Do diacritics entail an early processing cost in the absence of abstract representations? Evidence from masked priming in English

Using the masked priming technique, word recognition experiments in various languages have shown slower response times for a target word like NEVEU (nephew, in French) when preceded by a diacritical prime like néveu than by the identity prime neveu. The most common account of this effect is linguistic: diacritical and non-diacritical vowels (e.g., é and e) activate different letter representations (e.g., compare neveu /nə.vø/ vs. néveu /ne.vø/). However, another explanation is that the reduced effectiveness of the diacritical primes is merely due to the perceptual salience of accent marks in the first moments of word processing. Here, we designed a masked priming experiment that tested this perceptual salience account by comparing the effectiveness of diacritical versus non-diacritical primes in a language where diacritics have no linguistic value, namely, English (e.g., nórth-NORTH vs. north-NORTH). We found a small but reliable cost due to the diacritical primes, thus revealing that perceptual salience reduced the effectiveness of the primes. However, the effect sizes were substantially smaller than in the experiments in languages with diacritical marks, thus suggesting that the néveu-NEVEU versus neveu-NEVEU difference relies on both linguistic and perceptual sources

A flexible luminescent probe to monitor fast ion losses at the edge of the TJ-II stellarator

A mobile luminescent probe has been developed to detect fast ion losses and suprathermal ions escaping from the plasma of the TJ-II stellarator device. The priorities for its design have been flexibility for probe positioning, ease of maintenance, and detector sensitivity. It employs a coherent fiber bundle to relay, to the outside of the vacuum chamber, ionoluminescence images produced by the ions that impinge, after entering the detector head through a pinhole aperture, onto a screen of luminescent material. Ionoluminescence light detection is accomplished by a charge-coupled device camera and by a photomultiplier, both of which are optically coupled to the in-vacuum fiber bundle head by means of a standard optical setup. A detailed description of the detector, and the first results obtained when operated close to the plasma edge, are reported.Ministerio de Educación y Ciencia FTN 2003-0905, ENE2007-6500

Do grading gray stimuli help to encode letter position?

Numerous experiments in the past decades recurrently showed that a transposed-letter pseudoword (e.g., JUGDE) is much more wordlike than a replacement-letter control (e.g., JUPTE). Critically, there is an ongoing debate as to whether this effect arises at a perceptual level (e.g., perceptual uncertainty at assigning letter position of an array of visual objects) or at an abstract language-specific level (e.g., via a level of “open bigrams” between the letter and word levels). Here, we designed an experiment to test the limits of perceptual accounts of letter position coding. The stimuli in a lexical decision task were presented either with a homogeneous letter intensity or with a graded gray intensity, which indicated an unambiguous letter order. The pseudowords were either transposed-letter pseudowords or replaced-letter pseudowords (e.g., jugde vs. jupte). The results showed much longer response times and substantially more errors in the transposedletter pseudowords than in the replacement-letter pseudowords, regardless of visual format. These findings favor the idea that language-specific orthographic element factors play an essential role when encoding letter position during word recognition

What are the letters e and é in a language with vowel reduction? the case of Catalan

Although the Latin-based orthographies of most Western languages employ vowels with accent marks (e.g., é vs. e), extant models of letter and word recognition are agnostic as to whether these accented letters and their non-accented counterparts are represented by common or separate abstract units. Recent research in French with a masked priming alphabetic decision task was interpreted as favoring the idea that accented and non-accented vowels are represented by separate abstract orthographic units (orthographic account: é↛e and e↛é; Chetail & Boursain, 2019). However, a more parsimonious explanation is that salient (accented) vowels are less perceptually similar to non-salient (non-accented) vowels than vice versa (perceptual account: e→é, but é↛e; Perea et al., 2021a; Tversky, 1977). To adjudicate between the two accounts, we conducted a masked priming alphabetic decision experiment in Catalan, a language with a complex orthography-to-phonology mapping for non-accented vowels (e.g., e→/e/, /ə/, / /). Results showed faster responses in the identity than in the visually similar condition for accented targets (é-É < e-É), but not for non-accented targets (e-E = é-E). Neither of the above accounts can fully capture this pattern. We propose an explanation based on the rapid activation of both orthographic and phonological codes

Letter-similarity effects in braille word recognition.

Letter-similarity effects are elusive with common words in lexical decision experiments: viotin and viocin (base word: violin) produce similar error rates and rejection latencies. However, they are robust for stimuli often presented with the same appearance (e.g., misspelled logotypes such as anazon [base word: amazon] produce more errors and longer latencies than atazon). Here, we examine whether letter-similarity effects occur in reading braille. The rationale is that braille is a writing system in which the sensory information is processed in qualitatively different ways than in visual reading: the form of the word's letters is highly stable due to the standardization of braille and the sensing of characters is transient and somewhat serial. Hence, we hypothesized that the letter similarity effect would be sizeable with misspelled common words in braille, unlike the visual modality. To test this hypothesis, we conducted a lexical decision experiment with blind adult braille readers. Pseudowords were created by replacing one letter of a word with a tactually-similar or dissimilar letter in braille following a tactile similarity matrix (Baciero et al., 2021a; e.g., [ausor] vs. [aucor]; baseword: [autor]). Bayesian linear mixed-effects models showed that the responses to tactually-similar pseudowords were less accurate than to tactually-dissimilar pseudowords-the RTs showed a parallel trend. This finding supports the idea that, when reading braille, the mapping of input information onto abstract letter representations is done through a noisy channel (Norris & Kinoshita, 2012)

Overview of progress in European medium sized tokamaks towards an integrated plasma-edge/wall solution

Integrating the plasma core performance with an edge and scrape-off layer (SOL) that leads to tolerable heat and particle loads on the wall is a major challenge. The new European medium size tokamak task force (EU-MST) coordinates research on ASDEX Upgrade (AUG), MAST and TCV. This multi-machine approach within EU-MST, covering a wide parameter range, is instrumental to progress in the field, as ITER and DEMO core/pedestal and SOL parameters are not achievable simultaneously in present day devices. A two prong approach is adopted. On the one hand, scenarios with tolerable transient heat and particle loads, including active edge localised mode (ELM) control are developed. On the other hand, divertor solutions including advanced magnetic configurations are studied. Considerable progress has been made on both approaches, in particular in the fields of: ELM control with resonant magnetic perturbations (RMP), small ELM regimes, detachment onset and control, as well as filamentary scrape-off-layer transport. For example full ELM suppression has now been achieved on AUG at low collisionality with n  =  2 RMP maintaining good confinement HH(98,y2)≈0.95. Advances have been made with respect to detachment onset and control. Studies in advanced divertor configurations (Snowflake, Super-X and X-point target divertor) shed new light on SOL physics. Cross field filamentary transport has been characterised in a wide parameter regime on AUG, MAST and TCV progressing the theoretical and experimental understanding crucial for predicting first wall loads in ITER and DEMO. Conditions in the SOL also play a crucial role for ELM stability and access to small ELM regimes.Integrating the plasma core performance with an edge and scrape-off layer (SOL) that leads to tolerable heat and particle loads on the wall is a major challenge. The new European medium size tokamak task force (EU-MST) coordinates research on ASDEX Upgrade (AUG), MAST and TCV. This multi-machine approach within EU-MST, covering a wide parameter range, is instrumental to progress in the field, as ITER and DEMO core/pedestal and SOL parameters are not achievable simultaneously in present day devices. A two prong approach is adopted. On the one hand, scenarios with tolerable transient heat and particle loads, including active edge localised mode (ELM) control are developed. On the other hand, divertor solutions including advanced magnetic configurations are studied. Considerable progress has been made on both approaches, in particular in the fields of: ELM control with resonant magnetic perturbations (RMP), small ELM regimes, detachment onset and control, as well as filamentary scrape-off-layer transport. For example full ELM suppression has now been achieved on AUG at low collisionality with n = 2 RMP maintaining good confinement H-H(98,H-y2) approximate to 0.95. Advances have been made with respect to detachment onset and control. Studies in advanced divertor configurations (Snowflake, Super-X and X-point target divertor) shed new light on SOL physics. Cross field filamentary transport has been characterised in a wide parameter regime on AUG, MAST and TCV progressing the theoretical and experimental understanding crucial for predicting first wall loads in ITER and DEMO. Conditions in the SOL also play a crucial role for ELM stability and access to small ELM regimes.Peer reviewe

Ionoluminescent response of several phosphor screens to keV ions of different masses

We have characterized the ionoluminescent response of several phosphor powder materials when irradiated with ions of different masses H+ ,He+ ,Ar+ accelerated to keV energies. In particular, we have determined the absolute luminosity in terms of the number of photons per incident ion emitted by luminescent screens of Y2O2S:Tb P45, Y3Al5O12 :Ce P46, Y2SiO5 :Ce P47, Y2O3 :Eu P56, and SrGa2S4 :Eu TG-green. Their ionoluminescence has been studied as a function of ion beam energy and current and ion fluency. The energy trend and mass dependence of selected experimental results are compared relative to stopping and range of ions in matter SRIM code predictions.Ministerio de Educación y Ciencia FTN2003-090