In recent years the Critical Period Hypothesis of language acquisition has come under close scrutiny. The premise that native-like language proficiency can only be attained if the language is learned early in life seems difficult to maintain, as neuroimaging data have revealed a greater plasticity of the human brain to master new languages than has previously been assumed. The field of non-path...

This article is a methodological-substantive synergy. Methodologically, we demonstrate latent-variable contextual models that integrate structural equation models (with multiple indicators) and multilevel models. These models simultaneously control for and unconfound measurement error due to sampling of items at the individual (L1) and group (L2) levels and sampling error due the sampling of pe...

In this paper, we validate Macaro’s (2006) model of strategy use among language learners by assessing the amount of neural activity around the prefrontal cortex, the supposed locus of working memory (WM). We also examine whether WM activation during first language (L1) strategy deployment is lower than WM activation during second language (L2) strategy deployment, as predicted by Macaro’s model...

Title of dissertation: AUTOMATIC ACTIVATION OF SEMANTIC REPRESENTATION DURING SECOND LANGUAGE PROCESSING Written by: Sun Young Ahn, Doctor of Philosophy, 2015 Directed by: Professor Nan Jiang Department of Second Language Acquisition The present study is motivated by two questions. First, can late learners of a second language (L2), who begin learning after puberty and are unbalanced bilinguals...

This study examines the coda voicing effect in English on production of preceding vowel by comparing L1 and L2 speech. Particular attention is paid to how coda voicing contrast is encoded in temporal vs. spectral dimensions, how the effect interacts with information structure (with varying focus types), and how the use of information structure differs in L1 vs. L2. Both English (native) and Kor...

A companion diagnostic assay was codeveloped by Dako for pembrolizumab non-small-cell lung cancer clinical trials to detect PD-L1 expression by immunohistochemistry (IHC). This automated IHC assay has been analytically verified and validated using Dako's autostainer Link 48 and 22C3 mouse anti-PD-L1 monoclonal antibody to detect the PD-L1 expression in formalin-fixed paraffin-embedded human tum...

While many second language (L2) acquisition studies analyze the effects that the first language (L1) has on L2 development, less common are studies that examine the converse situation: does acquisition of an L2 impact the L1? This study examines the effects of L2 acquisition on L1 use by looking at the L1 phonological productions of advanced L2 learners vis-à-vis the production of monolingual s...

Comb filters can be designed by replacing single delays in digital filters by multiple delays. These filters are " periodic " in the sense that their frequency response repeats itself at fixed intervals. They are thus well suited to a signal such as GPS L1 which has a spectrum made up of lines separated by the code repetition frequency of 1 kHz. In this paper we examine how periodic filters can...

BACKGROUND Primary pulmonary lymphoepithelioma-like carcinoma (LELC) is a rare subtype of non-small cell lung cancer (NSCLC), and no effective treatments have been defined for advanced disease. Programmed cell death-ligand 1 (PD-L1) is expressed in a group of cancers that may be suitable targets for specific immunotherapy. METHODS This study investigated the expression and clinical value of P...