The Characteristics of Chinese Orthographic Neighborhood Size Effect for Developing Readers

Orthographic neighborhood size (N size) effect in Chinese character naming has been studied in adults. In the present study, we aimed to explore the developmental characteristics of Chinese N size effect. One hundred and seventeen students (40 from the 3^rd grade with mean age of 9 years; 40 from the 5^th grade with mean age of 11 years; 37 from the 7^th grade with mean age of 13 years) were recruited in the study. A naming task of Chinese characters was adopted to elucidate N-size- effect development. Reaction times and error rates were recorded. Results showed that children in the 3^rd grade named characters from large neighborhoods faster than named those from small neighborhoods, revealing a facilitatory N size effect; the 5^th graders showed null N size effect; while the 7^th graders showed an inhibitory N size effect, with longer reaction times for the characters from large neighborhoods than for those from small neighborhoods. The change from facilitation to inhibition of neighborhood size effect across grades suggested the transition from broadly tuned to finely tuned lexical representation in reading development, and the possible inhibition from higher frequency neighbors for higher graders.     

Individual Differences in the Effect of Orthographic/Phonological Conflict on Rhyme and Spelling Decisions

In typical readers, orthographic knowledge has been shown to influence phonological decisions. In the present study, we used visual rhyme and spelling tasks to investigate the interaction of orthographic and phonological information in adults with varying reading skill. Word pairs that shared both orthography and phonology (e.g., throat/boat), differed in both orthography and phonology (e.g., snow/arm), shared only orthography (e.g., farm/warm), and shared only phonology (e.g., vote/boat) were visually presented to university students who varied in reading ability. For rhyme judgment, participants were slower and less accurate to accept rhyming pairs when words were spelled differently and to reject non-rhyming pairs when words were spelled similarly. Similarly, for spelling judgments, participants were slower and less accurate when indicating that word endings were spelled differently when words rhymed, and slower and less accurate when indicating that words were spelled similarly when words did not rhyme. Crucially, while these effects were clear at the group level, there were large individual differences in the extent to which participants were impacted by conflict. In two separate samples, reading skill was associated with the extent to which orthographic conflict impacted rhyme decisions such that individuals with better nonword reading performance were less impacted by orthographic conflict. Thus, university students with poorer reading skills may differ from their peers either in the reading strategies they use or in the degree to which they automatically access word form information. Understanding these relationships is important for understanding the roles that reading processes play in readers of different skill.     

Phonological Codes Constrain Output of Orthographic Codes via Sublexical and Lexical Routes in Chinese Written Production

To what extent do phonological codes constrain orthographic output in handwritten production? We investigated how phonological codes constrain the selection of orthographic codes via sublexical and lexical routes in Chinese written production. Participants wrote down picture names in a picture-naming task in Experiment 1or response words in a symbol—word associative writing task in Experiment 2. A sublexical phonological property of picture names (phonetic regularity: regular vs. irregular) in Experiment 1and a lexical phonological property of response words (homophone density: dense vs. sparse) in Experiment 2, as well as word frequency of the targets in both experiments, were manipulated. A facilitatory effect of word frequency was found in both experiments, in which words with high frequency were produced faster than those with low frequency. More importantly, we observed an inhibitory phonetic regularity effect, in which low-frequency picture names with regular first characters were slower to write than those with irregular ones, and an inhibitory homophone density effect, in which characters with dense homophone density were produced more slowly than those with sparse homophone density. Results suggested that phonological codes constrained handwritten production via lexical and sublexical routes.     

中国水玉簪属中一个分类群的等级变动和拼写更正

大西坑水玉簪(变种)BurmanniacryptopetalaMakinovar.daxikangensisY.B.ChangetZ.Wei被提升为种的等级:B.daxikangensis(Y.B.ChangetZ.Wei)S.C.ChenetH.Li。它与透明水玉簪B.cryptopetala的区别在于叶腋具珠芽,花序只有1~2朵花以及药隔顶端凹陷。此分类群原描述中的拼写错误亦予以讨论并加以更正。     

Kernel Estimates for One- and Two-Dimensional Ion Channel Dwell-Time Densities

In this paper, we compare nonparametric kernel estimates with smoothed histograms as methods for displaying logarithmically transformed dwell-time distributions. Kernel density plots provide a simpler means for producing estimates of the probability density function (pdf) and they have the advantage of being smoothed in a well-specified, carefully controlled manner. Smoothing is essential for multidimensional plots because, with realistic amounts of data, the number of counts per bin is small. Examples are presented for a 2-dimensional pdf and its associated dependency-difference plot that display the correlations between successive dwell times.     

Patient Safety in Medication Nomenclature: Orthographic and Semantic Properties of International Nonproprietary Names

Background

Confusion between look-alike and sound-alike (LASA) medication names (such as mercaptamine and mercaptopurine) accounts for up to one in four medication errors, threatening patient safety. Error reduction strategies include computerized physician order entry interventions, and ‘Tall Man’ lettering. The purpose of this study is to explore the medication name designation process, to elucidate properties that may prime the risk of confusion.

Methods and Findings

We analysed the formal and semantic properties of 7,987 International Non-proprietary Names (INNs), in relation to naming guidelines of the World Health Organization (WHO) INN programme, and have identified potential for errors. We explored: their linguistic properties, the underlying taxonomy of stems to indicate pharmacological interrelationships, and similarities between INNs. We used Microsoft Excel for analysis, including calculation of Levenshtein edit distance (LED). Compliance with WHO naming guidelines was inconsistent. Since the 1970s there has been a trend towards compliance in formal properties, such as word length, but longer names published in the 1950s and 1960s are still in use. The stems used to show pharmacological interrelationships are not spelled consistently and the guidelines do not impose an unequivocal order on them, making the meanings of INNs difficult to understand. Pairs of INNs sharing a stem (appropriately or not) often have high levels of similarity (<5 LED), and thus have greater potential for confusion.

Conclusions

We have revealed a tension between WHO guidelines stipulating use of stems to denote meaning, and the aim of reducing similarities in nomenclature. To mitigate this tension and reduce the risk of confusion, the stem system should be made clear and well ordered, so as to avoid compounding the risk of confusion at the clinical level. The interplay between the different WHO INN naming principles should be further examined, to better understand their implications for the problem of LASA errors.     

Neighborhood socioeconomic deprivation and mortality: NIH-AARP diet and health study

Purpose

Residing in deprived areas may increase risk of mortality beyond that explained by a person''s own SES-related factors and lifestyle. The aim of this study was to examine the relation between neighborhood socioeconomic deprivation and all-cause, cancer- and cardiovascular disease (CVD)-specific mortality for men and women after accounting for education and other important person-level risk factors.

Methods

In the longitudinal NIH-AARP Study, we analyzed data from healthy participants, ages 50–71 years at study baseline (1995–1996). Deaths (n = 33831) were identified through December 2005. Information on census tracts was obtained from the 2000 US Census. Cox models estimated hazard ratios (HRs) and 95% confidence intervals (CIs) for quintiles of neighborhood deprivation.

Results

Participants in the highest quintile of deprivation had elevated risks for overall mortality (HR_men = 1.17, 95% CI: 1.10, 1.24; HR_women = 1.13, 95% CI: 1.05, 1.22) and marginally increased risk for cancer deaths (HR_men = 1.09, 95% CI: 1.00, 1.20; HR_women = 1.09, 95% CI: 0.99, 1.22). CVD mortality associations appeared stronger in men (HR = 1.33, 95% CI: 1.19, 1.49) than women (HR = 1.18, 95% CI: 1.01, 1.38). There was no evidence of an effect modification by education.

Conclusion

Higher neighborhood deprivation was associated with modest increases in all-cause, cancer- and CVD-mortality after accounting for many established risk factors.     

Phonological Units in Spoken Word Production: Insights from Cantonese

Evidence from previous psycholinguistic research suggests that phonological units such as phonemes have a privileged role during phonological planning in Dutch and English (aka the segment-retrieval hypothesis). However, the syllable-retrieval hypothesis previously proposed for Mandarin assumes that only the entire syllable unit (without the tone) can be prepared in advance in speech planning. Using Cantonese Chinese as a test case, the present study was conducted to investigate whether the syllable-retrieval hypothesis can be applied to other Chinese spoken languages. In four implicit priming (form-preparation) experiments, participants were asked to learn various sets of prompt-response di-syllabic word pairs and to utter the corresponding response word upon seeing each prompt. The response words in a block were either phonologically related (homogeneous) or unrelated (heterogeneous). Participants'' naming responses were significantly faster in the homogeneous than in the heterogeneous conditions when the response words shared the same word-initial syllable (without the tone) (Exps.1 and 4) or body (Exps.3 and 4), but not when they shared merely the same word-initial phoneme (Exp.2). Furthermore, the priming effect observed in the syllable-related condition was significantly larger than that in the body-related condition (Exp. 4). Although the observed syllable priming effects and the null effect of word-initial phoneme are consistent with the syllable-retrieval hypothesis, the body-related (sub-syllabic) priming effects obtained in this Cantonese study are not. These results suggest that the syllable-retrieval hypothesis is not generalizable to all Chinese spoken languages and that both syllable and sub-syllabic constituents are legitimate planning units in Cantonese speech production.     

The Proximate Phonological Unit of Chinese-English Bilinguals: Proficiency Matters

An essential step to create phonology according to the language production model by Levelt, Roelofs and Meyer is to assemble phonemes into a metrical frame. However, recently, it has been proposed that different languages may rely on different grain sizes of phonological units to construct phonology. For instance, it has been proposed that, instead of phonemes, Mandarin Chinese uses syllables and Japanese uses moras to fill the metrical frame. In this study, we used a masked priming-naming task to investigate how bilinguals assemble their phonology for each language when the two languages differ in grain size. Highly proficient Mandarin Chinese-English bilinguals showed a significant masked onset priming effect in English (L2), and a significant masked syllabic priming effect in Mandarin Chinese (L1). These results suggest that their proximate unit is phonemic in L2 (English), and that bilinguals may use different phonological units depending on the language that is being processed. Additionally, under some conditions, a significant sub-syllabic priming effect was observed even in Mandarin Chinese, which indicates that L2 phonology exerts influences on L1 target processing as a consequence of having a good command of English.     

Negative Life Events Vary by Neighborhood and Mediate the Relation between Neighborhood Context and Psychological Well-Being

Researchers have speculated that negative life events are more common in troubled neighborhoods, amplifying adverse effects on health. Using a clustered representative sample of Chicago residents (2001–03; n = 3,105) from the Chicago Community Adult Health Survey, we provide the first documentation that negative life events are highly geographically clustered compared to health outcomes. Associations between neighborhood context and negative life events were also found to vary by event type. We then demonstrate the power of a contextualized approach by testing path models in which life events mediate the relation between neighborhood characteristics and health outcomes, including self-rated health, anxiety, and depression. The indirect paths between neighborhood conditions and health through negative life event exposure are highly significant and large compared to the direct paths from neighborhood conditions to health. Our results indicate that neighborhood conditions can have acute as well as chronic effects on health, and that negative life events are a powerful mechanism by which context may influence health.     

Face Value: Towards Robust Estimates of Snow Leopard Densities

When densities of large carnivores fall below certain thresholds, dramatic ecological effects can follow, leading to oversimplified ecosystems. Understanding the population status of such species remains a major challenge as they occur in low densities and their ranges are wide. This paper describes the use of non-invasive data collection techniques combined with recent spatial capture-recapture methods to estimate the density of snow leopards Panthera uncia. It also investigates the influence of environmental and human activity indicators on their spatial distribution. A total of 60 camera traps were systematically set up during a three-month period over a 480 km² study area in Qilianshan National Nature Reserve, Gansu Province, China. We recorded 76 separate snow leopard captures over 2,906 trap-days, representing an average capture success of 2.62 captures/100 trap-days. We identified a total number of 20 unique individuals from photographs and estimated snow leopard density at 3.31 (SE = 1.01) individuals per 100 km². Results of our simulation exercise indicate that our estimates from the Spatial Capture Recapture models were not optimal to respect to bias and precision (RMSEs for density parameters less or equal to 0.87). Our results underline the critical challenge in achieving sufficient sample sizes of snow leopard captures and recaptures. Possible performance improvements are discussed, principally by optimising effective camera capture and photographic data quality.     

Ethnic Differences in Mammographic Densities: An Asian Cross-Sectional Study

BackgroundMammographic density is a strong risk factor for breast cancer and is highly variable, but, to date, few studies have examined density in Asian women, particularly those in low and middle-income Asian countries where genetic and lifestyle determinants may be significantly different.MethodsA total of 1,240 women who attended an opportunistic mammogram screening programme were eligible for analysis. Mammographic density was estimated using a fully-automated thresholding method and differences across ethnic groups were examined using linear regression in 205 randomly selected Chinese women, 138 Malay and 199 Indian women.ResultsPercent density was significantly higher in Chinese women (28.5%; 95% CI 27.0%, 30.0%) compared to Malay (24.2%; 95% CI 22.5%, 26.0%) and Indian (24.3%; 95% CI 22.8%, 25.7%) women (p<0.001), after adjustment for age, BMI, menopausal status, parity and age at first full term pregnancy. Correspondingly, adjusted nondense area was significantly lower in Chinese (72.2cm²; 95% CI 67.9cm², 76.5cm²) women compared to Malay (92.1cm²; 95% CI 86.9cm², 97.2cm²) and Indian (97.7cm²; 95% CI 93.4cm², 101.9cm²) women (p<0.001), but dense area did not differ across the three ethnic groups.ConclusionsOur study shows that higher percent density and lower nondense area reflect the higher incidence of breast cancer in Chinese compared to Malay and Indian women in Malaysia. Known lifestyle determinants of mammographic density do not fully account for the ethnic variations observed in mammographic density in this Asian cohort.     

Neighborhood Regularized Logistic Matrix Factorization for Drug-Target Interaction Prediction

In pharmaceutical sciences, a crucial step of the drug discovery process is the identification of drug-target interactions. However, only a small portion of the drug-target interactions have been experimentally validated, as the experimental validation is laborious and costly. To improve the drug discovery efficiency, there is a great need for the development of accurate computational approaches that can predict potential drug-target interactions to direct the experimental verification. In this paper, we propose a novel drug-target interaction prediction algorithm, namely neighborhood regularized logistic matrix factorization (NRLMF). Specifically, the proposed NRLMF method focuses on modeling the probability that a drug would interact with a target by logistic matrix factorization, where the properties of drugs and targets are represented by drug-specific and target-specific latent vectors, respectively. Moreover, NRLMF assigns higher importance levels to positive observations (i.e., the observed interacting drug-target pairs) than negative observations (i.e., the unknown pairs). Because the positive observations are already experimentally verified, they are usually more trustworthy. Furthermore, the local structure of the drug-target interaction data has also been exploited via neighborhood regularization to achieve better prediction accuracy. We conducted extensive experiments over four benchmark datasets, and NRLMF demonstrated its effectiveness compared with five state-of-the-art approaches.     

Estimation of Immune Cell Densities in Immune Cell Conglomerates: An Approach for High-Throughput Quantification

Background

Determining the correct number of positive immune cells in immunohistological sections of colorectal cancer and other tumor entities is emerging as an important clinical predictor and therapy selector for an individual patient. This task is usually obstructed by cell conglomerates of various sizes. We here show that at least in colorectal cancer the inclusion of immune cell conglomerates is indispensable for estimating reliable patient cell counts. Integrating virtual microscopy and image processing principally allows the high-throughput evaluation of complete tissue slides.

Methodology/Principal findings

For such large-scale systems we demonstrate a robust quantitative image processing algorithm for the reproducible quantification of cell conglomerates on CD3 positive T cells in colorectal cancer. While isolated cells (28 to 80 µm²) are counted directly, the number of cells contained in a conglomerate is estimated by dividing the area of the conglomerate in thin tissues sections (≤6 µm) by the median area covered by an isolated T cell which we determined as 58 µm². We applied our algorithm to large numbers of CD3 positive T cell conglomerates and compared the results to cell counts obtained manually by two independent observers. While especially for high cell counts, the manual counting showed a deviation of up to 400 cells/mm² (41% variation), algorithm-determined T cell numbers generally lay in between the manually observed cell numbers but with perfect reproducibility.

Conclusion

In summary, we recommend our approach as an objective and robust strategy for quantifying immune cell densities in immunohistological sections which can be directly implemented into automated full slide image processing systems.     

Phonological and morphological conditions on affix order in Huave

Huave, a language isolate of Mexico, has “mobile” affixes, which surface as prefixes or suffixes depending on morphophonological properties of the base to which they attach. This paper shows that despite affix mobility, the hierarchical structure of affixes is morphologically fixed. Meanwhile, the linearization algorithm for individual mobile affixes is analyzed with an Optimality-Theoretic P >> M ranking schema, where phonological well-formedness constraints outrank morphological alignment constraints. The proposed model is a revision of previous P >> M models in that morphological constraints are argued to be of the idiosyncratic, language-specific type previously used in subcategorization approaches to the morphology–phonology interface.