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realisation in form of a retroflex is not only found in the English south West ('West Country burr'), but also across the English Channel in a well circumscribed area of Trégor in Brittany. Both areas also share other phonetic features such as sonorisation of word initial fricatives, epenthesis, surnames etc. How is this to be explained? Intensive mobility and trade across the sea suggest themselves as a possible answer. Travelling by sea, aided by expert knowledge of the seasonal currents and winds, was much quicker and efficient in former times than travelling across land. In this connection, the phenomenon of the "Johnnys de Roccoff" who traded Breton onions along the English coasts until very recently is pointed ou as a type of contact which may have transported phoneme realisations and lexis across the sea, forming a linguistic area with not much contact with their respective hinterlands in England and Brittany.
Sentence comprehension requires the assignment of thematic relations between the verb and its noun arguments in order to determine who is doing what to whom. In some languages, such as English, word order is the primary syntactic cue. In other languages, such as German, case-marking is additionally used to assign thematic roles. During development children have to acquire the thematic relevance of these syntactic cues and weigh them against semantic cues. Here we investigated the processing of syntactic cues and semantic cues in 2- and 3-year-old children by analyzing their behavioral and neurophysiological responses. Case-marked subject-first and object-first sentences (syntactic cue) including animate and inanimate nouns (semantic cue) were presented auditorily. The semantic animacy cue either conflicted with or supported the thematic roles assigned by syntactic case-marking. In contrast to adults, for whom semantics did not interfere with case-marking, children attended to both syntactic and to semantic cues with a stronger reliance on semantic cues in early development. Children’s event-related brain potentials indicated sensitivity to syntactic information but increased processing costs when case-marking and animacy assigned conflicting thematic roles. These results demonstrate an early developmental sensitivity and ongoing shift towards the use of syntactic cues during sentence comprehension.
We present XMM-Newton results for the X-ray spectrum from the N-rich Wolf-Rayet (WR) star WR 1. The EPIC instrument was used to obtain a medium-resolution spectrum. The following features characterize this spectrum: (a) significant emission "bumps" appear that are coincident with the wavelengths of typical strong lines, such as Mg XI, Si XIII and S XV; (b) little emission is detected above 4 keV, in contrast to recent reports of a hard component in the stars WR 6 and WR 110 which are of similar subtype; and (c) evidence for sulfur K-edge absorption at about 2.6 keV, which could only arise from absorption of X-rays by the ambient stellar wind. The lack of hard emission in our dataset is suggestive that WR 1 may truly be a single star, thus representing the first detailed X-ray spectrum that isolates the WR wind alone (in contrast to colliding wind zones). Although the properties of the S-edge are not well-constrained by our data, it does appear to be real, and its detection indicates that at least some of the hot gas in WR 1 must reside interior to the radius of optical depth unity for the total absorptive opacity at the energy of the edge.
The effects of varying LiPF6 salt concentration and the presence of lithium bis(oxalate)borate additive on the electronic structure of commonly used lithium-ion battery electrolyte solvents (ethylene carbonate-dimethyl carbonate and propylene carbonate) have been investigated. X-ray Raman scattering spectroscopy (a non-resonant inelastic X-ray scattering method) was utilized together with a closed-circle flow cell. Carbon and oxygen K-edges provide characteristic information on the electronic structure of the electrolyte solutions, which are sensitive to local chemistry. Higher Li+ ion concentration in the solvent manifests itself as a blue-shift of both the pi* feature in the carbon edge and the carbonyl pi* feature in the oxygen edge. While these oxygen K-edge results agree with previous soft X-ray absorption studies on LiBF4 salt concentration in propylene carbonate, carbon K-edge spectra reveal a shift in energy, which can be explained with differing ionic conductivities of the electrolyte solutions.
We investigate the connections between the magnetic fields and the X-ray emission from massive stars. Our study shows that the X-ray properties of known strongly magnetic stars are diverse: while some comply to the predictions of the magnetically confined wind model, others do not. We conclude that strong, hard, and variable X-ray emission may be a sufficient attribute of magnetic massive stars, but it is not a necessary one. We address the general properties of X-ray emission from "normal" massive stars, especially the long standing mystery about the correlations between the parameters of X-ray emission and fundamental stellar properties. The recent development in stellar structure modeling shows that small-scale surface magnetic fields may be common. We suggest a "hybrid" scenario which could explain the X-ray emission from massive stars by a combination of magnetic mechanisms on the surface and shocks in the stellar wind. The magnetic mechanisms and the wind shocks are triggered by convective motions in sub-photospheric layers. This scenario opens the door for a natural explanation of the well established correlation between bolometric and X-ray luminosities.
Massive runaway stars produce bow shocks through the interaction of their winds with the interstellar medium, with the prospect for particle acceleration by the shocks. These objects are consequently candidates for non-thermal emission. Our aim is to investigate the X-ray emission from these sources. We observed with XMM-Newton a sample of five bow shock runaways, which constitutes a significant improvement of the sample of bow shock runaways studied in X-rays so far. A careful analysis of the data did not reveal any X-ray emission related to the bow shocks. However, X-ray emission from the stars is detected, in agreement with the expected thermal emission from stellar winds. On the basis of background measurements we derive conservative upper limits between 0.3 and 10 keV on the bow shocks emission. Using a simple radiation model, these limits together with radio upper limits allow us to constrain some of the main physical quantities involved in the non-thermal emission processes, such as the magnetic field strength and the amount of incident infrared photons. The reasons likely responsible for the non-detection of non-thermal radiation are discussed. Finally, using energy budget arguments, we investigate the detectability of inverse Compton X-rays in a more extended sample of catalogued runaway star bow shocks. From our analysis we conclude that a clear identification of non-thermal X-rays from massive runaway bow shocks requires one order of magnitude (or higher) sensitivity improvement with respect to present observatories.
Working memory load-dependent brain response predicts behavioral training gains in older adults
(2014)
In the domain of working memory (WM), a sigmoid-shaped relationship between WM load and brain activation patterns has been demonstrated in younger adults. It has been suggested that age-related alterations of this pattern are associated with changes in neural efficiency and capacity. At the same time, WM training studies have shown that some older adults are able to increase their WM performance through training. In this study, functional magnetic resonance imaging during an n-back WM task at different WM load levels was applied to compare blood oxygen level-dependent (BOLD) responses between younger and older participants and to predict gains in WM performance after a subsequent 12-session WM training procedure in older adults. We show that increased neural efficiency and capacity, as reflected by more "youth-like" brain response patterns in regions of interest of the frontoparietal WM network, were associated with better behavioral training outcome beyond the effects of age, sex, education, gray matter volume, and baseline WM performance. Furthermore, at low difficulty levels, decreases in BOLD response were found after WM training. Results indicate that both neural efficiency (i. e., decreased activation at comparable performance levels) and capacity (i. e., increasing activation with increasing WM load) of a WM-related network predict plasticity of the WM system, whereas WM training may specifically increase neural efficiency in older adults.