EMA Study Research Articles

Articulatory factors influencing regressive place assimilation across word boundaries in German

This EMA study examined articulatory properties of nasal–stop and stop–stop sequences across word boundaries in German. The immediate aim was to investigate whether the greater tendency of nasals as compared to stops to exhibit regressive place assimilation results from differences in tongue-tip reduction due, in turn, to acoustic–perceptual properties of nasals. In parallel with this aim, the relevance of word frequency for assimilatory processes was investigated. Analysis of data from four speakers showed greater tongue-tip reduction in high-frequency words with a nasal, indicating a combination of factors that causes tongue-tip reduction. A further route to capturing assimilatory processes is the amount of overlap between C 1 and C 2. Analysis of this was complicated precisely by the fact that particularly for the high-frequency nasals, movement reduction was sometimes so strong that no kinematic analysis could be performed. A tentative conclusion was nonetheless that overlap tended to be greater in nasal–stop than stop–stop sequences. The discussion points out that high-frequency words in German mostly end in a nasal and concludes that it is word frequency and speakers' knowledge of acoustic–perceptual properties of nasality that allows them to simplify articulation more in nasals than stops. This account presupposes that the nasality itself remains robustly present even when the lingual gesture of the nasal consonant is strongly reduced (or overlapped by the following consonant). Velum movement data available for some of the speakers and inspection of the acoustics indicated that this was indeed the case.

Articulatory features influencing regressive place assimilation across word‐boundaries in German

Within current phonological theories the greater tendency of C1 nasals vs. C1 plosives to undergo regressive place assimilation is often treated as the consequence of acoustic‐perceptual properties of nasality (e.g. Steriade, 2001). Little is known about the articulatory patterns underlying this asymmetry. Our current EMA study aims to test and compare the effects of manner of articulation of C1 (alveolar nasal vs. alveolar plosive), place of articulation of C2 (labial vs. dorsal plosive), vowel context (palatal /i/ vs. non‐palatal vowel /a/), and word frequency upon the intra‐ and intergestural timing and movement magnitude of various articulators in C1C2 sequences across word‐boundaries in German subjects. Our analyses of non‐palatal vowel contexts in three speakers showed a greater likelihood of reduction of the tongue tip both in words with a nasal C1 and in high frequency words. For those word pairs in which tongue tip displacement was measurable, tongue tip ‐ tongue back overlap was significantly gr...

199. Plasmid DNA Delivery by Nanoparticule Loaded Coronary Stent

Top of pageAbstract Introduction: Cardiovascular gene therapy has been hampered by a lack of effective gene delivery system. Although stent-based percutaneous gene delivery showed great promising, insufficient gene loading on stents remains a big problem. In this paper, we reported a new approach that gene loaded dodecylated chitosan nanoparticles (DCDNPs) were tethered on coronary stent and demonstrated efficient and highly localized plasmid DNA delivery and gene expression. Materials and Methods: Dodecylated chitosan (50kDa) was a gift from KD Yao. Plasmid EGFP-C1 was obtained from Clontech (Palo Alto, CA). Coronary stents (13mm) were kindly provided by the Microport Medical Co Ltd. (Shanghai, China). The NPs were prepared as Mao's description. The DCDNPs were attached on stents by spraying coating. The morphology of DCDNP-loaded stent (NP-stent) was observed by Scanning Electron Microscopy (SEM). The NP-stents loaded with EGFP-C1 plasmid were evaluated for gene delivery and expression in rat aortic smooth muscle cell (A10 cell) culture and in rabbit common carotid artery (CCA) studies. Results: When mixed with plasmid DNA in aqueous solution, dodecylated chitosan formed positive-charged nanospheres with mean diameter of around 90nm and zeta potential of +28|[plusmn]|3mV. Under physiologic condition, the DCDNPs did not show significant change in size and zeta potential for one week of incubation. TEM microphotographs showed spherical shape and homogeneous particle size distribution of the nanosparticles. EMA studies demonstrated that the DCDNPs could effectively protect plasmid DNA from degradation by DNase I digesting. A thin layer of dense DCDNPs was obverted on the metal struts of both unexpanded and expanded stents. SEM confirmed that the DCDNPs were successfully loaded on the endovascular stents. In cell culture, A10 cells grown on the surface and along the adjacent area of the EGFP- C NP-stents showed high level of GFP expression. Chitosan-coated or naked stents (without plasmid DNA) showed no detectable GFP expression. The NP-stents had no harmful effects on A10 cell growth as indicated by cell culture. Rabbit CCA studies with the pEGFPC1-loaded NP-stent demonstrated efficient gene transduction, with about12.3% of neointimal cells expressing GFP positivity, which is much higher than directly injecting the same quantity of EGFP-C1 into the rabbit common carotid artery. Furthermore, the GFP positive cells were only detected in the neointimal layer closely contacted to the NP-stent. Immunohistochemical analyses using anti-GFP antibody confirmed positive expression in the rabbit common carotid artery implanted with NP-stent. Conclusions: This result demonstrated a great progress in delivering plasmid DNA into intravascular tissue with high efficiency and good hemo- and bio- compatibility and without adverse immune response. The same technique could be used for a wide array of single or multiple therapeutic plasmid DNAs.

Twelve Fallacies in Contemporary Adaptation Theory

What could be more audacious than to argue that the study of moving images as adaptations of literary works, one of the very first shelters under which cin ema studies originally entered the academy, has been neglected? Yet that is ex actly what this essay will argue: that despite its venerable history, widespread practice, and apparent influence, adaptation theory has remained tangential to the thrust of film study because it has never been undertaken with conviction and theoretical rigor. By examining dozen interlinked fallacies that have kept adaptation theory from fulfilling its analytical promise, I hope to claim for ad aptation theory more of the power it deserves. 1. There is such thing as contemporary adaptation theory. This is the found ing fallacy of adaptation studies, and the most important reason they have been so largely ineffectual—because they have been practiced in theoretical vacuum, without the benefit of what Robert B. Ray has called a presiding po etics.1 There is, as the preceding sentence acknowledges, such thing as ad aptation studies. It is pursued in dozens of books and hundreds of articles in Literature/Film Quarterly and in classrooms across the country, from high school to graduate school, in courses with names like Dickens and Film and From Page to Screen. But this flood of study of individual adaptations pro ceeds on the whole without the support of any more general theoretical ac count of what actually happens, or what ought to happen, when group of filmmakers set out to adapt literary text. As Brian McFarlane has recently observed: In view of the nearly sixty years of writing about the adaptation of novels into film ... it is depressing to find at what limited, tentative stage the discourse has remained.2 Despite the appearance of more recent method ologies from the empiricism of Morris Beja to the neo-Aristotelianism of James Griffith, the most influential general account of cinema's relation to literature continues to be George Bluestone's tendentious Novels into Film, now nearly half century old. Bluestone's categorical and essentialist treatment of the rela tions between movies and the books they are based on neglects or begs many

An EMA study of VCV coarticulatory direction

This study addresses three issues that are relevant to coarticulation theory in speech production: whether the degree of articulatory constraint model (DAC model) accounts for patterns of the directionality of tongue dorsum coarticulatory influences; the extent to which those patterns in tongue dorsum coarticulatory direction are similar to those for the tongue tip; and whether speech motor control and phonemic planning use a fixed or a context-dependent temporal window. Tongue dorsum and tongue tip movement data on vowel-to-vowel coarticulation are reported for Catalan VCV sequences with vowels /i/, /a/, and /u/, and consonants /p/, /n/, dark /l/, /s/, /S/, alveolopalatal /n/ and /k/. Electromidsagittal articulometry recordings were carried out for three speakers using the Carstens articulograph. Trajectory data are presented for the vertical dimension for the tongue dorsum, and for the horizontal dimension for tongue dorsum and tip. In agreement with predictions of the DAC model, results show that directionality patterns of tongue dorsum coarticulation can be accounted for to a large extent based on the articulatory requirements on consonantal production. While dorsals exhibit analogous trends in coarticulatory direction for all articulators and articulatory dimensions, this is mostly so for the tongue dorsum and tip along the horizontal dimension in the case of lingual fricatives and apicolaminal consonants. This finding results from different articulatory strategies: while dorsal consonants are implemented through homogeneous tongue body activation, the tongue tip and tongue dorsum act more independently for more anterior consonantal productions. Discontinuous coarticulatory effects reported in the present investigation suggest that phonemic planning is adaptative rather than context independent.

Dialectal differences in vowel articulations in pre-consonantal contexts

Many varieties of English show the well-known pattern of longer vowels before voiced consonants, at least in monosyllabic words. Scottish English, however, shows a different pattern of adjacent-consonant conditioned vowel duration for the vowels /i,u,ai/: In this variety, short vowels are found before tautomorphemic voiceless stops, voiced oral and nasal stops, and voiceless fricatives. Long vowels are found before voiced fricatives and morpheme boundaries. For example, ‘‘bead,’’ ‘‘bean,’’ and ‘‘beat’’ and ‘‘peace’’ all contain short vowels, while ‘‘please,’’ ‘‘free,’’ and ‘‘freed’’ contain long vowels. This contextually conditioned durational pattern has been described by the Scottish vowel length rule (SVLR). We conducted an EMA study of the SVLR to examine the articulatory strategies speakers use to produce these well-documented acoustic durational patterns. We are particularly interested in (1) whether there is a single mechanism underlying all long duration vowels, i.e., those conditioned by tautomorphemic /z/ as compared to tautosyllabic but heteromorphemic /z/ and /d/, and (2) whether the strategy Scottish English speakers use to lengthen vowels in the SVLR conditioning environments is the same as that used by speakers of other varieties to produce longer vowels before voiced obstruents. [Work supported by ESRC.]