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A picture-word interference paradigm with visually presented distractors was used to investigate the independent effects of orthographic and phonological facilitation on Mandarin monosyllabic word production. Both the stimulus-onset asynchrony (SOA) and the picture-word relationship along different lexical dimensions were varied. We observed a pure orthographic facilitation effect and a pure phonological facilitation effect, and found that the patterns of orthographic and phonological facilitation were different. Of most interest, the additive effects of orthographic and phonological facilitation at -150-ms and 0-ms SOAs indicated that the orthographic effect was largely independent of the phonological effect on spoken picture naming. We argue that the present findings are useful for constraining theoretical models of language production and contend that theoretical models of word production need to consider independent effects of orthography and phonology on picture naming, at least in Chinese. (Contains 2 tables and 2 figures.)

The COVID-19 pandemic has a multifaceted impact on mental health due to ill health, restrictions and lockdowns, and loss of employment and institutional support. COVID-19 may disproportionally impact families with special educational needs and disabilities (SEND) due to the already higher prevalence of mental health conditions in children with SEND and their parents. Therefore, it is essential to determine the short-term impact of the pandemic on the mental health of families with SEND in order to identify their ongoing health support needs. The current study aims to examine the anxiety level and concerns of children with SEND and their parents living in China. The sample consisted of 271 parents of children with SEND aged between 6 and 17 years (M age = 8.37; SD age = 2.76). Parents completed an online survey between 10 April to 8 June 2020. Both child and parental anxiety levels and various concerns increased after the initial wave of COVID-19 when compared with retrospective pre-COVID-19 levels. Parental anxiety and concern levels were significantly higher for those living in rural areas compared to urban areas. In addition, parental and child anxiety and concern levels were significantly correlated with each other. Parental anxiety at the lowest level made a unique and significant statistical contribution to children's anxiety levels. The implications of the study findings are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background: Coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) has affected more than 5 million people around the world and killed more than 300,000 people; thus, it has become a global public health emergency. Our objective was to investigate the mental health of hospitalized patients diagnosed with COVID-19. Methods: The PTSD checklist for DSM-5 (PCL-5), Patient Health Questionnaire (PHQ-9), Generalized Anxiety Disorder Scale (GAD-7), Trauma Exposure Scale, abbreviated version of the Connor–Davidson Resilience Scale (CD-RISC-10), Perceived Social Support Scale (PSSS) and Demographic Questionnaire were used to examine posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD), depression, anxiety, trauma exposure, resilience and perceived social support among 898 patients who were hospitalized after being diagnosed with COVID-19 in China. The data were analyzed with t tests, one-way ANOVA and multivariable logistic regression analysis. Results: The results showed that the prevalence of PTSD, depression and anxiety was 13.2, 21.0 and 16.4%, respectively. Hospitalized patients who were more impacted by negative news reports, had greater exposure to traumatic experiences, and had lower levels of perceived social support reported higher PTSD, depression and anxiety. Conclusions: Effective professional mental health services should be designed to support the psychological wellbeing of hospitalized patients, especially those who have severe disease, are strongly affected by negative news and have high levels of exposure to trauma. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As an important pragmatic concept in linguistics, information structure differentiates focused/new information from background/given information. The present study investigated how the correspondence between focus (new information) and accentuation influences language processing at different positions (clause-medial vs. clause-final) of sentences in a semantic comprehension task. We found that focus elicited a larger negativity (at the clause-medial position) and a following positivity (at both the cause-medial and clause-final positions) compared to non-focus, indicating that listeners spend more cognitive resource to integrate new, focused information into discourse. Additionally, missing accent on focus elicited a negative effect, while superfluous accent on background evoked a positive effect at the late position. Furthermore, additional focus and accentuation effects were observed only at the clause-final position. The different ERP effects in the two positions suggest that listeners make online use of all available cues to process focus and accentuation in a predictive way. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The degree to which cognitive resources are shared in the processing of musical pitch and lexical tones remains uncertain. Testing Mandarin amusics on their categorical perception of Mandarin lexical tones may provide insight into this issue. In the present study, a group of 15 amusic Mandarin speakers identified and discriminated Mandarin tones presented as continua in separate blocks. The tonal continua employed were from a high-level tone to a mid-rising tone and from a high-level tone to a high-falling tone. The two tonal continua were made in the contexts of natural speech and of nonlinguistic analogues. In contrast to the controls, the participants with amusia showed no improvement for discrimination pairs that crossed the classification boundary for either speech or nonlinguistic analogues, indicating a lack of categorical perception. The lack of categorical perception of Mandarin tones in the amusic group shows that the pitch deficits in amusics may be domain-general, and this suggests that the processing of musical pitch and lexical tones may share certain cognitive resources and/or processes (Patel , , ). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

[Display omitted] • An interpretable hierarchical neural network for long-term water quality forecast. • A multiple attention mechanism to explore the long-term information of history. • A doubly residual connection TCN module to screen each layer's sampled information. Accurate forecast of water quality parameters is important for water quality monitoring and water quality regulation. However, the increasingly complex marine water environment makes improving the accuracy of forecasting water quality parameters challenging. In this study, a new interpretable deep learning method for forecasting water quality parameters is proposed. This method inputs the decomposed feature data into different stacks for data processing. Several parallel structure stacks are designed to capture the features of decomposed sequences. A new attention mechanism based on the combination of recent and long-term historical data is proposed, as well as an enhanced double residual temporal convolutional network block module. In this study, dissolved oxygen data obtained from eight marine ranches along the coast of Shandong Peninsula are used. The results showed that the MAE, RMSE and MAPE of our model Forecast results were 33.48%, 33.33% and 29.26% lower than those of other algorithms on average and R 2 was 6% higher on average. Our model exhibited the highest degree of fitting between the predicted value and the observed value, with the best linear fitting and the smallest error. Our work provides a valuable framework for investigating the cause and influence of water quality Forecast in marine ranches. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The presence of an intonational phrase boundary is often marked by three major acoustic cues: pause, final lengthening, and pitch reset. The present study investigates how these three acoustic cues are weighted in the perception of intonational phrase boundaries in two experiments. Sentences that contained two intonational phrases with a critical boundary between them were used as the experimental stimuli. The roles of the three acoustic cues at the critical boundary were manipulated in five conditions. The first condition featured none of the acoustic cues. The following three conditions featured only one cue each: pause, final lengthening, and pitch reset, respectively. The fifth condition featured both pause duration and pre-final lengthening. A baseline condition was also included in which all three acoustic cues were preserved intact. Listeners were asked to detect the presence of the critical boundaries in Experiment 1 and judge the strength of the critical boundaries in Experiment 2. The results of both experiments showed that listeners used all three acoustic cues in the perception of prosodic boundaries. More importantly, these acoustic cues were weighted differently across the two experiments: Pause was a more powerful perceptual cue than both final lengthening and pitch reset, with the latter two cues perceptually equivalent; the effect of pause and the effects of the other two acoustic cues were not additive. These results suggest that the weighting of acoustic cues contributes significantly to the perceptual differences of intonational phrase boundary.

Nongestational choriocarcinomas have been observed in the ovaries but rarely the uterus in postmenopausal women. Choriocarcinomas of gestational and nongestational origin have distinct prognoses but cannot be distinguished with routine histologic examination. We report a case of nongestational uterine choriocarcinoma in a 62-year-old Chinese woman that was confirmed with short tandem repeat analysis., (Copyright © 2014 Mosby, Inc. All rights reserved.)

An event-related brain potentials (ERP) experiment was carried out to investigate the role of prosodic prominence and prosodic boundary as well as their interaction in spoken discourse comprehension. Chinese question-answer dialogues were used as stimuli. The answer sentence is a syntactically ambiguous phrase, with a prosodic phrase boundary at the immediate left side of the critical word in the carrier sentence. Meanwhile, the critical word was accented. We manipulated the question context while keeping the speech signal of the answer sentence constant, which gives rise to congruent and in-congruent question-answer pairs with violations of prosodic prominence, prosodic boundary, or both. Results showed that prosodic prominence violation evoked a frontal-central negative effect (270-510ms), while prosodic boundary violation elicited a broadly distributed negative effect (270-510ms and 510-660ms). The effect of combined prominence-boundary violation was similar to that of the single prosodic prominence violation. Furthermore, there was an interaction between the effect of prosodic prominence violation and the effect of prosodic boundary violation in the window latency of 270-510ms, which suggests an immediate interaction between the semantic processing of prosodic prominence and the syntactic processing of prosodic boundary during spoken language comprehension. In addition, a detailed analysis of the obtained negativity effects showed that the size of the negative effect to the prosodic boundary violation was increased by an additional prosodic prominence violation, but the size of the negative effect to the prosodic prominence violation was not affected by an additional prosodic boundary violation, which suggests an asymmetry between the effects of prosodic prominence and prosodic boundary., (Copyright © 2010 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.)

Findings concerning the relation between dyslexia and speech perception deficits are inconsistent in the literature. This study examined the relation in Chinese children using a more homogeneous sample-children with phonological dyslexia. Two experimental tasks were administered to a group of Chinese children with phonological dyslexia, a group of age-matched control children, and a group of adults. In addition to a categorical perception task, a selective adaptation task was carried out. The results indicated that Chinese children with phonological dyslexia were less consistent than both the child and adult control groups in identifying stimuli within a given phonetic category. Furthermore, they did not show any significant adaptation effects in the selective adaptation task even when the adapting stimulus was identical to an endpoint stimulus in the test continuum. It seems that children with phonological dyslexia have a general deficiency in representing and processing speech stimuli.