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880The relative importance of particular parts of a sentence is signaled through devices of information structuring and prosodic stress, which control the focus of information within sentences, as is made clear in an extensive linguistic literature (see, e.g., Gundel, 1999;Halliday, 1967;Jackendoff, 1972;Rooth, 1992). In the present article, our interest is in the cognitive effects of linguistic prominence, which can be manipulated through information structuring devices, such as the it-cleft construction. This construction is illustrated in (1), which shows how an it-cleft structure can signal prominence linguistically.(1) It was Harry who threw the snowball at Mary.This construction consists of a presupposed part-that someone threw a snowball at Mary (Delin, 1992;Prince, 1978)-and a new assertion, that Harry was the person who did the throwing (see, e.g., Hedberg, 2000;Prince, 1978). Use of the it-cleft structure clearly distinguishes the given from the new information and enables speakers to single out the clefted constituent in order to focus attention on it (Hedberg, 2000). Linguistic analyses suggest that the cleft-it copula clefted constituent-puts the clefted constituent into referential focus. Effectively, sentence (1) answers the question Who threw the snowball, putting emphasis on Harry as opposed to on any other individual; hence, the effect of clefting is referred to as contrastive focus (e.g., Rooth, 1992).It is already well established that linguistic focus leads to a privileged and deeper analysis of the focused term. For instance, the Moses illusion in form (2) is easily missed, whereas in (3) it is not (Bredart & Modolo, 1988):(2) Moses put two of each animal on the Ark, true or false? (3) It was Moses who put two of each animal on the Ark, true or false?The point of this illusion is that people do not usually notice that it was Noah, not Moses, who put the animals on the Ark. However, because the cleft construction in (3) causes a deeper analysis of the term Moses, detection of the anomaly is higher in this case. A variety of other studies have shown that focused elements are more easily processed at the discourse level. Cutler and Fodor (1979) manipulated contrastive focus through discourse context, presenting sentences such as (4) or (5) before the target sentence (6): (4) Which man was wearing the hat? (5) What hat was the man wearing? (6) The man on the corner was wearing the blue hat.Sentence (4) has the effect of putting The man on the corner into narrow focus, whereas (5) has the effect of putting the blue hat into narrow focus. Using a phoneme monitoring task, it was found that the phoneme detection latency was shorter for words in the scope of focus than for words outside of the scope of focus. Similar evidence of enhancement was found by Sturt, Sanford, Stewart, and University of Glasgow, Glasgow, ScotlandInformation structuring through the use of cleft sentences increases the processing efficiency of references to elements within the scope of focus. Furthermore, there is evidence t...

CONSPECTUS-Understanding the spatial dynamics of biochemical networks is both fundamentally important for understanding life at the systems level and also has practical implications for medicine, engineering, biology, and chemistry. Studies at the level of individual reactions provide essential information about the function, interactions, and localization of individual molecular species and reactions in a network. However, analyzing the spatial dynamics of complex biochemical networks at this level is difficult. Biochemical networks are nonequilibrium systems containing dozens to hundreds of reactions with nonlinear and timedependent interactions, and these interactions are influenced by diffusion, flow, and the relative values of state-dependent kinetic parameters.To achieve an overall understanding of the spatial dynamics of a network and the global mechanisms that drive its function, networks must be analyzed as a whole, where all of the components and influential parameters of a network are simultaneously considered. Here, we describe chemical concepts and microfluidic tools developed for network-level investigations of the spatial dynamics of these networks. Modular approaches can be used to simplify these networks by separating them into modules, and simple experimental or computational models can be created by replacing each module with a single reaction. Microfluidics can be used to implement these models as well as to analyze and perturb the complex network itself with spatial control on the micrometer scale.* To whom correspondence should be addressed. E-mail: r-ismagilov@uchicago.edu. We also describe the application of these network-level approaches to elucidate the mechanisms governing the spatial dynamics of two networks-hemostasis (blood clotting) and early patterning of the Drosophila embryo. To investigate the dynamics of the complex network of hemostasis, we simplified the network by using a modular mechanism and created a chemical model based on this mechanism by using microfluidics. Then, we used the mechanism and the model to predict the dynamics of initiation and propagation of blood clotting and tested these predictions with human blood plasma by using microfluidics. We discovered that both initiation and propagation of clotting are regulated by a threshold response to the concentration of activators of clotting, and that clotting is sensitive to the spatial localization of stimuli. To understand the dynamics of patterning of the Drosophila embryo, we used microfluidics to perturb the environment around a developing embryo and observe the effects of this perturbation on the expression of Hunchback, a protein whose localization is essential to proper development. We found that the mechanism that is responsible for Hunchback positioning is asymmetric, time-dependent, and more complex than previously proposed by studies of individual reactions. NIH Public AccessAuthor Manuscript Acc Chem Res. Author manuscript; available in PMC 2008 December 04.Overall, these approaches provide strat...

Overall, results showed that Tall Man lettering reduced drug name confusion errors in a series of laboratory-based tasks, in both younger and older adults, and healthcare practitioners. Thus, the current findings offer some support for the use of Tall Man letters as a possible systems change that could be made by both pharmacies and manufacturers in an effort to reduce error caused by drug name confusion.

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