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Biomedical subjects

F Grosjean

Publications and source records attributed to F Grosjean.

At least 19 recordsLinked to original sources
PubMed2006

Ingestion of low doses of deoxynivalenol does not affect hematological, biochemical, or immune responses of piglets.

Deoxynivalenol (DON), a mycotoxin produced by Fusarium spp., is a frequent contaminant of cereals. Because of their rich cereal diet, pigs could be exposed to this mycotoxin. Pigs are among the animal species showing the greatest sensitivity to DON. Effects of intermediate to high levels of DON on pigs are well known and include feed refusal, decreased feed intake, and alteration of the immune response. Effects of low levels of DON, which are commonly detected in contaminated feed, remain unknown. The aim of this study was to investigate the effect of a diet naturally contaminated with a low concentration of DON (0, 280, 560, or 840 microg/kg of feed) on performance of weanling piglets and on 34 hematological, biochemical, and immune variables. Low doses of DON did not alter the animal performances (feed intake and BW gain). Such low levels of DON did not modify the 9 hematological variables measured (including white blood cell, red blood cell, and platelet counts, relative numbers of neutrophils and lymphocytes, and hematocrit and hemoglobin concentrations) or the 18 biochemical variables tested (including cations, glucose, urea, creatinine, bilirubin, cholesterol and triglyceride concentrations, and plasma enzyme activity). Similarly, no effect of low doses of DON was observed on the immune responses of the animals (immunoglobulin subset concentration, lymphocyte proliferation, and cytokine production).

Animal Feed↗
PubMed2001

The gender marking effect in spoken word recognition: the case of bilinguals.

It has been known for some time that the recognition of a noun is affected by the gender marking, such as masculine or feminine, that is carried by a preceding word. In this study, we used auditory naming to examine how early and late English-French bilinguals react to gender marking when processing French. The early bilinguals showed clear facilitation and inhibition effects, but the late bilinguals were totally insensitive to gender marking, whether congruent or incongruent. The results are discussed in terms of current accounts of gender processing as well as age of acquisition and regular use of the gender-marking language.

Age Factors↗
PubMed1999

Melanoma prevention: evaluation of a health education campaign for primary schools.

OBJECTIVE: To evaluate the effectiveness of an educational campaign aimed toward limiting children's sun exposure. DESIGN: Prospective, multicenter trial with before-after comparison. A school-based campaign was presented as a game during a 4-week period (May 25 to June 1992) with primary school teachers as game hosts. Children were interviewed with a standardized questionnaire in September before (1991) and after (1992) the campaign. Comparisons between the children's answers before and after the campaign were made using paired chi2 tests and analysis of variance. SETTING: Five French primary schools. SUBJECTS: All children in their fourth year of primary school (228 children aged 9 years). MAIN OUTCOME MEASURES: Changes after the campaign in children's answers concerning their knowledge, attitude, and behavior toward the sun during summer holidays. RESULTS: Compared with the precampaign answers, more children after the campaign claimed to protect themselves from the sun with a hat (33.7% vs 23.8%; P = .01) or sunscreen (34.8% vs 25.4%; P = .03), avoided going outside during the sunniest hours (76.8% vs 66.0%; P = .02), reapplied sunscreens (22.1% vs 10.6%; P<.001), considered that a T-shirt and shade provided better protection than sunscreen (82.7% vs 74.8%; P = .05), considered sunlight as a risk factor for skin cancer (74.9% vs 50.7%; P<.001), and spent significantly less time in the sun with their arms (P = .005), trunk, legs, and head uncovered (P<.001). Children with a fair complexion, who were the target of this campaign, showed the best improvement in their responses. CONCLUSION: Health education campaigns can be effective in terms of improving the knowledge, attitude, and behavior of young children.

Child↗
PubMed1994

The gender-marking effect in spoken word recognition.

In this paper we examine whether the recognition of a spoken noun is affected by the gender marking--masculine or feminine--that is carried by a preceding word. In the first of two experiments, the gating paradigm was used to study the access of French nouns that were preceded by an appropriate gender marking, carried by an article, or preceded by no gender marking. In the second experiment, subjects were asked to make a lexical decision on the same material. A very strong facilitatory effect was found in both cases. The origin of the gender-marking effect is discussed, as well as the level of processing involved--lexical or syntactic.

Adult↗
PubMed1989

Neurolinguists, beware! The bilingual is not two monolinguals in one person.

Two views of bilingualism are presented--the monolingual or fractional view which holds that the bilingual is (or should be) two monolinguals in one person, and the bilingual or wholistic view which states that the coexistence of two languages in the bilingual has produced a unique and specific speaker-hearer. These views affect how we compare monolinguals and bilinguals, study language learning and language forgetting, and examine the speech modes--monolingual and bilingual--that characterize the bilingual's everyday interactions. The implications of the wholistic view on the neurolinguistics of bilingualism, and in particular bilingual aphasia, are discussed.

Aphasia↗
PubMed1985

Polyglot aphasics and language mixing: a comment on Perecman (1984).

Perecman (1984) Brain and Language, 23, 43-63, proposes that language mixing (and especially utterance level mixing) in polyglot aphasics reflects a linguistic deficit and that spontaneous translation indicates a prelinguistic processing deficit. It is argued in this comment that both language mixing (including utterance-level mixing) and spontaneous translation are also found in normal polyglots, and that they may not therefore always be reflecting language deficit in aphasics. Only a good assessment of the patient's language and speech before and after the injury will determine if these behaviors do indeed reflect deficits.

Aphasia↗
PubMed1984

Articulation rate and its variability in spontaneous speech: a reanalysis and some implications.

It is by now well established that during normal conversation talkers often produce large variation in the rate at which they speak. However, existing research suggests that this modification is largely due to changes in the amount of pausing during conversation, and much less to actual changes in articulation rate, that is, the rate at which the speech itself is produced. In an attempt to examine this issue further, we used a modified measurement procedure to reanalyze the speech data from 30 talkers in an interview situation. In contrast to the earlier analyses, we found that there was indeed substantial variation in articulation rate for these speakers, even within a single utterance of a single talker. The implications of these findings for theories of segmental perception and for models of speech planning are discussed.

Humans↗
PubMed1981

How the components of speaking rate influence perception of phonetic segments.

In two studies we investigated the way in which the components of speaking rate, articulation rate and pause rate, combine to influence processing of the silence-duration cue for the voicing distinction in medial stop consonants. First, we replicated the finding that the articulation rate of a carrier sentence, that is, the rate at which the speech itself is produced, influences how the duration information is used to assign voicing values. Second, and more importantly, the assignment of voicing values was also influenced by the pause rate of the sentence. Thus, the listener adjusts for both articulation rate and pause rate when processing the phonetically relevant information. Finally, the two rate components did not function in an equivalent manner, since changes in articulation rate had considerably more effect on phonetic judgments than did changes in pause rate. Alternative explanations fo the relative weighting of the two variables are discussed.

Humans↗
PubMed1981

The invariance of sentence performance structures across language modality.

Native users of American Sign Language were asked to manipulate sentences in four different ways: sign them at slow rate, parse them, make relatedness judgments of pairs of signs taken from each sentence, and recall the sentences. The data obtained from these four tasks (pause durations, parsing values, indices of relatedness and probe latencies) were used to construct hierarchical performance structures for each of the sentences. The resulting structures were highly similar across tasks; that is, performance structures are not task specific. The four measures at each sign boundary in each sentence were well predicted by a performance model, elaborated by Grosjean, Grosjean, and Lane for speech, that combines a parsing measure with a symmetry measure. Thus performance structures appear to be founded in the processing of language, be it visual or oral, and not in the properties of any particular communication modality.

Adult↗
PubMed1979

A study of timing in a manual and a spoken language: American sign language and English.

A comparative analysis of the time variables in the production of speech and sign reveals that signers modify their global physical rate primarily by altering the time they spend articulating, whereas speakers do so by chaning the time they spend pausing. When signers increase or decrease their pause time, however little they do so, they alter the number and the length of the pauses equally, whereas speakers primarily alter the number of pauses and leave their pause durations relatively constant. An analysis of the durations of signs reveals that signs are longer at the end of sentences than within sentences and that the first occurrence of a sign is longer than the second when syntactic location is controlled (both these findings have already been reported for spoken language). The inherent duration of a sign can be accounted for almost totally by the movement characteristic; handshape, location, and number of hands in a sign are of little importance. Finally, signers retain their regular "quiet-breathing" respiratory pattern across signing rates and inhale at locations independent of syntactic importance. In this they are quite unlike speakers, who breathe at syntactic breaks.

Adult↗
PubMed1979

Breathing, pausing and reading.

An analysis of the breathing patterns of speakers in a variable-rate reading task shows that the duration and frequency of breathing pauses are dependent both on the rate of speaking and the syntactic nature of the pause location. Non-breathing pauses follow the same pattern of occurrence as breathing pauses, but are always shorter and tend to occur primarily at minor constituent breaks. At slow and normal rates, speakers accommodate their need to inhale to the preplanned pause patterns. At fast rates, however, the physiological need to breathe is the sole determinant of pausing.

Female↗