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Echo phonology was originally proposed to account for obligatory coordination of manual and mouth articulations observed in several sign languages. However, previous research into the phenomenon lacks clear criteria for which components of movement can or must be copied when the articulators are so different. Nor is there discussion of which nonmanual articulators can echo manual movement. Given the prosodic properties of echoes (coordination of onset/offset and of dynamics such as speed) as well as general motoric coordination of various articulators in the human body, we expect that the mouth is not the only nonmanual articulator involved in echo phonology. In this study, we look at a fixed set of lexical items across 36 sign languages and establish that the head can echo manual movement with respect to timing and to the axis/axes of manual movement. We propose that what matters in echo phonology is the visual percept of temporally coordinated movement that repeats a salient movement property in such a way as to give the visual impression of a copy. Our findings suggest that echoes are not obligatory motor couplings of two or more articulators but may enhance phonological distinctions that are otherwise difficult to see.

Adjectives are often identified via notional or even translational criteria in sign language research, which reflects a lack of formal criteria for identifying this part of speech in the field. This paper presents the results of a guided production task investigating the conservative hypothesis that ASL has a small, closed adjective class consisting only of terms for dimension, age, value, and color. Evidence from the syntactic distribution of these core properties compared to non-core properties will be presented to refute the initial hypothesis and show that ASL has an open adjective class. Its members are characterized by their ability to occur as prenominal modifiers without function-indicating morphosyntax. The semantic distinction between core and peripheral adjectives is nonetheless reflected in a significant preference for core adjectives to be used as modifiers rather than as sentential predicates. Postnominal property signs are analyzed as (in most cases) reduced relative clauses. I further suggest that prototypically verbal signs can be used as prenominal modifiers when they are embedded in reduced relative clauses. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We studied the combined effects of pressure (0.1-200 MPa) and temperature (22, 30, and 38 °C) on the catalytic activity of designed amyloid fibrils using a high-pressure stopped-flow system with rapid UV/Vis absorption detection. Complementary FT-IR spectroscopic data revealed a remarkably high pressure and temperature stability of the fibrillar systems. High pressure enhances the esterase activity as a consequence of a negative activation volume at all temperatures (about -14 cm(3)  mol(-1) ). The enhancement is sustained in the whole temperature range covered, which allows a further acceleration of the enzymatic activity at high temperatures (activation energy 45-60 kJ mol(-1) ). Our data reveal the great potential of using both pressure and temperature modulation to optimize the enzyme efficiency of catalytic amyloid fibrils., (© 2016 WILEY-VCH Verlag GmbH & Co. KGaA, Weinheim.)

Polymorphism is a wide-spread feature of amyloid-like fibrils formed in vitro, but it has so far remained unclear whether the fibrils formed within a patient are also affected by this phenomenon. In this study we show that the amyloid fibrils within a diseased individual can vary considerably in their three-dimensional architecture. We demonstrate this heterogeneity with amyloid fibrils deposited within different organs, formed from sequentially non-homologous polypeptide chains and affecting human or animals. Irrespective of amyloid type or source, we found in vivo fibrils to be polymorphic. These data imply that the chemical principles of fibril assembly that lead to such polymorphism are fundamentally conserved in vivo and in vitro., (© 2016 WILEY-VCH Verlag GmbH & Co. KGaA, Weinheim.)