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Understanders appear to routinely and immediately evaluate the congruence of discourse at many levels of analysis, processes often labeled "validation." This study was an initial exploration of individual differences in discourse validation. Text "reading-time" profiles were examined as a function of two negligibly correlated reader qualities: first, their working memory resources (indexed by reading span), and second, their "accessing" of relevant antecedent message ideas and world knowledge in the service of comprehension. Participants read narratives bearing a target sentence that was either true or false with reference to the preceding text and was expressed either in the affirmative or negative. For low-access readers, reading time was greater for false than for true affirmative target sentences and vice versa for negative targets, mirroring a familiar pattern of intentional sentence verification. In contrast, for high-access readers, reading time was greater for false than for true sentences regardless of affirmative/negative expression. Regression analysis suggested that all subjects validated the target sentence but that only high-access readers were also sensitive to subtle pragmatic discourse influences. Unexpectedly, there was a generally similar truth × negation × reading span interaction profile. However, because that effect did not attain conventional significance levels, its implications are viewed only as suggestive.

Fault-type identification and fault estimation for the active steering system of a vehicle are considered in this paper. The vehicle studied is an electric ground vehicle, which operates mainly under normal driving conditions. First, a two-degree-of- freedom dynamic model of the lateral motion and the yaw motion of the vehicle is established and verified by experimental data. Then, an adaptive observer is proposed to estimate the steering motor fault by using measurements of the yaw rate of the vehicle. Residuals are defined for specific fault-type identification purposes. Experimental tests on the electric ground vehicle are carried out to assess the fault identification and estimation performance as well as to reveal the limitations of and possible improvement in the proposed method. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]