Effect Of Spray Drying On The Sensory And Physical Properties Of Hydrolysed Casein Using Gum Arabic As The Carrier.

This study was aimed at spray drying hydrolysed casein using gum Arabic as the carrier agent, in order to decrease the bitter taste. Three formulations with differing proportions of hydrolysed casein: gum Arabic (10:90, 20:80 and 30:70) were prepared and characterized. They were evaluated for their moisture content, water activity, hygroscopicity, dispersibility in water and in oil, particle size and distribution, particle morphology, thermal behaviour (DSC) and bitter taste by a trained sensory panel using a paired-comparison test (free samples vs. spray dried samples). The proportion of hydrolysed casein did not affect the morphology of the microspheres. The spray drying process increased product stability and modified the dissolution time, but had no effect on the ability of the material to dissolve in either water or oil. The sensory tests showed that the spray drying process using gum Arabic as the carrier was efficient in attenuating or masking the bitter taste of the hydrolysed casein.

Adult language input in the early childhood educational setting

Age-related changes in the adult language addressed to children aged 2;0-4;0 years in polyadic conditions were investigated in Australian childcare centres. The language that 21 staff members addressed to these children was coded for multiple variables in the broad social categories of prosody, context, speech act and gesture. The linguistic components were coded within the categories of phonology, lexicon, morphology, syntax and referential deixis. Minimal age-related differences were found. Explanations for the similarity of the adult language input across the age groups within the early childhood educational environment, will be discussed

Pinch my wig or winch my pig: Spelling, spoonerisms and other language skills

Phonological processing skills have often been assumed to play a minimal role in skilled adult spelling despite evidence showing their importance in the development of spelling skills. The present study investigated the relationship between phonological awareness and spelling in adults. It was hypothesised that subjects demonstrating higher levels of spelling proficiency would also show superior phonological processing skills. This relationship was expected to be mediated by sound-spelling mapping knowledge. Given the irregularities of sound-spelling correspondences in English, it was also predicted that knowledge of orthographic conventions would be related to spelling competency. Two measures of each component skill were used on seventy three university students. As predicted, the importance of spelling-sound mapping skills in spelling were demonstrated, as was a relationship between phonological awareness and spelling-sound correspondences. In addition a moderate correlation was found between orthographic tasks and spelling performance. It was concluded that, among university students at least, phonological ability makes an important contribution to skilled adult spelling.

Listening to the Whispers of Matter Through Arabic Hermeticism: New Studies on the Book of the Treasure of Alexander

The Jabirian Corpus refers to the K. Thahirat Al-`Iskandar, ""The Book of the Treasure of Alexander"" (hereafter BTA), as one of several forgeries suggesting that alchemical secrets were hidden in inscriptions in various places. The book was neglected until 1926, when Julius Ruska discussed it in his work on the Emerald Tablet, placing the BTA within the literature related to the development of Arabic alchemy. His preliminary study became an essential reference and encouraged many scholars to work on the BTA in the following decades. Some years ago, we completed the first translation of the BTA into a Western language. The work was based on the acephalous Escorial manuscript, which we identified as a fourteenth-century copy of the BTA. This manuscript is peculiar, as part of it is encoded. After finishing our translation, we started to establish the text of the BTA. At present, the text is in process of fixation-to be followed by textual criticism-and has been the main focus of a thorough study of ours on medieval hermeticism and alchemy. A sample of the work currently in progress is presented in this paper: an analysis of the variations between different manuscripts along with a study and English translation of its alchemical chapter.

MapScript: A map algebra programming language incorporating neighborhood analysis

Map algebra is a data model and simple functional notation to study the distribution and patterns of spatial phenomena. It uses a uniform representation of space as discrete grids, which are organized into layers. This paper discusses extensions to map algebra to handle neighborhood operations with a new data type called a template. Templates provide general windowing operations on grids to enable spatial models for cellular automata, mathematical morphology, and local spatial statistics. A programming language for map algebra that incorporates templates and special processing constructs is described. The programming language is called MapScript. Example program scripts are presented to perform diverse and interesting neighborhood analysis for descriptive, model-based and processed-based analysis.

Lengua familiar y conocimiento de la lengua escolar en Cataluña al finalizar la Educación Infantil = Home Language and Knowledge of the School Language in Catalonia at the end of Nursery School

La infancia extranjera se escolariza en Cataluña en un programa de cambio de lengua del hogar a la escuela. Las investigaciones afirman que este alumnado tarda un mínimo de seis años en equiparar sus habilidades lingüístico-cognitivas con sus pares autóctonos, no así las habilidades conversacionales, las cuales se adquieren antes de los dos años de residencia. Sin embargo, no existen estudios sobre los efectos de la escolarización en el parvulario del alumnado alófono, así como de su lengua familiar, en relación con la adquisición de la lengua escolar. El artículo es un estudio comparativo de la adquisición del catalán de 567 autóctonos y 434 alófonos, al final del parvulario, en 50 escuelas de Cataluña que escolarizan a alumnado de origen extranjero. Las lenguas del alumnado autóctono son el catalán, el castellano y el bilingüismo catalán-castellano y las lenguas del alumnado alófono son el árabe, el soninké y el castellano. Los factores utilizados más relevantes han sido el nivel socioprofesional y educativo de las familias, el tiempo de residencia y el momento de escolarización del alumnado, el porcentaje de alumnado catalanohablante y de alumnado alófono en el aula y el contexto sociolingüístico del centro escolar. Los resultados muestran que el alumnado autóctono sabe más catalán que el alumnado alófono, pero las diferencias desaparecen respecto a algunos factores, de los cuales los más relevantes son los relacionados con las características del alumnado de las aulas. La lengua familiar del alumnado alófono no incide en sus resultados

Некоторые наблюдения по поводу построения компьютерного морфологического анализатора марийского языка. [Problems in writing a two-level model of Mari morphology]

The article describes some concrete problems that were encountered when writing a two-level model of Mari morphology. Mari is an agglutinative Finno-Ugric language spoken in Russia by about 600 000 people. The work was begun in the 1980s on the basis of K. Koskenniemi’s Two-Level Morphology (1983), but in the latest stage R. Beesley’s and L. Karttunen’s Finite State Morphology (2003) was used. Many of the problems described in the article concern the inexplicitness of the rules in Mari grammars and the lack of information about the exact distribution of some suffixes, e.g. enclitics. The Mari grammars usually give complete paradigms for a few unproblematic verb stems, whereas the difficult or unclear forms of certain verbs are only superficially discussed. Another example of phenomena that are poorly described in grammars is the way suffixes with an initial sibilant combine to stems ending in a sibilant. The help of informants and searches from electronic corpora were used to overcome such difficulties in the development of the two-level model of Mari. The variation of the order of plural markers, case suffixes and possessive suffixes is a typical feature of Mari. The morphotactic rules constructed for Mari declensional forms tend to be recursive and their productivity must be limited by some technical device, such as filters. In the present model, certain plural markers were treated like nouns. The positional and functional versatility of the possessive suffixes can be regarded as the most challenging phenomenon in attempts to formalize the Mari morphology. Cyrillic orthography, which was used in the model, also caused problems. For instance, a Cyrillic letter may represent a sequence of two sounds, the first being part of the word stem while the other belongs to a suffix. In some cases, letters for voiced consonants are also generalized to represent voiceless consonants. Such orthographical conventions distance a morphological model based on orthography from the actual (morpho)phonological processes in the language.

Design And Development Of A Named Entity Based Question Answering System For Malayalam Language

This is a Named Entity Based Question Answering System for Malayalam Language. Although a vast amount of information is available today in digital form, no effective information access mechanism exists to provide humans with convenient information access. Information Retrieval and Question Answering systems are the two mechanisms available now for information access. Information systems typically return a long list of documents in response to a user’s query which are to be skimmed by the user to determine whether they contain an answer. But a Question Answering System allows the user to state his/her information need as a natural language question and receives most appropriate answer in a word or a sentence or a paragraph. This system is based on Named Entity Tagging and Question Classification. Document tagging extracts useful information from the documents which will be used in finding the answer to the question. Question Classification extracts useful information from the question to determine the type of the question and the way in which the question is to be answered. Various Machine Learning methods are used to tag the documents. Rule-Based Approach is used for Question Classification. Malayalam belongs to the Dravidian family of languages and is one of the four major languages of this family. It is one of the 22 Scheduled Languages of India with official language status in the state of Kerala. It is spoken by 40 million people. Malayalam is a morphologically rich agglutinative language and relatively of free word order. Also Malayalam has a productive morphology that allows the creation of complex words which are often highly ambiguous. Document tagging tools such as Parts-of-Speech Tagger, Phrase Chunker, Named Entity Tagger, and Compound Word Splitter are developed as a part of this research work. No such tools were available for Malayalam language. Finite State Transducer, High Order Conditional Random Field, Artificial Immunity System Principles, and Support Vector Machines are the techniques used for the design of these document preprocessing tools. This research work describes how the Named Entity is used to represent the documents. Single sentence questions are used to test the system. Overall Precision and Recall obtained are 88.5% and 85.9% respectively. This work can be extended in several directions. The coverage of non-factoid questions can be increased and also it can be extended to include open domain applications. Reference Resolution and Word Sense Disambiguation techniques are suggested as the future enhancements

Passive verb morphology: the effect of phonotactics on passive comprehension in typically developing and grammatical-SLI children

In this study we explore the impact of a morphological deficit on syntactic comprehension. A self-paced listening task was designed to investigate passive sentence processing in typically developing (TD) children and children with Grammatical-Specific Language Impairment (G-SLI). Participants had to judge whether the sentence they heard matched a picture they were shown. Working within the framework of the Computational Grammatical Complexity Hypothesis, which stresses how different components of the grammar interact, we tested whether children were able to use phonotactic cues to parse reversible passive sentences of the form the X was verbed by Y We predicted that TD children would be able to use phonotactics to parse a form like touched or hugged as a participle, and hence interpret passive sentences correctly. This cue is predicted not be used by G-SLI children, because they have difficulty building complex morphological representations. We demonstrate that indeed TD, but not G-SLI, children are able to use phonotactics cues in parsing passive sentences. (C) 2006 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

Differential effects of internal and external factors on the development of vocabulary, tense morphology and morpho-syntax in successive bilingual children

The present study investigates the effects of child internal (age/time) and child external/environmental factors on the development of a wide range of language domains in successive bilingual (L2) Turkish-English children of homogeneously low SES. Forty-three L2 children were tested on standardized assessments examining the acquisition of vocabulary and morpho-syntax. The L2 children exhibited a differential acquisition of the various domains: they were better on the general comprehension of grammar and tense morphology and less accurate on the acquisition of vocabulary and (complex) morpho-syntax. Profile effects were confirmed by the differential effects of internal and external factors on the language domains. The development of vocabulary and complex syntax were affected by internal and external factors, whereas external factors had no contribution to the development of tense morphology. These results are discussed in light of previous studies on the impact of internal and external factors in child L2 acquisition.

Production and processing asymmetries in the acquisition of tense morphology by sequential bilingual children

This study investigates the production and on-line processing of English tense morphemes by sequential bilingual (L2) Turkish-speaking children with more than three years of exposure to English. Thirty nine 6-9-year-old L2 children and 28 typically developing age-matched monolingual (L1) children were administered the production component for third person –s and past tense of the Test for Early Grammatical Impairment (Rice & Wexler, 1996) and participated in an on-line word-monitoring task involving grammatical and ungrammatical sentences with presence/omission of tense (third person –s, past tense -ed) and non-tense (progressive –ing, possessive ‘s) morphemes. The L2 children’s performance on the on-line task was compared to that of children with Specific Language Impairment (SLI) in Montgomery & Leonard (1998, 2006) to ascertain similarities and differences between the two populations. Results showed that the L2 children were sensitive to the ungrammaticality induced by the omission of tense morphemes, despite variable production. This reinforces the claim about intact underlying syntactic representations in child L2 acquisition despite non target-like production (Haznedar & Schwartz, 1997).

The time-course of morphological processing in a second language

We report findings from psycholinguistic experiments investigating the detailed timing of processing morphologically complex words by proficient adult second (L2) language learners of English in comparison to adult native (L1) speakers of English. The first study employed the masked priming technique to investigate -ed forms with a group of advanced Arabic-speaking learners of English. The results replicate previously found L1/L2 differences in morphological priming, even though in the present experiment an extra temporal delay was offered after the presentation of the prime words. The second study examined the timing of constraints against inflected forms inside derived words in English using the eye-movement monitoring technique and an additional acceptability judgment task with highly advanced Dutch L2 learners of English in comparison to adult L1 English controls. Whilst offline the L2 learners performed native-like, the eye-movement data showed that their online processing was not affected by the morphological constraint against regular plurals inside derived words in the same way as in native speakers. Taken together, these findings indicate that L2 learners are not just slower than native speakers in processing morphologically complex words, but that the L2 comprehension system employs real-time grammatical analysis (in this case, morphological information) less than the L1 system.

The acquisition of person and number morphology within the verbal domain in Early Greek

The aim of this paper is to examine the acquisition pattern of person and number verb morphology within the generative framework and to compare the results of the analyses with previous research in Greek and other European languages. The study considers previous data on the acquisition of subject-verb agreement, and thereafter, examines the acquisition of person and number morphology in a new dataset of two monolingual Greek-speaking children. The analyses present quantitative data of accuracy of person and number marking, error data, and qualitative analyses addressing the productivity of person and number marking. The results suggest that person and number morphology is used correctly and productively from a very early age in Greek speaking children. The findings provide new insight into early Greek language acquisition and are also relevant for research in early development of languages with rich inflectional morphology.