Secondary sexual traits have been suggested to provide reliable signals of a male’s ability to resist infection by agents of disease. The immunocompetence handicap hypothesis provides a potential mechanism for reliable signalling in the form of a trade-off between expenditure on trait expression and expenditure on immunity. Thus, males resistant to disease can spend more resources on their sexu...

Rats (Rattus norvegicus) emit a variety of ultrasonic vocalizations throughout their lifespan that reflect different forms of emotional arousal and accompanying affective states. In this study, high frequency recordings of ultrasonic vocalizations were made during mating, aggression, and both conspecific and heterospecific (dubbed "tickling") rough-and-tumble play behavior. We found that freque...

Variation in song can play a central role in species and subspecies recognition among birds. The ability of individuals to distinguish between songs of their own versus songs of a different subspecies potentially strengthens local adaptation of subspecific populations. We investigated the degree of vocal divergence and discrimination between two subspecies of Swamp Sparrow (Melospiza georgiana)...

Electropalatographic data on C-to-C coarticulatory e!ects were analyzed for consonant clusters composed of an extensive set of Catalan consonants, i.e., dentals (t), alveolars (n, dark l, s, trilled r), alveolopalatals (ʃ, V, E), palatals ( j) and velars (k). Regarding tongue dorsum coarticulation, results show that consonantal e!ects in CC clusters are more prominent than vocalic e!ects in VCV...

BACKGROUND Publication bias is an important factor that may result in selection bias and lead to overestimation of the intervention effect. In this study, the focus was on using capture-recapture method as a statistical procedure which may possibly be a practical means for measuring the amount of publication bias. METHODS A systematic review was conducted to estimate the duration of protectio...

Objective. To assess the presence of nonverbal and verbal apraxia in patients with Parkinson's disease (PD) and analyze the correlation between these conditions and patient age, education, duration of disease, and PD stage, as well as evaluate the correlation between the two types of apraxia and the frequency and types of verbal apraxic errors made by patients in the sample. Method. This was an...

The present paper investigates the conditions under which different realizations of /R/ occur in standard Austrian German. The study is based on 509 word tokens containing the phone sequence /aR/ in coda position drawn from a corpus of read speech from seven male Austrian radio speakers. Acoustic measurements of the vowel /a/ revealed that F1, F2 and F3 are significant predictors for the realiz...

This study investigates the effectiveness of three high variability training paradigms in training 42 speakers of American English to correctly perceive and produce Spanish intervocalic /d, Q, r/. Since Spanish spirantization and English flapping both affect /d/ intervocalically, the acquisition of the /d/-/Q/ contrast proves difficult for English learners of Spanish. The acquisition of the tri...

Male songbirds often establish territories and attract mates by singing, and some song features can reflect the singer's condition or quality. The quality of the song environment can change, so male songbirds should benefit from assessing the competitiveness of the song environment and appropriately adjusting their own singing behavior and the neural substrates by which song is controlled. In a...

We examined acoustic masking in a chirping katydid species of the Mecopoda elongata complex due to interference with a sympatric Mecopoda species where males produce continuous trills at high amplitudes. Frequency spectra of both calling songs range from 1 to 80 kHz; the chirper species has more energy in a narrow frequency band at 2 kHz and above 40 kHz. Behaviourally, chirper males successful...