OBJECTIVE We tested the hypothesis that hyperhomocysteinemia and hypercholesterolemia promote arterial thrombosis in mice. METHODS AND RESULTS Male apolipoprotein E (Apoe)-deficient mice were fed one of four diets: control, hyperhomocysteinemic (HH), high fat (HF), or high fat/hyperhomocysteinemic (HF/HH). Total cholesterol was elevated 2-fold with the HF or HF/HH diets compared with the cont...

In addition to 9 vowel and 18 consonant phonemes, Swedish has three prosodic phonemic contrasts: word stress, quantity and tonal word accent. There are also examples of distinctive phrase or sentence stress, where a verb can be followed by either an unstressed preposition or a stressed particle. This study focuses on word level and more specifically on word stress and tonal word accent in disyl...

This paper proposes a noise robust speech recognition method using prosodic information. In Japanese, fundamental frequency (F0) contour represents phrase intonation and word accent information. Consequently, it conveys information about prosodic phrase and word boundaries. This paper first proposes a noise robust F0 extraction method using Hough transform, which achieves high extraction rates ...

Background. Hyperinsulinaemic Hypoglycaemia (HH) is the most common cause of severe and persistent hypoglycemia in the neonatal period. It has been shown that the neonates with HH fail to generate adequate serum cortisol counterregulatory response to symptomatic hypoglycemia. However the role played by growth hormone (GH) and Insulin-like Growth Factor 1 (IGF-1) is not clear. Objectives. To com...

We propose a method for generating F0 contours for text-tospeech synthesis. Training speech is automatically annotated in terms of feet, with features indicating start and end times of syllables, foot position, and foot length. During training, we fit a foot-based superpositional intonation model comprising accent curves and phrase curves. During synthesis, the method searches for stored, fitte...

The present ERP study investigated the effect of focus particles on Dutch sentence processing. Focus particles such as only are claimed to indicate focus constituents and can thus affect the interpretation of pitch accents during speech comprehension [1]. Our results show that contrastive pitch accents are unexpected in sentences without a focus particle and triggered a fronto-central positivit...

Under the autosegmental-metrical (AM) theory of intonation, temporal alignment fundamental frequency (F0) patterns with respect to syllables has been claimed distinguish pitch accent categories. Several experiments test whether differences in F0 peak or valley American English phrases would produce evidence consistent a change from (1) H* H+L* accent, and (2) L* L+H* accent. Four stimulus serie...

This study investigates the coordination of boundary tones as a function of stress and pitch accent. Boundary tone coordination has not been experimentally investigated previously, and the effect of prominence on this coordination, and whether it is lexical (stress-driven) or phrasal (pitch accent-driven) in nature is unclear. We assess these issues using a variety of syntactic constructions to...

The four experiments reported concern the amount and domain of lengthening associated with focal accents in Swedish. Word, syllable and segment durations were measured in read sentences with focus in di!erent positions. As expected, words with focal accents were longer than nonfocal words in general, but the amount of lengthening varied greatly, primarily due to speaker di!erences but also to p...

German and French differ in a number of aspects. Regarding the prosody-pragmatics interface, German is said to have a direct focus-to-accent mapping, which is largely absent in French--owing to strong structural constraints. We used a semi-spontaneous dialogue setting to investigate the intonational marking of Verum Focus, a focus on the polarity of an utterance in the two languages (e.g. the c...