Animals can exhibit complex movement patterns that may be the result of interactions with their environment or may be directly the mechanism by which their behaviour is governed. In order to understand the drivers of these patterns we examine the movement behaviour of individual desert locusts in a homogenous experimental arena with minimal external cues. Locust motion is intermittent and we re...

Objectives: This study aimed to examine the characteristics of linguistic disfluencies during story generation and retelling tasks investigate an association between cognitive abilities in narrative samples. Methods: A total 49 children aged 7-10 (20 with vocabulary delay 29 typically developing children) participated. Participants completed task. Children’s utterances were analyzed into four c...

RNA polymerases are protein molecular machines that transcribe genetic information from DNA into RNA. The elongation of the RNA molecule is frequently interrupted by pauses, the detailed nature of which remains controversial. Here we ask whether backtracking, the central mechanism behind long pauses, could also be responsible for short pauses normally attributed to the ubiquitous pause state. T...

The first ten cycles following cessation of atrial pacing were evaluated in 44 control subjects (mean age 52.9 +/- 14.88 yr) and 39 patients (mean age 62.9 +/- 15.41 yr) suspected of having sinus node dysfunction (SND). The maximal cycle length for each postpacing cycle following several pacing periods in each control subject was determined, and was normalized by dividing it by the subject's me...

In this paper we examine the usage of pauses in speech. Thereby we concentrate on cultural differences with the aim to build a computational model for virtual agents later. By adapting the agents’ conversation management behavior to cultural background, we hope to get a better acceptance in a given culture. Therefore we have a closer look at the occurrence of pauses in speech with their feature...

Theoretical models of speech production have hypothesized a relation between different types of disfluencies and the mechanisms responsible for them. Some disfluencies, such as filled pauses (e.g. ‘um’, ‘uh’) and repetitions (i.e. ‘the the’), are argued to arise from difficulty in planning, while cutoff disfluencies (e.g. ‘horiz-[ontal]’) are argued to arise from selfmonitoring. This distinctio...

In this paper we present a study of speech pauses at three different speaking rates, based on the analysis of four hours of read speech in six European languages. Our results confirm earlier observations that the logarithmic duration of the pauses can be well approximated by a bi-Gaussian distribution. We found this also to be true at slow and fast speaking rates. Our analysis further shows tha...

The present study examined pausing patterns in spontaneous speech as a measure of the effect of deep brain stimulation (DBS) of the subthalamic nucleus (STN) on parkinsonian speech. Pauses reflect various aspects of speech and language processes, including motor initiation and linguistic planning. Relatively little attention has been given to pauses in determining the effect of STN-DBS. An exam...

This study explores L2 learners’ linguistic plans through silent and filled pauses, such as “uh”. Seven native speakers and seven American learners of Chinese participated in this study. They produced speech naturally on pre-provided topics. One minute and fifteen seconds of speech on a single topic produced by each participant was used for analysis in the present research. First, the distribut...

Purkinje cells (PCs) integrate all computations performed in the cerebellar cortex to inhibit neurons in the deep cerebellar nuclei (DCN). Simple spikes recorded in vivo from pairs of PCs separated by less than 100 μm are known to be synchronized with a sharp peak riding on a broad peak, but the significance of this finding is unclear. We show that the sharp peak consists exclusively of simple ...