ABSTRACT: Relative speech timing was examined in individuals with Parkinson disease (PD) and in agematched control speakers. Relative timing ratios were created from temporal intervals in one phrase containing no pause, one phrase containing an optional pause, and one phrase containing a mandatory pause. Results indicated that there were no relative timing differences between participants with ...

The plasticity of intrinsic excitability has been described in several types of neurons, but the significance of non-synaptic mechanisms in brain plasticity and learning remains elusive. Cerebellar Purkinje cells are inhibitory neurons that spontaneously fire action potentials at high frequencies and regulate activity in their target cells in the cerebellar nuclei by generating a characteristic...

We have previously shown that RNA polymerase II (Pol II) pause release and transcriptional elongation involve phosphorylation of the factor TRIM28 by the DNA damage response (DDR) kinases ATM and DNA-PK. Here we report a significant role for DNA breaks and DDR signalling in the mechanisms of transcriptional elongation in stimulus-inducible genes in humans. Our data show the enrichment of TRIM28...

Transcriptional pausing by human RNA polymerase II (RNAPII) in the HIV-1 LTR is caused principally by a weak RNA:DNA hybrid that allows rearrangement of reactive or catalytic groups in the enzyme's active site. This rearrangement creates a transiently paused state called the unactivated intermediate that can backtrack into a more long-lived paused species. We report that three different regions...

In the current analysis we examined the acoustic and phonetic characteristics of filled pauses in spontaneous French speech and their relationship to the prosody of the surrounding context. Two main results emerged : 1) There was no effect of the duration of filled pauses or their sentence location on their F0 patterns or on the differences between the highest and lowest values. 2) There was no...

The paper explores the interaction between sentence boundaries marked by annotators in transcriptions of Russian spontaneous speech and actual prosodic boundaries in the signal. The aim of the research is to investigate whether annotators’ prosodic competence allows them to correctly detect sentence boundaries in speech based on textual information only. We found that inter-annotator agreement ...