context. Non-final focus accents in L2 German are difficult for Italian learners to produce, especially in broad focus contexts with de-accentuation of final verb forms (cf. Paschke/Vogt, in press), because their native language has a strong positional requirement of rightmostness. Given that both German and Italian use pitch accents for information structuring, i. e. to highlight important information, a correct placement of focus accents might, however, be favoured by narrow focus contexts in which prosodic prominence has to be assigned to one specific constituent. In addition to this main hypothesis, the study investigated whether additional clues (such as prosodic highlighting of the relevant constituent in the L2 question, a corresponding syntactic and prosodic structure between L1 and L2) might increase the success rate. The data shows that advanced Italian speakers of German L2 correctly realize non-final focus accents in more than half of the narrow focus contexts, but that their success rate is not significantly higher than in the broad focus condition and is not affected by the additional clues provided

Перспективы планирования устойчивого развития: городского транспорта в Иркутске

Mobility is a strong demand of urban societies and transport systems are backbones of urban life – in Russian cities like in other cities all over the world. Transport planning has to be understood as an integral part of urban development and urban planning. The report discusses problems and chances for sustainable urban transport planning in Irkutsk.Мобильность является важнейшим требованием городского общества, а транспортные системы – основой жизни города. Транспортное планирование необходимо рассматривать как неотъемлемую часть городского развития и планирования. Рассмотрены проблемы и возможности планирования устойчивого развития городского транспорта в Иркутске

Does pragmatics beat syntax? Evidence from focus accent placement in the semi-spontaneous speech of Italian learners of German

In this paper, we investigate the prosodic marking of information structure by Italian L1 learners of German. We analyze two different contexts with non-final focus accents, i. e. narrow and broad focus contexts, mainly on sentence level while most studies discussing post-focal de-accentuation are restricted to noun phrases. For Italian learners, non-final placement of focus accents is likely to cause problems, given that in their L1, phonetic prominence is normally as-signed to the last constituent in the verbal phrase. Our initial hypothesis was that the hypothetical "cognitive universal" requiring de-accentuation of given elements might probably guide the learners in realizing the correct pitch contour in contexts with a non-final narrow focus (and pragmatic de-accentuation of the final given constituent). By contrast, the de-accentuation of phrase-final lexical verbs in broad focus contexts was expected to cause more problems given that this typologically marked syntactic structure does not exist in Italian. However, in a previous study based on read speech, de-accentuation of final given elements was managed by inter-mediate Italian learners of German L2 only slightly better than realizing a non-final focus accent in all new contexts on the argument in OV structures (success rate of 55% vs. 48%, with no statistically significant difference). In other words, both types of non-final focus accents seem to be balanced at this intermediate stage of acquisition. In this contribution, our goal is to discover whether in semi-spontaneous speech one can find the same distributional patterns of non-final focus accents in this learner variety of Italian learners of German. To this end, we analyzed recordings of oral exams from the same 10 Italian university students that had taken part in the previous study. The analysis shows that in semi-spontaneous speech production too, there is evidence for the hypothesis that pragmatics does not "beat" syntax in prosodic acquisition. Besides, when the two different data types were compared, a very high intra-speaker correlation emerged between read and semi-spontaneous speech