5,645 research outputs found
Investigating the timecourse of accessing conversational implicatures during incremental sentence interpretation
Many contextual inferences in utterance interpretation are explained as following from the nature of conversation and the assumption that participants are rational. Recent psycholinguistic research has focussed on certain of these ‘Gricean’ inferences and have revealed that comprehenders can access them in online interpretation. However there have been mixed results as to the time-course of access. Some results show that Gricean inferences can be accessed very rapidly, as rapidly as any other contextually specified information (Sedivy, 2003; Grodner, Klein, Carbery, & Tanenhaus, 2010); while other studies looking at the same kind of inference suggest that access to Gricean inferences are delayed relative to other aspects of semantic interpretation (Huang & Snedeker, 2009; in press). While previous timecourse research has focussed on Gricean inferences that support the online assignment of reference to definite expressions, the study reported here examines the timecourse of access to scalar implicatures, which enrich the meaning of an utterance beyond the semantic interpretation. Even if access to Gricean inference in support of reference assignment may be rapid, it is still unknown whether genuinely enriching scalar implicatures are delayed. Our results indicate that scalar implicatures are accessed as rapidly as other contextual inferences. The implications of our results are discussed in reference to the architecture of language comprehension
Plasma arginine vasopressin concentrations in epileptics under monotherapy
Plasma arginine vasopressin concentrations were determined by radio-immunoassay in 112 adult epileptics who were taking carbamazepine, phenytoin, primidone, or sodium valproate in long-term monotherapy, and in 19 controls. No significant difference was found between the groups, but some epileptics taking carbamazepine and primidone showed low values. Serum
concentrations of carbamazepine did not correlate with the concentrations of plasma arginine vasopressin.
In conclusion, there was no evidence of a stimulating
effect of chronic carbamazepine medication or a special inhibiting effect of phenytoin on the release of vasopressin arginine from the posterior pituitary
Geometry and symmetries of multi-particle systems
The quantum dynamical evolution of atomic and molecular aggregates, from
their compact to their fragmented states, is parametrized by a single
collective radial parameter. Treating all the remaining particle coordinates in
d dimensions democratically, as a set of angles orthogonal to this collective
radius or by equivalent variables, bypasses all independent-particle
approximations. The invariance of the total kinetic energy under arbitrary
d-dimensional transformations which preserve the radial parameter gives rise to
novel quantum numbers and ladder operators interconnecting its eigenstates at
each value of the radial parameter.
We develop the systematics and technology of this approach, introducing the
relevant mathematics tutorially, by analogy to the familiar theory of angular
momentum in three dimensions. The angular basis functions so obtained are
treated in a manifestly coordinate-free manner, thus serving as a flexible
generalized basis for carrying out detailed studies of wavefunction evolution
in multi-particle systems.Comment: 37 pages, 2 eps figure
The effect of normal and insulating layers on 0-πtransitions in Josephson junctions with a ferromagnetic barrier
Using the Usadel approach, we provide a formalism that allows us to calculate the critical current density of 21 different types of Josephson junctions (JJs) with a ferromagnetic (F) barrier and additional insulating (I) or/and normal (N) layers inserted between the F layer and superconducting (S) electrodes. In particular, we obtain that in SFS JJs, even a thin additional N layer between the S layer and F layer may noticeably change the thickness of the F layer at which the 0-π transitions occur. For certain values of a 0-π transition can even be achieved by changing only the N layer thickness. We use our model to fit experimental data of SIFS and SINFS tunnel junctions
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