One critical question for the front end of models of visual-word recognition and reading is whether the stage of letter position coding is purely orthographic or whether phonology is (to some degree) involved. To explore this issue, we conducted a silent reading experiment in Japanese Kana--a script in which orthography and phonology can be easily separated--using a technique that is highly sen...

Pseudomonas putida M10 was originally isolated from factory waste liquors by selection for growth on morphine. The NADP(+)-dependent morphine dehydrogenase that initiates morphine catabolism is encoded by a large plasmid of 165 kb. Treatment of P. putida M10 with ethidium bromide led to the isolation of a putative plasmid-free strain that was incapable of growth on morphine. The structural gene...

Bacterial invasion plays a critical role in the establishment of Pseudomonas aeruginosa infection and is aided by two major virulence factors--surface appendages and secreted proteases. The second messenger cyclic diguanylate (c-di-GMP) is known to affect bacterial attachment to surfaces, biofilm formation and related virulence phenomena. Here we report that MorA, a global regulator with GGDEF ...

Serial ordering mechanisms have been investigated extensively in psychology and psycholinguistics. It has also been demonstrated repeatedly that long-term phonological knowledge contributes to serial ordering. However, the mechanisms that contribute to serial ordering have yet to be fully understood. To understand these mechanisms, we demonstrate 2 effects using triples of Japanese nonwords in ...

The mora timing organization for producing contrastive geminate/single consonants and long/short vowels is a difficult task for non-native speakers of Japanese. This paper investigates characteristics of the segment durations involved in the production of contrastive phonemes by native Japanese speakers and Chinese-speaking subjects, when the speaking rate is changed. From the statistical regre...

A new scheme is proposed to incorporate prosodic processing into speech recognition, where the accent nuclei at the head of words are detected automatically and used to limit the searching space in speech recognition, that is, to preselect candidate words. Especially in this paper, the proposed method for the automatic detection of the accent nuclei and its performance are described. Using this...

This paper describes a system for Japanese spoken language learning using Java information technology (IT). The system is automatically evaluated Japanese speech uttered by trainee as computer assisted language learning (CALL) on the Internet. For the Internet, the system can be used at any time, in anywhere and for anyone so that it is very suitable for busy learners in the world. Phonetically...