This paper investigates cumulative effects of strengthening and lengthening on English vowels across two prominencebearing prosodic factors, phrasal accent and prosodic phrase boundary. F1, F2 and duration measures are compared across vowels in three prosodic contexts: ip-medial unaccented, ipmedial accented, and ip-final accented. The results show that for most vowels there is only one degree ...

Activity-dependent synaptic plasticity is likely to provide a mechanism for learning and memory. Cortical synaptic responses that are strengthened within a fixed synaptic modification range after 5 days of motor skill learning are driven near the top of their range, leaving only limited room for additional synaptic strengthening. If synaptic strengthening is a requisite step for acquiring new s...

[Purpose] We investigated the effects of individual strengthening exercises for the stabilization muscles on the nutation torque of the sacroiliac joint in a sedentary worker with nonspecific sacroiliac joint pain. [Subject] A 36-year-old female complained of pain in the sacroiliac joints. [Methods] The subject performed individual strengthening exercises for the stabilization muscles for nutat...

The current study investigates effects of prosodic boundary and accent on lip opening and tongue movement of English /æ / in ‘add’, ‘had’ and ‘pad’. Boundary-induced strengthening is found in both V-initial (#VC) and C-initial (#CVC) words, although different kinematic measures are influenced by the segmental contexts. ‘Had’ patterns better with phonetically similar ‘add’ (sharing no constricti...

Switch costs in task switching are often assumed to reflect the strengthening of task-related associations. Recently, we provided evidence that committing an error leads to the strengthening of the wrong task (Steinhauser & Hübner, 2006). In the present study, we report how error-induced control compensates for the effects of error strengthening. We hypothesized that, although error detection c...