Successful Web services evolve through a process of continuous change due to several reasons such as improving the quality, fixing bugs and adding new features. However, this evolution process may weaken the design of the Web service’s interface by aggregating many noncohesive and semantically unrelated operations. Thus, the service interface becomes unnecessarily complex for users to find rele...

this article addresses a multi-stage flowshop scheduling problem with equal number of unrelated parallel machines. the objective is to minimize the makespan for a given set of jobs in the system. this problem class is np-hard in the strong sense, so a hybrid heuristic method for sequencing and then allocating operations of jobs to machines is developed. a number of test problems are randomly ge...

Theories of language production need to account for how speakers produce prosodic structure. Very few models have addressed the role of prosodic phrasing in speech planning, and little experimental work examining this question has been conducted so far. Four studies designed to investigate the effect of phrase length and prosodic phrasing on speech planning are presented. The first experiment e...

A Web-based message board or forum is an online area where discussions are held by many Internet users on a variety of subjects. More recently, online social networks have been created for various purposes: job searching, dating, band promotion, etc. Many social networking sites have also incorporated community discussion features such as message boards. Rather than add a message board to a soc...

OBJECTIVE Individuals with dyslexia do not only show deficits reading but are also less accurate in naming pictures. This has mainly been linked to prevalent phonological deficits. However, lexical retrieval of picture names could be due increased lexical-semantic competition. The present study tested whether adults (AwDs) more affected by a competitive context than control participants. METHOD...

Two experiments explored the effects of stimulus degradation on behavioral and event-related potential (ERP) measures of semantic priming. The primary goal was to help elucidate the psychological processes that underlie the N400 component. In both experiments, subjects made speeded lexical decisions to words and pseudowords preceded by either semantically related or unrelated prime words. In on...

Olfactory decline represents one of the earliest signs of Alzheimer’s disease (AD), and deficits in olfactory identification have now been identified in persons with amnestic mild cognitive impairment (aMCI). Whether the olfactory identification deficit in AD reflects underlying degraded semantic knowledge or lower-order olfactory deficits is uncertain. To address this question, we focused on t...

The neural basis underlying implicit semantic priming was investigated using event-related fMRI. Prime-target pairs were presented auditorily for lexical decision (LD) on the target stimulus, which was either semantically related or unrelated to the prime, or was a nonword. A tone task was also administered as a control. Behaviorally, all participants demonstrated semantic priming in the LD tas...