Speyer (2008) finds an overall decline in the rate of topicalization in historical English, which we refer to pretheoretically as direct object fronting. He attributes it to two separate phenomena: 1) the early loss of unaccented pronominal and demonstrative fronting, and 2) a gradient decline in the use of accented, contrastive fronting due to prosodic well-formedness conditions imposed by the...

Three experiments examined the hypothesis that it preferentially refers to the most salient entity in a discourse, whereas that preferentially refers to a conceptual composite. In Experiment 1, eye movements were monitored as participants followed spoken instructions such as, Put the cup on the saucer. Now put it/that. . .. The preferred referent was the theme (cup) for it and the composite for...

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Saxén, John-Eric: Identification of Switching Systems – An On-line Algorithm. Master’s Thesis, Department of Information Technologies, Åbo Akademi University, 2010. 80 pages. This thesis focuses on the identification of special types of systems, hybrid systems with switching character, which present a new challenge for the research circulating around system identification. A switching identific...

This paper describes a demonstrative research of daily assistive robots. Several tasks related to cleaning and tidying up rooms are focused on, a real robot performs these tasks. A software system combining environment recognition with motion generation provides functions of finding failures and planning retry behaviors, the robot can do the given tasks with recovering the failures in some case...