Brucellosis, caused by Brucella spp., is an important zoonotic disease that causes abortion and infertility in cattle and undulant fever in humans. Various studies have examined cell-free native and recombinant proteins as candidate protective antigens in animal models. Among Brucella immunogenes, antigen based on ribosomal preparation has been widely investigated. In this study, the immunogeni...

A better understanding of the control mechanisms of speech in verbal interaction is very important for the evaluation of the pragmatic competence of a mentally deficient speaker. This study focuses on pauses in the oral production of a Speaker with Down syndrome involved in a conversation : it brings to light the temporal compensation mechanisms which allow the speaker to go beyond the distorti...

Purpose: The study aim was to determine whether the mean duration of silent pauses depends on the word class (open or closed) and to compare the duration for each type of word between children with typical language development and children with specific language impairment (SLI). Methods: The study included 40 children with typical language development and 20 children with SLI, aged between 7 a...

This study reports on the cross-modal analysis (video and audio) of spontaneous narratives produced by children (9 plus-minus 3 months years old) and is aimed to test the role of speech pauses (filled and empty) in children discourse organization. Video analysis was necessary to assess the association between utterance’s meaning and pauses. Empty speech pauses were divided into three categories...

In this study we investigated how pause length and pause ratio influence listeners in ascribing emotional states to the speaker, if nothing but the length of the pauses changes. We did this by taking emotionally neutral speech samples and manipulating the length of pauses. Our results show that the same speech samples were perceived to be happier, more positive, more heated, and concurrently le...

Filled pauses are pervasive in conversational speech and have been shown to serve several psychological and structural purposes. Despite this, they are seldom modelled overtly by stateof-the-art speech synthesis systems. This paper seeks to motivate the incorporation of filled pauses into speech synthesis systems by exploring their use in conversational speech, and by comparing the performance ...

The neurons of many basal ganglia nuclei, including the external and internal globus pallidus (GPe and GPi, respectively) and the substantia nigra pars reticulata (SNr) are characterized by their high-frequency (50-100 spikes/s) tonic discharge (HFD). However, the high firing rate of GPe neurons is interrupted by long pauses. We studied the extracellularly recorded spiking activity of 212 well-...

PURPOSE To verify the average time of silent pauses in narratives and the influence of story's complexity in the occurrence of these pauses in narratives of children with typical language development and children with specific language impairment (SLI), and further to compare these aspects between groups. METHODS Sixty children aged between seven to ten years took part in this research, being...

In this paper, we investigate the effect of filled pauses, a discourse marker and silent pauses in a change detection experiment in natural, vocoded and synthetic speech. In natural speech change detection has been found to increase in the presence of filled pauses, we extend this work by replicating earlier findings and explore the effect of a discourse marker, like, and silent pauses. Further...

BACKGROUND Collagen, the most abundant human protein, is the principal component of the extracellular matrix and plays important roles in maintaining tissue and organ integrity. Highly resistant to proteolysis, fibrillar collagen is degraded by specific matrix metalloproteases (MMPs). Degradation of fibrillar collagen underlies processes including tissue remodeling, wound healing, and cancer me...