Microorganisms
September 2023
SARS-CoV-2 diagnostic tests have become an important tool for pandemic control. Among the alternatives for COVID-19 diagnosis, antigen rapid diagnostic tests (Ag-RDT) are very convenient and widely used. However, as SARS-CoV-2 variants may continuously emerge, the replacement of tests and reagents may be required to maintain the sensitivity of Ag-RDTs.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFIn 'Being pragmatic about syntactic bootstrapping', Hacquard (2022) argues that abstract syntax is useful for word learning, but that an additional cue, pragmatics, is both necessary and available for young children during the first steps of language acquisition. She focuses on modals and attitude verbs, where the physical context seems particularly impoverished as the sole basis for deriving meanings, and thus where linguistic cues may be particularly helpful. She convincingly shows how pragmatic and syntactic cues could be combined to help young language learners learn and infer the possible meanings of attitude verbs such as "think", "know" or "want".
View Article and Find Full Text PDFThis work aims to investigate French children's ability to use phrasal boundaries for disambiguation of a type of ambiguity not yet studied, namely stripping sentences versus simple transitive sentences. We used stripping sentences such as "[Le tigre tape]! [Le canard aussi]!" ("[The tiger is hitting]! [The duck too]!", in which both the tiger and the duck are hitting), which, without the prosodic information, would be ambiguous with a transitive sentence such as "[Le tigre] [tape le canard aussi]!" ("[The tiger] [is hitting the duck too]!", in which the tiger is hitting the duck). We presented 3-to-4-year-olds and 28-month-olds with one of the two types of sentence above, while they watched two videos side-by-side on a screen: one depicting the transitive interpretation of the sentences, and another depicting the stripping interpretation.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFTwo word-learning experiments were conducted to investigate the understanding of negative sentences in 18- and 24-month-old children. In Experiment 1, after learning that bamoule means "penguin" and pirdaling means "cartwheeling," 18-month-olds (n = 48) increased their looking times when listening to negative sentences rendered false by their visual context ("Look! It is not a bamoule!" while watching a video showing a penguin cartwheeling); however, they did not change their looking behavior when negative sentences were rendered true by their context ("Look! It is not pirdaling!" while watching a penguin spinning). In Experiment 2, 24-month-olds (n = 48) were first exposed to a teaching phase in which they saw a new cartoon character on a television (e.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBecause linguistic communication is often noisy and uncertain, adults flexibly rely on different information sources during sentence processing. We tested whether toddlers engage in a similar process and how that process interacts with verb learning. Across two experiments, we presented French 28-month-olds with right-dislocated sentences featuring a novel verb ("He is VERBing, the boy"), where a clear prosodic boundary after the verb indicates that the sentence is intransitive (such that the NP "the boy" is coreferential with the pronoun "he" and the sentence means "The boy is VERBing").
View Article and Find Full Text PDFYoung children can exploit the syntactic context of a novel word to narrow down its probable meaning. But how do they learn which contexts are linked to which semantic features in the first place? We investigate if 3- to 4-year-old children (n = 60) can learn about a syntactic context from tracking its use with only a few familiar words. After watching a 5-min training video in which a novel function word (i.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFFree functional muscle transfer (FFMT) is a salvage procedure recommended in cases of brachial plexus injury with late presentations or failures of primary nerve reconstruction. The workhorse for most authors is the gracilis, and the most common indication is the restoration of elbow flexion. For successful revascularization of the muscle, donor vessels must be in proximity of the site of the muscle fixation and allow direct coaptation to a donor nerve, ideally without the use of nerve grafts.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFOne of the major challenges in Nile tilapia (Oreochromis niloticus L.) farming is the occurrence of bacterial infections, and the Francisella noatunensis subsp. orientalis (FNO) is an important pathogen that has emerged in last decades.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFDecades of research show that children rely on the linguistic context in which novel words occur to infer their meanings. However, because learning in these studies was assessed after children had heard numerous occurrences of a novel word in informative linguistic contexts, it is impossible to determine how much exposure would be needed for a child to learn from such information. This study investigated the speed with which French 20-month-olds and 3-to-4-year-olds exploit function words to determine the syntactic category of novel words and therefore infer their meanings.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFGenomics
November 2018
Francisella noatunensis subsp. orientalis (FNO) is an important emerging pathogen associated with disease outbreaks in farm-raised Nile tilapia. FNO genetic diversity using PCR-based typing, no intra-species discrimination was achieved among isolates/strains from different countries, thus demonstrating a clonal behaviour pattern.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFAdults create and update predictions about what speakers will say next. This study asks whether prediction can drive language acquisition, by testing whether 3- to 4-year-old children (n = 45) adapt to recent information when learning novel words. The study used a syntactic context which can precede both nouns and verbs to manipulate children's predictions about what syntactic category will follow.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFThis study examined whether phrasal prosody can impact toddlers' syntactic analysis. French noun-verb homophones were used to create locally ambiguous test sentences (e.g.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFScalar implicatures, the phenomena where a sentence like "The pianist played Mozart sonatas" is interpreted, as "The pianist did play Mozart sonatas" have been given two different analyses. Neo-Griceans (NG) claim that this interpretation is based on lexical scales (e.g.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFTo comprehend language, listeners need to encode the relationship between words within sentences. This entails categorizing words into their appropriate word classes. Function words, consistently preceding words from specific categories (e.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFThis study tested American preschoolers' ability to use phrasal prosody to constrain their syntactic analysis of locally ambiguous sentences containing noun/verb homophones (e.g., [The baby flies] [hide in the shadows] vs [The baby] [flies his kite], brackets indicate prosodic boundaries).
View Article and Find Full Text PDFAnaerobe
August 2016
The epidemiology of Clostridium difficile infections is highly dynamic as new strains continue to emerge worldwide. Here we present a detailed analysis of a new C. difficile strain (ICC-45) recovered from a cancer patient in Brazil that died from severe diarrhea.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFStand Genomic Sci
June 2016
Streptococcus agalactiae, also referred to as Group B Streptococcus, is a frequent resident of the rectovaginal tract in humans, and a major cause of neonatal infection. The pathogen can also infect adults with underlying disease, particularly the elderly and immunocompromised ones. In addition, S.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBMC Genomics
April 2016
Background: Studies have detected mis-assemblies in genomes of the species Corynebacterium pseudotuberculosis. These new discover have been possible due to the evolution of the Next-Generation Sequencing platforms, which have provided sequencing with accuracy and reduced costs. In addition, the improving of techniques for construction of high accuracy genomic maps, for example, Whole-genome mapping (WGM) (OpGen Inc), have allow high-resolution assembly that can detect large rearrangements.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFThe genus Francisella is composed of Gram-negative, pleomorphic, strictly aerobic and non-motile bacteria, which are capable of infecting a variety of terrestrial and aquatic animals, among which Francisella noatunensis subsp. orientalis stands out as the causative agent of pyogranulomatous and granulomatous infections in fish. Accordingly, F.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFLeprosy, an infectious disease caused by Mycobacterium leprae, affects millions of people worldwide. However, little is known regarding its molecular pathophysiological mechanisms. In this study, a comprehensive assessment of human mRNA was performed on leprosy skin lesions by using DNA chip microarrays, which included the entire spectrum of the disease along with its reactional states.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFOral squamous cell carcinoma (OSCC) is the most common tumor of the oral cavity and has been associated with poor prognosis. Scarce prognostic markers are available for guiding treatment and/or sub-classifying patients. This study aims to identify biomarkers by searching for genes whose expression is increased or decreased during tumor progression (through T1 to T4 stages).
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