This study investigates the knowledge of unaccusativity in Japanese native, heritage, and second/foreign language speakers with respect to licensing of floating numeral quantifiers (FNQs) by unaccusative and unergative subjects (the FNQ diagnostic). Two acceptability judgment experiments were conducted to examine (i) whether and how judgments of the three populations differ with respect to the ...

People's language is shaped by the input from the environment. The environment, however, offers a range of linguistic inputs that differ in their reliability. We test whether listeners accordingly weigh input from sources that differ in reliability differently. Using a perceptual learning paradigm, we show that listeners adjust their representations according to linguistic input provided by nat...

Within a very short timeframe, mobile devices have become an intrinsic part of everyday life. The versatility of the devices is driven by a process which allows users to run mobile apps to perform tasks. The majority of mobile content today is consumed through custom built native apps. Web apps, although popular in the desktop environment, have never enjoyed the same success in the mobile envir...

The phonological decoding of non-native letter sequences during visual word recognition has been shown to be influenced by phonotactic constraints of the reader’s native language [Hallé, P. A., Dominguez, A., Cuetos, F., & Segui, J. (2008). Phonological mediation in visual masked priming: Evidence from phonotactic repair. Journal of Experimental Psychology. Human Perception and Performance, 34(...

Proteins are highly complex molecules with features exquisitely selected by nature to carry out essential biological functions. Physical chemistry and polymer physics provide us with the tools needed to make sense of this complexity. Upon translation, many proteins fold to a thermodynamically stable form known as the native state. The native state is not static, but consists of a hierarchy of c...

Pain problems are more prevalent in Native Americans than in any other group in the U.S., and this might result from group differences in pain modulation. This study was designed to examine emotional modulation of pain and spinal nociception in healthy, pain-free Native Americans (n = 21) relative to non-Hispanic Whites (n = 20). To assess emotional modulation of pain and the nociceptive flexio...

Newborns are equipped with a large phonemic inventory that becomes tuned to one's native language early in life. We review and add new data about how learning of a non-native phoneme can be accomplished in adults and how the efficiency of word learning can be assessed by neurophysiological measures. For this purpose, we studied the acquisition of the voiceless, bilabial fricative /Phi/ via a st...

This article considers the problem of correcting errors made by English as a Second Language writers from a machine learning perspective, and addresses an important issue of developing an appropriate training paradigm for the task, one that accounts for error patterns of non-native writers using minimal supervision. Existing training approaches present a trade-off between large amounts of cheap...