Perception of interrupted speech: effects of dual-rate gating on the intelligibility of words and sentences

Perception of interrupted speech and the influence of speech materials and memory load were investigated using one or two concurrent square-wave gating functions. Sentences (Experiment 1) and random one-, three-, and five-word sequences (Experiment 2) were interrupted using either a primary gating rate alone (0.5-24 Hz) or a combined primary and faster secondary rate. The secondary rate interrupted only speech left intact after primary gating, reducing the original speech to 25%. In both experiments, intelligibility increased with primary rate, but varied with memory load and speech material (highest for sentences, lowest for five-word sequences). With dual-rate gating of sentences, intelligibility with fast secondary rates was superior to that with single rates and a 25% duty cycle, approaching that of single rates with a 50% duty cycle for some low and high rates. For dual-rate gating of words, the positive effect of fast secondary gating was smaller than for sentences, and the advantage of sentences over word-sequences was not obtained in many dual-rate conditions. These findings suggest that integration of interrupted speech fragments after gating depends on the duration of the gated speech interval and that sufficiently robust acoustic-phonetic word cues are needed to access higher-level contextual sentence information.     

Characterization of the Interaction Between Lantibiotics, Nisin and Duramycin, and β-Lactoglobulin by Affinity Capillary Electrophoresis

Affinity capillary electrophoresis was used to study quantitatively the noncovalent interactions between β-lactoglobulin (β-LG), a milk whey protein, and two lantibiotics, nisin (a dairy biopreservative lantibiotic) and duramycin (a bovine mastitis treatment lantibiotic). The study involved measuring the change in effective electrophoretic mobility of the lantibiotic as the concentration of β-LG in the background electrolyte is increased. Nonlinear regression analysis was used to model the dependence of the effective mobility of the lantibiotic on β-LG concentration in the BGE. Using this approach, binding constants were determined to be 3.1 (±0.2) × 10⁸ M^?1 for nisin and 2.2 (±0.1) × 10⁸ M^?1 for duramycin. Both binding constants were comparable indicating the similarity of affinity properties of nisin and duramycin towards β-LG. These results demonstrate that affinity capillary electrophoresis is a suitable method for characterizing the interaction between lantibiotics and β-LG.     

On the formation of H(n=3)dipole moments in collisions of protons on rare gas atoms

We have investigated proton-rare gas atom charge transfer collisions in the energy range from 20 to 100 keV and have extracted the electrostatic dipole moments (EDMs) of the collisionally produced H(n=3) atoms from the optical data. The results show that the EDM decreases with increasing atomic number of the rare gas atoms. Our data provide experimental evidence that post-collisional electrostatic forces do not influence the formation of the EDMs.