No abstract

Forty-eight Hindi-English bilinguals completed two blocks of trials where each trial involved presentation of a letter string requiring a lexical decision. In the first block subjects were exposed to 22 words and 11 non-words in either English or Hindi. In the second block the original words were repeated in either the same language or in the alternative language. In this block the old (repeated) words were mixed with 22 new words, and 22 non-words. Twelve subjects were included in each of the four groups given by the factorial combination of blocks and languages. Reaction time in the lexical decision task was facilitated when words were repeated in the same language (109 and 125 ms in the English-English and Hindi-Hindi groups respectively), but little or no facilitation was observed in the inter-lingual conditions (-22 and 23 ms in the Hindi-English and English-Hindi conditions respectively). The results support the view that lexical representation in bilinguals is language-specific.

Two experiments were conducted to evaluate the role of script in lexical representation in bilinguals. The particular issue under investigation concerned the role of a script difference when the translations concerned are in all other respects identical. Does it provide a basis for the operation of unique functional entries in the lexicon, or is it, like case, treated as a pre-lexical attribute? The experiments contrasted the physically unrelated scripts used to depict Hindi and Urdu, North Indian languages which share a substantial vocabulary and which, with minor qualifications, are phonemically identical. The experiments used repetition effects in lexical decision and memory for language of presentation procedures, respectively, to assess the representational status of items common to the Hindi and Urdu vocabularies. Experiment 1 demonstrated that transfer is virtually complete between Hindi and Urdu translations, suggesting that the role of script is akin to that of case, and quite unlike phonology in its impact on lexical definition. Experiment 2 showed that whereas memory for language of presentation is reliable in tests involving language pairs such as Hindi and English, performance on this task is poor when script alone provides the distinguishing feature. Considered together, the results of the experiments are consistent with the proposition that when translations differ only with regard to script, a common lexical unit is involved in visual recognition and attribute retention. By implication, therefore, a morphophonemic distinction is a pre-requisite for the presence and use of distinct units for translations. The representational character of this interpretation was supported by the fact that complementary evidence was obtained from tasks involving qualitatively different retrieval processes.

In this paper, a new method called the extended voltage phasors approach (EVPA) is proposed for placement of FACTS controllers in power systems. While the voltage phasors approach (VPA) identifies only the critical paths from the voltage stability viewpoint, the proposed method additionally locates the critical buses/line segments. The results of EVPA are compared with the well-established line flow index (LFI) method for nine-bus, 39-bus, and 68-bus systems. It is shown that the EVPA provides accurate indication for the placement of FACTS controllers.

No abstract