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This study considers the mastery of maximality, or domain restrictions, in a group of 47 children acquiring French (aged 4.06–8.09), as well as a control group of young adults. Singular definite (le “the”) and indefinite (un “a/one”) plural (des “some,” les “the”) and explicitly maximal contexts (tous les “all the”) were provided to participants. Animals were arranged in groups of three. Participants were asked to select one or more animals from these groups and give them to the experimenter (similar to Munn et al., 2006). Following Munn, we expected children to make maximality errors on the singular definite items. However, we did not observe this pattern. On the contrary we observed more errors on plurals generally. Further, the developmental patterns show that participants become less maximal in their responses to indefinite plurals (an adult-like pattern, also found in Caponigro et al., 2012) with no important changes on definite types: no strong age effects are observed on maximality patterns. These point to the importance of cross-linguistic data for the understanding of child language acquisition and error patterns in psycholinguistic theory.

MicroRNAs (miRNAs) are short single-stranded non-coding RNA sequences that posttranscriptionally regulate up to 60% of protein encoding genes. Evidence is emerging that miRNAs are key mediators of the host response to infection, predominantly by regulating proteins involved in innate and adaptive immune pathways. miRNAs can govern the cellular tropism of some viruses, are implicated in the resistance of some individuals to infections like HIV, and are associated with impaired vaccine response in older people. Not surprisingly, pathogens have evolved ways to undermine the effects of miRNAs on immunity. Recognition of this has led to new experimental treatments, RG-101 and Miravirsen—hepatitis C treatments which target host miRNA. miRNAs are being investigated as novel infection biomarkers, and they are being used to design attenuated vaccines, e.g., against Dengue virus. This comprehensive review synthesizes current knowledge of miRNA in host response to infection with emphasis on potential clinical applications, along with an evaluation of the challenges still to be overcome.

This study presents the first two ERP reading studies of comma-induced effects of covert (implicit) prosody on syntactic parsing decisions in English. The first experiment used a balanced 2 x 2 design in which the presence/absence of commas determined plausibility (e.g., John, said Mary, was the nicest boy at the party versus John said Mary was the nicest boy at the party). The second reading experiment replicated a previous auditory study investigating the role of overt prosodic boundaries in closure ambiguities (Pauker et al., 2011). In both experiments, commas reliably elicited CPS components and generally played a dominant role in determining parsing decisions in the face of input ambiguity. The combined set of findings provides further evidence supporting the claim that mechanisms subserving speech processing play an active role during silent reading.