Does Musicality Assist Foreign Language Learning? Perception and Production of Thai Vowels, Consonants and Lexical Tones by Musicians and Non-Musicians.

The music and spoken language domains share acoustic properties such as fundamental frequency (f0, perceived as pitch), duration, resonance frequencies, and intensity. In speech, the acoustic properties form an essential part in differentiating between consonants, vowels, and lexical tones. This study investigated whether there is any advantage of musicality in the perception and production of Thai speech sounds.

Middle Stone Age foragers resided in high elevations of the glaciated Bale Mountains, Ethiopia.

Studies of early human settlement in alpine environments provide insights into human physiological, genetic, and cultural adaptation potentials. Although Late and even Middle Pleistocene human presence has been recently documented on the Tibetan Plateau, little is known regarding the nature and context of early persistent human settlement in high elevations. Here, we report the earliest evidence of a prehistoric high-altitude residential site.

Mineralogy and geochemistry of the main glauconite bed in the Middle Eocene of Texas: paleoenvironmental implications for the verdine facies.

The Main Glauconite Bed (MGB) is a pelleted greensand located at Stone City Bluff on the south bank of the Brazos River in Burleson County, Texas. It was deposited during the Middle Eocene regional transgression on the Texas Gulf Coastal Plain. Stratigraphically it lies in the upper Stone City Member, Crockett Formation, Claiborne Group.

Neogene fallout tuffs from the Yellowstone hotspot in the Columbia Plateau region, Oregon, Washington and Idaho, USA.

Sedimentary sequences in the Columbia Plateau region of the Pacific Northwest ranging in age from 16-4 Ma contain fallout tuffs whose origins lie in volcanic centers of the Yellowstone hotspot in northwestern Nevada, eastern Oregon and the Snake River Plain in Idaho. Silicic volcanism began in the region contemporaneously with early eruptions of the Columbia River Basalt Group (CRBG), and the abundance of widespread fallout tuffs provides the opportunity to establish a tephrostratigrahic framework for the region. Sedimentary basins with volcaniclastic deposits also contain diverse assemblages of fauna and flora that were preserved during the Mid-Miocene Climatic Optimum, including Sucker Creek, Mascall, Latah, Virgin Valley and Trout Creek.

The effects of tone-reducing orthotics on walking of an individual after incomplete spinal cord injury.

Purpose: Most literature about the efficacy of tone-reducing orthotics pertains to adults and children with central nervous system (CNS) pathology. There is relatively little mention of using this type of orthotic with adults after spinal cord injury (SCI). Therefore, the purpose of this study was to investigate whether tone-reducing orthotics have an effect on gait including electromyographic (EMG) activity, velocity, step length, time in double-limb support, and SCI-Functional Ambulation Inventory (SCI-FAI) scores for an individual with incomplete SCI and spasticity.