Background: The fetal origins hypothesis poses that adverse intrauterine conditions predispose to cardiovascular and metabolic diseases in adulthood. Evidence is accumulating that similar mechanisms to those identified for physical disorders may also apply to psychiatric disorders. Focusing on the activity of neurophysiological systems thought to regulate emotions from very early in life may be key to understanding how maternal stress in pregnancy impacts on the developing baby with possible long-lasting consequences for behaviour and psychopathology. Respiratory Sinus Arrhythmia (RSA), "vagal tone", is thought to reflect autonomic regulatory capabilities that may underpin emotion regulation. However, little is known about possible fetal origins of vagal tone. Animal studies increasingly point to sex differences in the effects of prenatal stress, and this is supported by human studies of the prenatal origins of cardiovascular functioning and psychopathology. The current investigation examines whether prenatal depression and anxiety predict vagal tone in infancy, and whether the associations are modified by infant sex. Method: Two hundred mothers and infants from a high-risk consecutive community sample were examined prospectively from the first trimester of pregnancy until 29 weeks postnatal. Maternal self-reports of stress (EPDS and STAI) were collected in pregnancy (20 and 32 weeks) and postnatally (5 weeks and 29 weeks). Vagal tone was ascertained across five procedures, the "Helper-Hinderer" social evaluation task, toy exploration and the "Still Face" paradigm (2 minutes of social engagement, followed by 2 minutes of maternal unresponsiveness and concluded by 2 minutes of social reunion). Results: Principal Component Analysis of the RSA scores yielded a one-factor solution explaining over 70% of the variance, and so mean of RSA scores was used as the index of overall vagal tone, and the difference between overall and RSA during the Still Face as the estimate of vagal withdrawal. There were no main effects of prenatal maternal depression or anxiety on vagal tone or vagal withdrawal. However, there were significant prenatal stress by sex of infant interactions. Follow-up analyses revealed that increasing maternal depression and anxiety at 20 weeks gestation were associated with decreasing vagal tone in males and increasing vagal tone in females. Vagal withdrawal in response to the still face showed similar patterns i.e. decreased in males and increased in girls with elevated maternal anxiety at 32 weeks gestation. These associations were not explained by possible confounding variables assessed in pregnancy, nor by postnatal maternal depression and anxiety. Conclusions: The findings support the fetal origins hypothesis for vagal tone and vagal withdrawal, but only in interaction with sex of the infant. Longitudinal study is required to determine conditions under which increasing vagal tone and withdrawal in girls associated with prenatal depression and anxiety, and decreasing vagal tone and withdrawal in boys, are associated with later resilience or vulnerability to psychopathology.

A central claim of Optimality Theory (Prince and Smolensky 1993, McCarthy and Prince 1993a) is that phonological variation can be modeled through the variable ranking of universal constraints. In this thesis, I test this claim by examining variation in the tongue root vowel harmony system in a number of closely related yet distinct Bantu languages of Congo and Zaire. The twenty-odd languages are drawn from each of Guthrie 1967's eight Bantu C. subgroups and are shown to vary along a number of dimensions. One is morphological, related to whether or not the harmonic element in the lexical root extends to prefixes and suffixes. This variation is shown to follow from the variable ranking of constraints that seek to ALIGN the harmonic feature, [retracted tongue root] ([rtr]) with the edges of the morphological domains STEM and WORD. A second parameter of variation concerns the relationship between high vowels and [rtr]. A third dimension involves the interaction of [rtr] with the low vowel [a] under harmony. Here, three patterns involving (i) low vowel assimilation, (ii) low vowel opacity, or (iii) low vowel transparency under harmony are shown to follow from the variable ranking of a few constraints. A significant theme that emereges in the study is recognizing and characterizing the distinct morphological and phonological domain edges involved in vowel harmony. An important contribution of this study is in bringing to light a language family where phonological tongue height, in this case expressed by the feature [low], is shown to be incompatible with tongue root retraction, as expressed in the feature [rtr]. Although the gestures of tongue body lowering and tongue root retraction are sympathetic in the articulatory dimension and in their acoustic effect, they are seen to be phonologically hostile, in fact, because of the redundancy relation between them. This redundancy-based phonological incompatibility is implemented via licensing-failure: [low] fails to "license" [rtr] because lowness implies retraction (Ito, Mester and Padgett 1994). / Arts, Faculty of / Linguistics, Department of / Graduate

Although tone plays an important role in Chinese speech perception, many issues regarding tone processing remained debatable. Among these issues, whether tone and segment are integrally or independently processed is the one that motivated this study. To investigate the integration vs. independence view of tone and segment (i.e., rime in this study) processing during Mandarin sentence comprehension, the present experiment adopted the violation paradigm and event- related potential (ERP) recording. Participants heard a series of sentences and judged whether each sentence made sense or not after its offset. The sentences included congruous sentences that embodied the original word (e.g., "观众"/guan1-zhong4/; "audience") and incongruous sentences that were created by mismatching tone (e.g., "观肿"/guan1-zhong3/), rime (e.g., " 观赚"/guan1-zhuan4/) or tone-plus-rime (e.g., "观转"/guan1-zhuan3/) of the second syllable of the original words in the congruous sentences. Larger N400 (250-400 ms) and P600 (500-700 ms) were evoked by the incongruous sentences than congruous sentences. Among the incongruous sentences, the N400 elicited by double violation (i.e., tone-plus-rime violation) was larger than rime violation, which was in turn larger than tone violation. The P600 evoked by tone violation was larger than rime violation in 500-600 ms, but they were comparable in 600-700 ms. In addition, the P600 evoked by tone and rime violation were both larger than double violation. The different ERP effects among the three violation conditions supported the independence view of tone and rime processing. Based on the results, a dynamic model of spoken word processing was proposed, in which the functional dissociation of tone and segment across different stages was taken into consideration.

The zebrafish (Danio rerio) has been used as a model for studying vertebrate development in the cardiovascular system. In order to monitor heart contraction and cytosolic calcium oscillations, fish were either embedded in methylcellulose or anesthetized with tricaine. Using high-resolution differential interference contrast and calcium imaging microscopy, we here show that dopamine and verapamil alter calcium signaling and muscle contraction in anesthetized zebrafish, but not in embedded zebrafish. In anesthetized fish, dopamine increases the amplitude of cytosolic calcium oscillation with a subsequent increase in heart contraction, whereas verapamil decreases the frequency of calcium oscillation and heart rate. Interestingly, verapamil also increases myocardial contraction. Our data further indicate that verapamil can increase myocardial calcium sensitivity in anesthetized fish. Taken together, our data reinforce in vivo cardiac responses to dopamine and verapamil. Furthermore, effects of dopamine and verapamil on myocardial calcium and contraction are greater in anesthetized than embedded fish. We suggest that while the zebrafish is an excellent model for a cardiovascular imaging study, the cardio-pharmacological profiles are very different between anesthetized and embedded fish.

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This study first traces the evolution of a new musical design, one which emphasizes textual elements in the structural foundation. It follows with an account of the life and musical style of Olivier Messian, a contemporary composer who has emphasized timbre as a structural parameter in his music - most notably in several works of the sixties. An analysis of his Couleurs de la Cité Céleste (1963) is offered in the final chapter, indicating in particular the important role that timbre, as well as other textual elements, plays on forming the large-scale design.

The intent of this thesis is to explore the effects and influencers of skin tone on consumer perception. Firstly we conducted a primary study to test the effects of skin tone on service provider quality. The results showed that while skin tone had little effect, gender and ethnicity were more indicative. Therefore our study seeks to re-test the relationship between skin tone and consumer service perception as well as the effects of ethnicity and tipping behavior, and if a consumer’s cultural identity strength plays a role in consumer perception. We examined the differences across ethnicities i.e. White, Hispanic, and African American. Specifically we were interested in any potential differences across skin tone (light skinned vs. dark skinned) within African American and Hispanic service providers. Firstly we sought out stock images that portrayed easily identifiable ethnicities. We exposed the respondents to those images in which we asked them to identify the ethnicity of the image as a manipulation check for ethnicity. In the actual study, all respondents were given the same service scenario with the image of one of the ten (White, light or dark skinned Hispanic, light or dark skinned African American, male or female) stock photos. Respondents were asked to rate the service quality, satisfaction, and tip amount. The data was analyzed as a 2 way independent-groups design.

<p> Three experiments, involving 250 subjects, were performed which support the conclusion that a tone cue presented shortly before a tachistoscopic stimulus facilitates tachistoscopic recognition. With tone-stimulus intervals below two seconds no threshold differences occurred. With intervals between two and eight seconds, the shorter the interval was, the lower thresholds were, and the more practice decrement observed. Experiment II showed that while the tone-stimulus interval affects thresholds the most, the interval between successive exposures of a stimulus affects thresholds. We concluded that as this interval is lengthened, the subject forgets information already gained. Experiment III showed that training in a reaction time task transferred positively to a tachistoscopic task when a two second tone-stimulus interval was used in both tasks. Reasons for the facilitative effect of the tone were discussed.</p> / Thesis / Master of Arts (MA)

Non-Nutritive Serial Varnish is a song written and arranged for big band which explores several stylistic and compositional techniques developed during the 20th century. Serial techniques are used as the structural underpinning during melodic presentation. Eventually these serial structures work their way to the surface to reveal themselves as source material. The salient aesthetic, overarching form and harmony are derived from conventional jazz. The use of semi-improvised melodic modules is also employed.

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