Letter Sequences Research Articles

Dialectical awareness in early literacy interventions

The present research investigated the potential link between low literacy acquisition levels and dialectal differences between the non-standard English spoken by many children from lower socio-economic schools in New Zealand in normal day-to-day conversation and the standard English used as the basis of literacy work. The work focused on assessing improvements in literacy of two students from a low decile school in New Zealand who showed evidence of common use of non-standard English. These two children were selected as they were relatively young learners (both approximately 7 years old with about 2 years of formal literacy learning) and because one showed literacy weaknesses in word-level tasks, and the other had more problems in writing. The two students each received two 30 minute sessions a week over an 8-week period of literacy intervention support that focused on linking letter sequences and language sounds: phonological awareness training linked to literacy. However, the tailored interventions also targeted those areas of language where the non-standard English of the children differed from a standard form more consistent with accurate writing. Despite both children having shown poor progress in literacy over the previous 2 years of tuition, the present intervention showed greater than expected improvements between pre- and post-intervention literacy measures of word and non-word reading, word spelling and writing, as well as phonemic awareness. This single-case intervention research suggests that programs aimed at linking letters and sounds may show increased success if attending to both cognitive and dialectical differences of the students.

Assessing spelling in kindergarten: Further comparison of scoring metrics and their relation to reading skills

Early reading and spelling development share foundational skills, yet spelling assessment is underutilized in evaluating early reading. This study extended research comparing the degree to which methods for scoring spelling skills at the end of kindergarten were associated with reading skills measured at the same time as well as at the end of first grade. Five strategies for scoring spelling responses were compared: totaling the number of words spelled correctly, totaling the number of correct letter sounds, totaling the number of correct letter sequences, using a rubric for scoring invented spellings, and calculating the Spelling Sensitivity Score (Masterson & Apel, 2010b). Students (N=287) who were identified at kindergarten entry as at risk for reading difficulty and who had received supplemental reading intervention were administered a standardized spelling assessment in the spring of kindergarten, and measures of phonological awareness, decoding, word recognition, and reading fluency were administered concurrently and at the end of first grade. The five spelling scoring metrics were similar in their strong relations with factors summarizing reading subskills (phonological awareness, decoding, and word reading) on a concurrent basis. Furthermore, when predicting first-grade reading skills based on spring-of-kindergarten performance, spelling scores from all five metrics explained unique variance over the autoregressive effects of kindergarten word identification. The practical advantages of using a brief spelling assessment for early reading evaluation and the relative tradeoffs of each scoring metric are discussed.

Erratum to: 1-Dependent Stationary Sequences for Some Given Joint Distributions of Two Consecutive Random Variables

We provide a method to construct a 1-dependent stationary sequence provided some mixing condition on the joint distribution of two consecutive random variables. Two illustrations of computational benefits of the method are given. We obtain analytical formulas to compute the expectation and variance of the number of occurrences of a word in a sequence of letters from a finite alphabet generated by the 1-dependent model.We also obtain an approximation formula for the distribution of the longest success run in a Bernoulli sequence generated by our model.

Large deviation principles for words drawn from correlated letter sequences

When an sequence of letters is cut into words according to i.i.d. renewal times, an i.i.d. sequence of words is obtained. In the annealed large deviation principle (LDP) for the empirical process of words, the rate function is the specific relative entropy of the observed law of words w.r.t. the reference law of words. In Birkner, Greven and den Hollander, the quenched LDP (= conditional on a typical letter sequence) was derived for the case where the renewal times have an algebraic tail. The rate function turned out to be a sum of two terms, one being the annealed rate function, the other being proportional to the specific relative entropy of the observed law of letters w.r.t. the reference law of letters, obtained by concatenating the words and randomising the location of the origin. The proportionality constant equals the tail exponent of the renewal process. The purpose of the present paper is to extend both LDP's to letter sequences that are not It is shown that both LDP's carry over when the letter sequence satisfies a mixing condition called summable variation. The rate functions are again given by specific relative entropies w.r.t. the reference law of words, respectively, letters. But since neither of these reference laws is i.i.d., several approximation arguments are needed to obtain the extension.

Las habilidades fonológicas, su organización neurofisiológica y su aplicación en la educación

For some authors phonological awareness is a prerequisite for reading, that has to be understood as a conscious activity that involves the activation of a set of skills that integrate higher brain functions, such as praxis, gnosis and language, and whose organization defines new neurophysiological components of reading acquisition, particularly, the phonemic stereotypes. The skill of reading, particularly, the early recognition of graphics and spelling is acquired through childhood in the interaction with the environment, especially, through recreational activities, as well as through biological maturation. This is why, both writing and reading require an accurate phonemic ear (brain mechanism that supports the development of phonological skills), so to identify the lexical units of language, allowing the comparison of the orthographic form of a written word (sequence of letters in an engram) with its mental representation. Once the word is recognized there is access to the semantic system, its sense and its corresponding articulatory production. For this reason, the best name for this phenomenon is that of phonological skills, because the processes involving reading are simultaneous and multiple and depend on the knowledge and development that the reader has acquired in this learning process.

Development of Pocket Vision Screener and its effectiveness at screening visual acuity deficits.

Aim:The aim was to construct a visual acuity chart and find its effectiveness at screening visual acuity deficits.Materials and Methods:Two phases were involved in this study. Construction of the screener: Ten Sloan letters (C, D, H, K, N, O, R, S, V, and Z) were selected and the letters were constructed and reduced to 0.2 logMAR acuity size (6.92 mm) for viewing at 3 m. The screener contains three lines with seven letters in each. Few combinations of the seven letter sequences were chosen based on the row legibility scores. Three seven letter combinations close to the median of all combinations were selected, such that maximum difficulty score difference between the lines are <1%. Finding the effectiveness of the screener: 100 literate subjects with unaided visual acuity better than or equal to 6/60 were recruited for the study. Unaided visual acuity was tested using both the newly constructed Pocket Vision Screener and a logMAR visual acuity chart and the time taken to measure the visual acuity using both the charts was noted.Results:The mean age of the subjects was 43 ± 17 years. Subjects were classified as normal or deficient based on the logMAR visual acuity measurement. The screener was found to have 81% sensitivity, 94% specificity. The positive and negative predictive values were found to be 91% and 87%, respectively. A significant difference (P < 0.001) was found in the time taken to record visual acuity using both the charts.Conclusion:The Pocket Vision Screener can be used as a quick and accurate tool to screen subjects for visual acuity deficits, being highly sensitive, specific, and cost-effective.

Design of Customizable Automated Low Cost Eye Testing System

In many underdeveloped and third world countries, eye care is often neglected due to illiteracy. Particularly people in rural areas suffer with eye problems due to mal nutrition. The government is spending lot of money and efforts in screening the people at periodic intervals. One of the challenges faced by the doctors is screening the school children. The standard Snellen letter chart based diagnostic system does not work always. There are instances where the first few students who undergo this diagnostic system, memorize the letter sequence of the Snellen letter chart and convey the same to other fellow students. Hence other students simply read out the Snellen letter sequence from their memory, not by looking at the Snellen letter chart. Thus there is a need of randomizing the sequence of letters being displayed on the Snellen letter chart for every student to be diagnosed for eye testing. In the present paper we are proposing a customizable, software based, cost effective solution which involves a standard personal computer (PC) fitted with a camera, headphone and speaker system. The envisaged system can be administered even by the trained persons. The proposed system is also suitable for remote diagnosis of patients, particularly in the field of telemedicine.

Similarity Index for Sound-alikeness of Drug Names with Pitch Accents

Drug name similarity is one of major reasons of medical accidents. In order to prevent from the accidents, one of the best ways is to avoid approving drugs that has the names similar to that of existing drugs. It is well-known that there are two kinds of drug name similarity, look-alikeness and sound-alikeness. Nabeta et. al. proposed a look-alikeness similarity index,which excludes the sound-alikeness. Though, in Japan, oral prescription is basically prohibited, emergent situation can force a doctor to prescribe orally. In such a situation, medical accidents can occur.In this study, we proposed a sound-alikeness similarity index based on quantitative similarity of consonants. The consonant similarity was proposed based on The International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA). Overall drug name similarity is calculated based on Letter Sequence Kernel (LSK). The similarity calculation method takes account of the effect of plural pitch accents. We divided a drug name into some pieces at the position where a pitch accent changes, applied LSK to each of them, and combined them to obtain the value of the similarity index. The similarity index proposed in this study achieved relatively high correlation to the results of our experiment, r ≃ 0.8.

Parafoveal preprocessing in reading revisited: Evidence from a novel preview manipulation.

The study investigated parafoveal preprocessing by the means of the classical invisible boundary paradigm and a novel manipulation of the parafoveal previews (i.e., visual degradation). Eye movements were investigated on 5-letter target words with constraining (i.e., highly informative) initial letters or similarly constraining final letters. Visual degradation was administered to all, no, the initial, or the final 2 letters of the parafoveal preview of the target words. Critically, the manipulation of the parafoveal previews did not interfere with foveal processing. Thus, we had a proper baseline to which we could relate our main findings, which were as follows: First, the valid (i.e., nondegraded) preview of the target words' final letters led to shorter fixation times compared to the baseline condition (i.e., the degradation of all letters). Second, this preview benefit for the final letters was comparable to the benefit of previewing the initial letters. Third, the preview of a constraining initial letter sequence, however, yielded a larger preview benefit than the preview of an unconstraining initial letter sequence. The latter finding indicates that preprocessing constraining initial letters is particularly conducive to foveal word recognition.

The Importance of Teaching Phonological-Based Spelling Skills.

&#x0D; &#x0D; &#x0D; &#x0D; In a recent study we (Greaney &amp; Arrow, 2009) undertook an analysis of the types of spelling errors that students had made during a National Education Monitoring Project writing task (Crooks, Flockton &amp; White, 2007). We discussed several issues related to spelling, including the value of analysing students’ error-response patterns as a way of identifying some of the likely causes for these errors. As Bissaker and Westwood (2006) note “A pattern of errors (miscues) can indicate children’s grasp of regular grapho- phonic relationships and their awareness of less predictable letter sequences” (p. 25). In the current paper the relevance of analysing spelling error- responses as a source of data from which to design further explicit spelling instruction is discussed. Some possible teaching activities that may be used with either small groups or whole classes that aim to develop (in students) a more in-depth orthographic knowledge of words are also presented.&#x0D; &#x0D; &#x0D; &#x0D;

Liability of search engine operator for autocomplete suggestions that infringe rights of privacy - "Autocomplete" function

A search engine operator has to take adequate precautions in order to prevent the so-called predictions generated by autocomplete function of the search engine from infringing others' rights of privacy. Failure by the search engine operator to take such precautions despite knowledge of the situation will result in liability for damages. ... [1] Plaintiff No 1, a stock corporation that sells food supplements and cosmetics on the internet via a network marketing system, and plaintiff No 2, its founder and chairman of the board, sued the defendant, which has its registered office in the USA and operates an internet search engine under the internet address “www.google.de”, for injunctive relief and monetary compensation. By entering search terms into the search engine of the defendant, users can access a hit list of contents that were placed on the internet by third parties. In April 2009 the defendant integrated an autocomplete function into its search engine so that various “predictions” are automatically displayed to the internet users in the form of combinations of terms in a separate window that opens while the search terms are typed, varying on the basis of the sequence of letters typed. The predictions displayed within the context of the autocomplete function are determined on the basis of an algorithm which, among other things, takes the number of queries typed by other users into account.

Laus Platonici Philosophi: Marsilio Ficino and His Influence ed. by Stephen Clucas, Peter J. Forshaw, Valery Rees (review)

Reviewed by: Laus Platonici Philosophi: Marsilio Ficino and His Influence ed. by Stephen Clucas, Peter J. Forshaw, Valery Rees James K. Coleman Stephen Clucas, Peter J. Forshaw, and Valery Rees, editors. Laus Platonici Philosophi: Marsilio Ficino and His Influence. Brill’s Studies in Intellectual History, 198. Leiden-Boston: Brill, 2011. Pp. xii + 384. Cloth, $183.00. Scholarship on Marsilio Ficino has flourished during the last decade, thanks in large measure to the recent publication of James Hankins and Michael Allen’s definitive edition and English translation of Ficino’s magnum opus, the Platonic Theology. The increasing accessibility of Ficino’s writings has opened the way to important new scholarly work revealing with ever-greater clarity Ficino’s immense influence during his own lifetime and subsequently, not only as the first translator of Plato’s complete works, but also as an original philosopher in his own right. The present volume, a collection of scholarly essays on Ficino’s thought and influence in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, is the latest confirmation of the vitality of this field of study. The volume is divided into two parts. The first consists of essays that deal with Ficino’s own thought and his engagement with the earlier Platonic tradition. Particularly noteworthy contributions include James Hankins’s essay, which establishes Ficino’s importance as the first author to discuss atheism and religious despair as a problem with physiological causes. In this respect, Ficino was a major influence on Robert Burton, among other later thinkers. As Hankins explains, it is surprising that Ficino, a great admirer of Plotinus, developed such a view, given that Plotinus insisted that the soul controls the body, whereas the body exerts no influence over the soul. In his readiness to acknowledge the body’s influence on the soul, Ficino is indebted to Galen, whom he regarded as a Platonist. Hankins shows that Ficino’s De vita, with its medical and magical cures designed for scholars prone to melancholy, also aims to cure the atheism toward which scholarly minds are sometimes inclined, by alleviating the physiological imbalances that give rise to unbelief. Valery Rees’s essay examines the relationship between praise and love in Ficino’s writings, arguing that Ficino’s creative use of praise draws on literary models including the Hermetic corpus and the Pauline epistles, as well as the writings and teachings of Antoninus Pierozzi. Stéphane Toussaint’s essay focuses on Ficino’s ideas about levitation and heavenly rapture, highlighting the importance of Ficino’s belief that the scriptural accounts of Ezekiel and Elijah’s ascents to heaven could be explained by Neoplatonic theories of the vehicles of the soul. Toussaint provides the first solid evidence that Ficino read and drew material from the work of Jean Gerson, and argues convincingly that Ficino’s ideas about levitation were influenced by writings of Michael Psellos. The second half of the volume is dedicated to studies of Ficino’s influence in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Brian Copenhaver’s essay explores the gap between [End Page 484] the characterizations of Giovanni Pico della Mirandola offered by Marsilio Ficino and by Gianfrancesco Pico: while Ficino’s letters cast Pico as an endangered but engaged intellectual, Gianfrancesco takes pains to portray his uncle as a world-denying Christian saint. According to Copenhaver, Gianfrancesco Pico deliberately published his uncle’s letters in a sequence far removed from their temporal order, intending for the letters to be read not historically, but thematically and spiritually. Copenhaver argues that Gianfrancesco’s ordering of the letters foregrounds the theme of Pico’s repentance, which unfolds over three sequences of letters: the first proclaims Pico’s repentance, the second charts its initial failure, and the third documents its final achievement. Letizia Panizza’s essay traces the ways in which Ficino’s version of Platonic love theory was reworked by an array of sixteenth-century authors, from Baldassare Castiglione to Alessandro Piccolomini. Of particular interest is Panizza’s new analysis of the rewriting of Book IV of Castiglione’s Libro del Cortegiano carried out on behalf of the Congregation of the Index by the Jesuit Antonio Ciccarelli da Foligno. Constance Blackwell’s essay identifies the sixth-century philosopher Simplicius as...

Symmetric periodic solutions of the Hill’s problem. I

The planar circular Hill’s problem is considered, as well as its limiting integrable variant called the Henon problem, for which the original Hill’s problem is a singular perturbation. Among solutions to the Henon problem there are a countable number of generating solutions-arcs that are uniquely determined by the condition of successive passage through the origin of coordinates—singular point of equations of motion of the Hill’s problem. Using the generating solutions-arcs as “letters” of a certain “alphabet”, one can compose, according to some rules, the “words”: generating solutions of families of periodic orbits of the Hill’s problem. The sequence of letters in a word determines the order of orbit transfer from one invariant manifold to another, while the set of all properly specified words determine the system’s symbolic dynamics.

Sleep Promotes the Extraction of Grammatical Rules

Grammar acquisition is a high level cognitive function that requires the extraction of complex rules. While it has been proposed that offline time might benefit this type of rule extraction, this remains to be tested. Here, we addressed this question using an artificial grammar learning paradigm. During a short-term memory cover task, eighty-one human participants were exposed to letter sequences generated according to an unknown artificial grammar. Following a time delay of 15 min, 12 h (wake or sleep) or 24 h, participants classified novel test sequences as Grammatical or Non-Grammatical. Previous behavioral and functional neuroimaging work has shown that classification can be guided by two distinct underlying processes: (1) the holistic abstraction of the underlying grammar rules and (2) the detection of sequence chunks that appear at varying frequencies during exposure. Here, we show that classification performance improved after sleep. Moreover, this improvement was due to an enhancement of rule abstraction, while the effect of chunk frequency was unaltered by sleep. These findings suggest that sleep plays a critical role in extracting complex structure from separate but related items during integrative memory processing. Our findings stress the importance of alternating periods of learning with sleep in settings in which complex information must be acquired.

Letter Knowledge in Parent-Child Conversations.

Learning about letters is an important component of emergent literacy. We explored the possibility that parent speech provides information about letters, and also that children's speech reflects their own letter knowledge. By studying conversations transcribed in CHILDES (MacWhinney, 2000) between parents and children aged one to five, we found that alphabetic order influenced use of individual letters and letter sequences. The frequency of letters in children's books influenced parent utterances throughout the age range studied, but children's utterances only after age two. Conversations emphasized some literacy-relevant features of letters, such as their shapes and association with words, but not letters' sounds. Describing these patterns and how they change over the preschool years offers important insight into the home literacy environment.

The Role of Morphosyntactic Awareness in Conventional Lexical Segmentation

Starting with the alphabetic stage of writing acquisition, the learner struggles with issues related to spelling, including the segmentation of writing in graphic words. This study examined the conventional segmentation of words and its relation to morphosyntactic awareness in a sample of students in the 4th and 5th years of elementary education in public schools. Results reveal a discrepancy between the oral identification of words and performance in the segmentation of writing, with three criteria being used by students to define “word”: (1st) full meaning; (2nd) sequence of letters, not only one or two; (3rd) frequency of word use. Statistical analyses revealed significant positive correlations between conventional segmentation and morphosyntactic awareness. It is inferred that morphosyntactic skills support the establishment of the conventional notion of the word, and it is suggested that teachers promote the development of these skills, in order to ensure a greater command of the written language.

Variational characterization of the critical curve for pinning of random polymers

In this paper we look at the pinning of a directed polymer by a one-dimensional linear interface carrying random charges. There are two phases, localized and delocalized, depending on the inverse temperature and on the disorder bias. Using quenched and annealed large deviation principles for the empirical process of words drawn from a random letter sequence according to a random renewal process [Birkner, Greven and den Hollander, Probab. Theory Related Fields 148 (2010) 403-456], we derive variational formulas for the quenched, respectively, annealed critical curve separating the two phases. These variational formulas are used to obtain a necessary and sufficient criterion, stated in terms of relative entropies, for the two critical curves to be different at a given inverse temperature, a property referred to as relevance of the disorder. This criterion in turn is used to show that the regimes of relevant and irrelevant disorder are separated by a unique inverse critical temperature. Subsequently, upper and lower bounds are derived for the inverse critical temperature, from which sufficient conditions under which it is strictly positive, respectively, finite are obtained. The former condition is believed to be necessary as well, a problem that we will address in a forthcoming paper. Random pinning has been studied extensively in the literature. The present paper opens up a window with a variational view. Our variational formulas for the quenched and the annealed critical curve are new and provide valuable insight into the nature of the phase transition. Our results on the inverse critical temperature drawn from these variational formulas are not new, but they offer an alternative approach, that is, flexible enough to be extended to other models of random polymers with disorder.

Tandem mass spectrometry (MSn) of peptide disulfide regio-isomers via collision-induced dissociation: Utility and limits in disulfide bond characterization

Mass spectrometric characterization of the disulfide connecting patterns directly from intact peptides and proteins is highly desirable but remains a challenging task. In this work, the regio-isomers of peptides containing two intrachain disulfide bonds were synthesized from P1 and P2 peptides (single letter sequence: C(1)ARIC(5)AKLC(9)LEVC(13)K and C(1)AEKC(5)IEKC(9)LVRC(13), respectively). They were further used as model systems to understand the fragmentation chemistry of each isomer under low energy collision-induced dissociation (CID) conditions. MS2 CID could easily identify the regio-isomer having a side-by-side disulfide linkage pattern (C1–C5 and C9–C13). However, the other two isomers with either loop-within-a-loop (C1–C13 and C5–C9) or overlapped disulfide configuration (C1–C9 and C5–C13) showed almost identical spectra and very limited sequence information could be obtained. Internal fragments which resulted from cleavages of two amide bonds from a sequence covered only by one disulfide loop were chosen for further dissociation. The MS3 CID data showed that certain internal fragment ions produced distinct fragmentation patterns which were useful in assigning the correct connecting pattern of the disulfide bonds for all three isomers. On the other hand, some internal fragment ions could undergo consecutive disulfide bond opening during collisional activation, which led to the observation of isomeric peaks from different disulfide regio-isomers. The latter situation made it difficult to independently assign the regio-isomers.

The graphematic foot in English and German

Abstract In traditional graphematics words are represented as a linear sequence of letters. We will present a non-linear graphematic approach which supplements linearity with a hierarchical graphematic structure. This hierarchy of graphematic units comprises letter features, letters, graphemes, syllables, feet and words. We will present structural and experimental evidence for this hierarchical organisation of graphematic units. Our focus lies on the graphematic foot and on the graphematics of English and German. We have found an asymmetry between a canonical and a non-canonical structural organisation of graphematic words. The regularities found in these types of structure can be captured with reference to hierarchical graphematic structures and to foot structures in particular. In order to elucidate whether graphematic foot structure is a relevant unit in graphematics that may influence the analysis of the corresponding phonological foot structure we have conducted a production experiment with German pseudowords.

Finding unusual peptides on the internet using plain three letter sequence codes

Finding peptides with modified amino acids is difficult or impossible when you use plain three letter sequence codes and BLAST. You can find those peptides when you use the structure as a query, but drawing the structure correctly is rather difficult for non-chemists. We developed CWM Global Search [1] with [2]. This is an Internet search engine that allows scientists such as biologists to input plain three letter sequence codes and subsequently search the corresponding chemical structures on the Internet including substructure searches and structure similarity searches. The results are mapped back to three letter sequence codes if possible. This makes the interpretation of the search results much easier than trying to interpret the structures or systematic names normally provided in the databases. Results can also be easily compared using Proteax for Spreadsheets. We demonstrate how to input the plain three letter sequence codes in the editor and the easy and powerful interpretation of the results performing substructure and structure similarity searches for peptides in PubChem and ChEBI. Figure 1 Result from a substructure search is converted in an easy to read three letter sequence code. Unsystematic amino acids are shown as structures.