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The accelerating developments in micro- and nanotechnology require faster and more precise tools for application and diagnostics. A new ultra-fast diagnostics is presented as an advancement of a conventional phase microscopy method (Iatia QPm™). In contrast to the conventional method using one CCD to detect three object planes, three CCDs detect these planes separately and simultaneously. The measurement technique named TQPm has been analyzed and validated by measuring the optical phase of a commercial fiber. This novel visualization technique affords reliable quantitative time-resolved measurements of the optical phase, the transient refractive index or the dynamical geometry changes. The structural and optical modifications of welded glass have been observed coaxially in situ during melting and welding by TQPm. Technical glass plates (Schott D263) have been welded using an ultra-short pulsed laser. By the use of femtosecond laser radiation (tp = 350 fs, frep = 1 MHz) focused by a microscope objective (2ω0 ≈ 4 µm) at the interface, multi-photon absorption is the dominant phenomenon. This causes heat accumulation and thereby glass melting and welding.

This event-related potential (ERP) study examines the influence of dialectal competence differences (merged vs. unmerged dialect group) on cross-dialectal comprehension between Southern German dialects. It focuses on the question as to whether certain dialect phonemes (/oatrue⌢/, /oƱtrue⌢/), which are attributed to different lexemes in two dialect areas (Central Bavarian, Bavarian-Alemannic transition zone) evoke increased neural costs during sentence processing. In this context, the phonological and semantic processing of lexemes is compared in three types of potentially problematic communication settings (misunderstanding, incomprehension, allophonic variation = potential comprehension). For this purpose, an oddball design including whole sentences was combined with a semantic rating task. Listeners from the unmerged Central Bavarian dialect area heard sentences including either native or non-native lexemes from the merged neighboring dialect. These had to be evaluated with regard to their context acceptability. The main difference between the lexemes can be attributed to the fact that they have different meanings in the respective dialect areas or are non-existent in the linguistic competence of the Central Bavarians. The results provide evidence for the fact that non-native lexemes containing the /oatrue⌢/-diphthong lead to enhanced neural costs during sentence processing. The ERP results show a biphasic pattern (N2b/N400, LPC) for non-existent lexemes (incomprehension) as well as for semantically incongruous lexemes (misunderstanding), reflecting an early error detection mechanism and enhanced costs for semantic integration and evaluation. In contrast, allophonic /oƱtrue⌢/ deviations show reduced negativities and no LPC, indexing an unproblematic categorization and evaluation process. In the light of these results, an observed change of /oatrue⌢/ to /oƱtrue⌢/ in the Bavarian-Alemannic transition zone can be interpreted as a facilitation strategy of cross-dialectal comprehension to reduce both misunderstandings as well as neural costs in processing, which might be interpreted as the initial trigger for this particular phoneme change.

Top down technique of interfering femtosecond laser processing was applied to generate new nanomaterials such as nanocrown, nanomesh, nanobelt, and dual periodic structure. In the case of nanocrown, whiskers are standing at the edge of a nanohole. The width of a whisker was just 80 nm. A nanohole array structure generated by interfering 4 beams was applied to a spatial filter as a base material for the growth of photo-polymerizing polymer, and polymer nanobump array was generated. Dual periodic structures were generated by multiple shots, and bimetallic nanobelt was generated from bilayer thin film. Processing of fiber film was tested.

In vowel discrimination, commonly found discrimination patterns are directional asymmetries where discrimination is faster (or easier) if differing vowels are presented in a certain sequence compared to the reversed sequence. Different models of speech sound processing try to account for these asymmetries based on either phonetic or phonological properties. In this study, we tested and compared two of those often-discussed models, namely the Featurally Underspecified Lexicon (FUL) model (Lahiri and Reetz, 2002) and the Natural Referent Vowel (NRV) framework (Polka and Bohn, 2011). While most studies presented isolated vowels, we investigated a large stimulus set of German vowels in a more naturalistic setting within minimal pairs. We conducted an mismatch negativity (MMN) study in a passive and a reaction time study in an active oddball paradigm. In both data sets, we found directional asymmetries that can be explained by either phonological or phonetic theories. While behaviorally, the vowel discrimination was based on phonological properties, both tested models failed to explain the found neural patterns comprehensively. Therefore, we additionally examined the influence of a variety of articulatory, acoustical, and lexical factors (e.g., formant structure, intensity, duration, and frequency of occurrence) but also the influence of factors beyond the well-known (perceived loudness of vowels, degree of openness) in depth via multiple regression analyses. The analyses revealed that the perceptual factor of perceived loudness has a greater impact than considered in the literature and should be taken stronger into consideration when analyzing preattentive natural vowel processing.

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