Filled pauses (uh, um) have been shown in a number of studies to have a facilitative effect for listeners, such as helping them better perceive the syntactic structure of ongoing speech. This may be because the extra time afforded by the filled pause gives listeners more time to process the input. Theoretically, then, silent pauses should show a comparable effect. The present study tests this prediction using a grammaticality judgment task following a study by Bailey and Ferreira (2003). Results show that filled and silent pauses have a comparable influence on listeners' grammaticality judgments but further suggest that listeners deem silent pauses as more important and influential markers.
Aquaporin-2–4 (AQP) are expressed in the principal cells of the renal collecting duct (CD). Beside their role in water transport across membranes, several studies showed that AQPs can influence the migration of cells. It is unknown whether this also applies for renal CD cells. Another fact is that the expression of these AQPs is highly modulated by the external osmolality. Here we analyzed the localization of AQP2–4 in primary cultured renal inner medullary CD (IMCD) cells and how osmolality influences the migration behavior of these cells. The primary IMCD cells showed a collective migration behavior and there were no differences in the migration speed between cells cultivated either at 300 or 600 mosmol/kg. Acute increase from 300 to 600 mosmol/kg led to a marked reduction and vice versa an acute decrease from 600 to 300 mosmol/kg to a marked increase in migration speed. Interestingly, none of the analyzed AQPs were localized at the leading edge. While AQP3 disappeared within the first 2–3 rows of cells, AQP4 was enriched at the rear end. Further analysis indicated that migration induced lysosomal degradation of AQP3. This could be prevented by activation of the protein kinase A, inducing localization of AQP3 and AQP2 at the leading edge and increasing the migration speed.
Entities realized in prominent syntactic positions receive some preferential treatment when referred to in a subsequent discourse segment: In particular, they are preferentially referred to with reduced referring expressions, often pronouns. This has been observed in both production (Arnold, 1998) and perception (Gordon et al., 1993; Almor, 1999). As a result, syntactic prominence has been regarded as a primary factor in determining the salience of entities. However, in English, syntactic role and semantic role are often conflated. That is, entities realized as syntactic subjects are often semantic agents while those realized as objects are often patients. Thus, it could be that salience is determined by semantic prominence rather than syntactic prominence. In this paper, I present some evidence from a corpus investigation comparing the relative contribution of syntactic and semantic prominence to the salience of entities for subsequent pronominal reference. Using the concept of the value of information from Information Theory (Shannon, 1948), results suggest that syntactic and semantic prominence are comparably informative, but that together they are more informative than either is alone.
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