Diacritics convey vowel sounds in Arabic, allowing accurate word pronunciation. Mostly, modern Arabic is printed nondiacritized. Otherwise, diacritics appear either only on homographic words when not disambiguated by surrounding text or on all words as in religious or educational texts. In an eye-tracking experiment, we examined sentence processing in the absence of diacritics and when diacriti...

In this paper, a procedure has been presented to develop fragility curves of structures equipped with optimal variable damping or stiffness semi-active tuned mass dampers (SATMDs). To determine proper variable damping or stiffness of semi-active devices in each time step, instantaneous optimal control algorithm with clipped control concept has been used. Optimal SATMDs have been designed based ...

Active-fixation pacing leads allow the use of selective pacing sites. We evaluated their long-term performance versus passive-fixation leads in 199 newly implanted patients (n = 100 active and n = 99 passive). Postoperative pacing thresholds in the active group were higher than in the passive group (0.85 ± 0.31 V vs. 0.53 ± 0.21 V at baseline, P < 0.001). The active thresholds fell to 0.72 ± 0....

With a surface wave method to estimate shear-wave velocity (Vs) from dispersion curve(s) of known mode(s), accurate modal identification is obviously a crucial issue. In this regard, the dispersion imaging method is an essential processing tool as it can unfold the multi-modal nature of surface waves through direct wavefield transformations. When a combined dispersion curve of an extended frequ...

We report a replication and extension of Ferreira (2003), in which it was observed that native adult English speakers misinterpret passive sentences that relate implausible but not impossible semantic relationships (e.g., The angler was caught by the fish) significantly more often than they do plausible passives or plausible or implausible active sentences. In the experiment reported here, part...

Behavioral syntactic priming effects during sentence comprehension are typically observed only if both the syntactic structure and lexical head are repeated. In contrast, during production syntactic priming occurs with structure repetition alone, but the effect is boosted by repetition of the lexical head. We used fMRI to investigate the neuronal correlates of syntactic priming and lexical boos...

OBJECTIVES In utero fetal exposure to tobacco smoke has been found to be associated with adverse pregnancy outcome and increased maternal and fetal risks. The aim of this study was to compare umbilical cord blood S100B levels of infants of active smoker, passive smoker and non-smoker mothers. SUBJECTS AND METHODS A total of 82 women, 26 habitual smokers, 27 passive smokers and 29 controls, wh...