This study investigates the acoustic realization of single vs. double focus in statements and yes/no questions in General American English. Four speakers produced four sets of utterances of different lengths with alternating focus and sentence type conditions. Results indicate that double focus increases max F0 and duration of the focused word to a similar degree as single focus in both stateme...

value cannot rule out the possibility that some area in the brain may be hypoxic or ischemic. We agree that this is a major limitation of the method. However, the same triticism could be brought against the measurement of cerebral oxygenation by methods that monitor a very limited cerebrd area, such as near-infrared spectroscopy (NIRS) or direct cerebral oxygen measurement with intracerebra1 pr...

(1994) Prophylactic sclerotherapy for esophageal varices: Long-term results of a prospective study. Endoscopy; 26: 729-733. Controlled trials of endoscopic sclerotherapy for the prevention of the first variceal hemorrhage have given controversial results. We continued a previously reported study and randomly assigned 141 patients with esophageal varics and no prior gastrointestinal bleeding to ...

Volunteers studied pictures of objects and were then tested for yes/no recognition at 10 min and 1 week after learning (experiment 1), or at 10 min and 4 months after learning (experiment 2). Because the gradual consolidation of long-term memory is thought to occur across this time scale (weeks and months), the reaction time distributions of successfully retrieved items were analyzed in an atte...

This paper summarizes several perception experiments showing that the morphology of the prosodic focus conveys more information than the only deictic information: (1) the binary valence yes/no focus – which is perceptively quite categorical (a magnet effect is clear on the basis of an identification and a discrimination experiment [2]), (2) the intensity information, used by the speaker to give...

The detectability of a pure-tone signal may be reduced by adding a small number of randomly drawn masker tones remote from the signal frequency, an effect attributed to informational masking. A pretrial cue consisting of either the upcoming signal or masker releases informational masking, but a pretrial cue of the signal-plus-masker stimulus does not. In these experiments the relative potency o...

BACKGROUND Experiences and attitudes of clinical trainers of undergraduate medical students and postgraduate medical trainees in secondary care have received limited attention. Anecdotally, clinical teaching is becoming increasingly restricted by clinical service pressures, thereby presenting a risk to the quality of training provision. METHODS To explore the commitment, experience and attitu...

We examined the role of conceptual and visual similarity in a memory task for natural images. The important novelty of our approach was that visual similarity was determined using an algorithm [1] instead of being judged subjectively. This similarity index takes colours and spatial frequencies into account. For each target, four distractors were selected that were (1) conceptually and visually ...

OBJECTIVES To describe the use, perceived effectiveness, and predicted future use of organisational strategies for influencing clinicians' behaviour in the approach of NHS trusts to clinical governance, and to ascertain the perceived benefits of clinical governance and the barriers to change. DESIGN AND SETTING Whole population postal survey conducted between March and June 1999. SUBJECTS C...