No abstract

No abstract

In this study we examined the development of wine expertise. We asked four groups--untrained wine drinkers, second- and third-level trainee sommeliers, and professional sommeliers--to engage in a range of olfactory tasks to assess perceptual and semantic aspects of expertise. These tasks included identification, recognition, and description of a range of domain-specific and common odour stimuli, including wines. Trainee sommeliers were significantly poorer at identification of wine-relevant odours than untrained wine drinkers and professional sommeliers. Trainee and professional sommeliers were, however, significantly better than untrained wine drinkers in a delayed matching-to-sample wine-recognition task, but not in the case of other odorous stimuli. The wine-description task demonstrated a degree of skill, in terms of specificity and quantity of wine-relevant descriptors, as a function of expertise. These results, of one of the first studies of examining wine expertise by a cross-sectional developmental approach, indicate that perceptual aspects of expertise are probably rapidly acquired, being present even in the second- and third-level trainees, while semantic expertise is slower to develop, and may incur time for the identification of wine-specific odorants during training.

The present study investigates two aspects of 5-and 7-year-old children's meta-pragmatic knowledge. The first is the ability to attribute polite and impolite requests according to degrees of perceived familiarity among participants in a verbal exchange. The second is the representational explicitness of the pragmatic rule involved in the task. Thirty-two children of two age groups participated in the experiment. Results showed a developmental difference both in the attribution task and in metapragmatic awareness, confirming an age-related increase in the ability to establish representational links among pragmatic procedures.'What politeness essentially consists of is a special way of treating people, saying and doing things in such a way to take into account the other person's feelings' (Brown 1980: 114). This definition identifies succinctly the main psychological abilities which are required for suitably polite social behaviour. The concerns of the present paper are when and how these abilities develop.Let us neglect for the moment politeness expressed through actions (such as giving way to ladies or giving the right Christmas presents), and restrict our analysis to linguistic politeness. Even in linguistic cases, the first aspect of the ability to be polite in a given situation is related to the socio-cognitive competence of the speaker. In fact, in order to produce discourse (or more simply to formulate a request) which does not hurt the other person's feelings, the speaker must take into account a great deal of information about the addressee. In particular, he/she has to consider the other person's attitude and mood, as indicated by the addressee's behaviour (social attribution process). The speaker must also take into account the social setting of

Neuronal vacuolation and spinocerebellar degeneration in young Rottweiler dogs is a neurodegenerative condition characterized by neuronal vacuolation of several nuclei in the central nervous system and degeneration of the spinal cord white matter. Here, we describe the morphologic and ultrastructural findings in laryngeal muscles and peripheral nerves of a 16-week-old female and a 32-week-old female Rottweiler dog affected by progressive ataxia and tetraparesis associated with laryngeal paralysis. Lesions were characterized by neurogenic muscle atrophy of the intrinsic laryngeal muscles, and a loss of large myelinated fibers in the recurrent laryngeal nerve, accompanied by demyelinating/remyelinating features affecting the small myelinated fibers. No significant changes were detected in the cranial laryngeal, vagus, phrenic, ulnar, or peroneal nerves. These findings were indicative of a selective distal neuropathy of the recurrent laryngeal nerve with early severe axonal degeneration, mainly of the large myelinated fibers.

No abstract

Staphylococcus aureus is a pathogen associated a different kind of infection. Molecular markers are useful tools to study microbial epidemiology. Twenty two methicillin-resistant S. aureus (MRSA) and 23 methicillin-susceptible S. aureus (MSSA) were studied by mecA gene, SCCmec cassette, Panton Valentine leucocidin (PVL) and spa polymorphism. The clinical data patients were analyzed. MSSA was prevalent in samples different from skin and soft tissue (SST) and in hospitalized patients, whereas MRSA in SST. SCCmec type IV was predominant, followed by type I. Low presence of PVL was found. In MRSA 11 different types of spa were detected, t019 was the most frequent and associated with outpatient, 17 types were found in MSSA and t189 was prevalent. spa t002 was present in MSSA and MRSA. We found 11 types of spa not reported in our country.

Recall and recognition of various aspects of three places were studied under incidental and intentional conditions. Data showed that subjects passing through a place incidentally remembered structural features such as walls better than variable features such as furniture. On the other hand, subjects passing through a place knowing they will be tested for memory of its remembered the variable elements better than the structural elements. The results are interpreted in terms of intentionally governed coding.