This study attempts to extend the relationship between phonological memory and word acquisition to the experimental learning of second-language vocabulary. Nonword span was used to measure phonological memory and was found to be generally predictive of the number of trials needed for acquiring certain English (second-language) new words for a group of Hong Kong 7th graders. This relationship, however, was preserved only in those whose English vocabulary size was below the group median. It was concluded that phonological memory plays a part in second-language word learning, and its effect interacts with the learner's long-term knowledge in that language.I would like to express my gratitude to Susan Goldin-Meadow and Susan Gathercole for their very helpful comments on the early versions of this article. I would also like to thank

This study investigates the effects of parent-child shared book reading and metalinguistic training on the language and literacy skills of 148 kindergartners in Hong Kong. Children were pretested on Chinese character recognition, vocabulary, morphological awareness, and reading interest and then assigned randomly to 1 of 4 conditions: the dialogic reading with morphology training (DR + MT), dialogic reading (DR), typical reading, or control condition. After a 12-week intervention period, the DR intervention yielded greater gains in vocabulary, and the DR + MT intervention yielded greater improvement in character recognition and morphological awareness. Both interventions enhanced children's reading interest. Results confirm that different home literacy approaches influence children's oral and written language skills differently: Shared book reading promotes language development, whereas parents' explicit metalinguistic training within a shared book reading context better prepares children for learning to read.

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This study examined temporal processing in relation to Chinese reading acquisition and impairment. The performances of 26 Chinese primary school children with developmental dyslexia on tasks of visual and auditory temporal order judgement, rapid naming, visual-orthographic knowledge, morphological, and phonological awareness were compared with those of 26 reading level ability controls (RL) and 26 chronological age controls (CA). Dyslexic children performed worse than the CA group but similar to the RL group on measures of accurate processing of auditory and visual-order stimuli, rapid naming, morphological awareness, and phonological awareness and a minority performed worse on the two temporal processing tasks. However, hierarchical regression analyses revealed that visual but not auditory temporal processing contributed unique variance to Chinese character recognition even with other cognitive measures controlled, suggesting it may be as important a correlate of reading ability in Chinese as in alphabetic scripts.

We present an analytic solution describing the quantum state of a single photon after interacting with a moving mirror in a cavity. This includes situations when the photon is initially stored in a cavity mode as well as when the photon is injected into the cavity. In addition, we obtain the spectrum of the output photon in the resolved-sideband limit, which reveals spectral features of the single-photon strong-coupling regime in this system. We also clarify the conditions under which the phonon sidebands are visible and the photon-state frequency shift can be resolved.

The in vitro cytotoxicities of the ethanol extract of Andrographis paniculata (APE) and its main diterpenoid components were evaluated in various cancer cells. APE was found to be significantly growth inhibitory to human acute myeloid leukemic HL-60 cells with an IC (50) value of 14.01 microg/mL after 24 h of treatment. Among the three main diterpenoids in A. paniculata, andrographolide exhibited the highest degree of cytotoxicity followed by deoxyandrographolide while neoandrographolide was the least effective. Laser confocal microscopy and gel electrophoresis studies revealed chromosomal DNA fragmentations suggesting the occurrence of apoptosis. An increase of G (0)/G (1) phase cells from 51.88 % to 78.69 % was noted after andrographolide treatment for 36 h. The G (0)/G (1) phase arrest and apoptosis were associated with disappearance of mitochondrial cytochrome c and increased expression of Bax but decreased expression of Bcl-2 proteins in the inhibited cells. Although the order of all these events has not been determined, it is concluded that APE and andrographolide induce cell cycle arrest and affect an intrinsic mitochondria-dependent pathway of apoptosis by regulating the expression of some pro-apoptotic markers in HL-60 cells.

No abstract

This study used a referential communication task to investigate the effectiveness of elderspeak, a speech register targeted at older listeners. The tasks required the listener to reproduce a route drawn on a map or array of dots, following the speaker's instructions. Dyads of young-young, old-old, and young-old adults were compared with regard to measures of fluency, prosody, grammatical complexity, semantic content, and speaker and listener style. Although the older speakers showed little variation in response to listener age or task difficulty, the young speakers adopted a simplified speech style when addressing the older listeners. These simplifications may have been triggered by the verbal responses of the older listeners. Older listeners did benefit from these speech adjustments with regard to the accuracy of their maps and dot patterns. Despite the effectiveness of the young adults' speech adjustments, older adults reported more expressive and receptive problems when interacting with the young adults.