The aim of this study was to analyze the spinal stability and safety after posterior fusion with various fixation segments screw types in patients an osteoporotic thoracolumbar burst fracture based on finite element analysis (FEA). To realize vertebral conditions T12, seven cases Young’s modulus, namely 0%, 1%, 5%, 10%, 25%, 50%, 100% for bones under intact were considered. Four T12 (fixed T11-...

The present study examines prosodic characteristics of Taiwan (TW) English in relation to native (L1) English and TW speakers’ mother tongue, Mandarin. The aim is to investigate 1) how TW second-language (L2) English is different from L1 English by integrated prosodic features 2) if any transfer effect from L2s’ mother tongue contributes to L2 accent and 3) What is the similarity/difference bet...

This paper examines the intricate relationship between working memory (WM) capacity and inhibitory control as a function of both L2 proficiency and age. In both its design and research questions, this study closely follows Gass & Lee's work, where both L1 and L2 Reading Span Tasks (as measures of WM capacity) and L1 and L2 Stroop interference tasks (to measure inhibitory control) were admin...

The programmed death-1 (PD-1) molecule is involved in peripheral tolerance and in the immune escape mechanisms during chronic viral infections and cancer. PD-1 interacts with two ligands, PD-L1 and PD-L2. We have investigated the molecular mechanisms of PD-1 interactions with its ligands by surface plasmon resonance and cell surface binding as well as the ability of the two ligands to compete f...

Antibodies specific for neutralizing epitopes in either Human papillomavirus (HPV) capsid protein L1 or L2 can mediate protection from viral challenge and thus their accurate and sensitive measurement at high throughput is likely informative for monitoring response to prophylactic vaccination. Here we compare measurement of L1 and L2-specific neutralizing antibodies in human sera using the stan...

The functional brain network of a bilingual's first language (L1) plays a crucial role in shaping that of his or her second language (L2). However, it is less clear how L2 acquisition changes the functional network of L1 processing in bilinguals. In this study, we demonstrate that in bimodal (Chinese spoken-sign) bilinguals, the functional network supporting L1 production (spoken language) has ...

Past approaches to translate a phrase in a language L1 to a language L2 using a dictionarybased approach require grammar rules to restructure initial translations. This paper introduces a novel method without using any grammar rules to translate a given phrase in L1, which does not exist in the dictionary, to L2. We require at least one L1–L2 bilingual dictionary and n-gram data in L2. The aver...

This study concerns good pronunciation from the L2 Japanese listeners’ point of view. More precisely, focusing on prosodic variations, this study investigates whether L2 Japanese listeners from different L1 backgrounds perceive foreign-accented Japanese differently. The experimental results obtained from the two L2 Japanese groups who speak Mandarin Chinese and Bahasa Indonesian, respectively a...