This study presents an overview of the different strategies that Persian learners of English employ to deal with initial clusters. While vowel epenthesis appears to be the most widespread repair strategy to conform such clusters to Persian phonotactics, the location of the epenthetic vowel varies. In this paper, we investigate two approaches that seek to explain the epenthetic site. The first o...

Many of the plant leucine rich repeat receptor-like kinases (LRR-RLKs) have been found to regulate signaling during plant defense processes. In this study, we selected and sequenced an LRR-RLK gene, designated as Oryza rufipogon receptor-like protein kinase 1 (OrufRPK1), located within yield QTL yld1.1 from the wild rice Oryza rufipogon (accession IRGC105491). A 2055 bp coding region and two ex...

A significant fraction of the nuclear DNA of all eukaryotes is comprised of simple sequence repeats (SSRs). Although these sequences are widely used for studying genetic variation, linkage mapping and evolution, little attention had been paid to the chromosomal distribution and cytogenetic diversity of these sequences. In this paper, we report the distribution characterization of mono-, di-, an...

We consider a totally asynchronous stochastic approximation algorithm, Q-learning, for solving finite space stochastic shortest path (SSP) problems, which are total cost Markov decision processes with an absorbing and cost-free state. For the most commonly used SSP models, existing convergence proofs assume that the sequence of Q-learning iterates is bounded with probability one, or some other ...

In this study we report the development of primers to amplify polymorphic chloroplast simple sequence repeats in the genus Hordeum, which includes cultivated barley (H. vulgare ssp. vulgare) and its wild progenitor H. vulgare ssp. spontaneum. Polymorphic products were amplified in a wide range of Hordeum spp. and intraspecific variation was detected in both cultivated and wild barley. A decreas...

The first Lactobacillus delbrueckii ssp. bulgaricus genome sequence revealed the presence of a very large inverted repeat (IR), a DNA sequence arrangement which thus far seemed inconceivable in a non-manipulated circular bacterial chromosome, at the replication terminus. This intriguing observation prompted us to investigate if similar IRs could be found in other bacteria. IRs with sizes varyin...

0. Combinations of Sonority and Stress In their analysis of Imdlawn Tashlhiyt Berber syllabification, Prince and Smolensky (1993) postulate that different types of prominence, such as sonority and syllabicity, should align—a phenomenon they term prominence alignment. This concept is implemented by Prince and Smolensky using families of inherently-ranked constraints that are derived from combini...

Evidence is accumulating that native speaker-hearers are not as consistent, confident, or in agreement, on counting the number of syllables in natural utterances as is commonly assumed. There are, however, instances where speaker-hearers give clear, consistent syllable counts. It is position of this paper that the unclear cases as well as the clear cases are phonetically classifiable in terms o...

SUMMARY DRTF contains 2025 putative transcription factors (TFs) in Oryza sativa L. ssp. indica and 2384 in ssp. japonica, distributed in 63 families, identified by computational prediction and manual curation. It includes detailed annotations of each TF including sequence features, functional domains, Gene Ontology assignment, chromosomal localization, EST and microarray expression information,...

In this paper, the use of sonority measure as an acoustic feature of the speech signal for continuous automatic speech recognition is described. The representation of sonority extent of sounds is made with a help of spectrum derivation. Therefore, a novel articulatory motivated acoustic feature expressing the sonority is named spectrum derivative feature. The new feature is tested in combinatio...