Animacy interactions with individual variability in sentence production and comprehension reveal similar lexically driven competitive processes.

Sentence production and comprehension both draw on linguistic knowledge, but current research is unclear on whether these fundamental language tasks involve similar or distinct competitive processes. Previous studies suggest that production and comprehension may involve similar conflict resolution processes, but that production may additionally recruit motor-related conflict not necessarily present in comprehension. To examine these possibilities, we combined an experimental animacy-driven manipulation eliciting difficulty in separate production and comprehension tasks with an examination of how this manipulation interacted with individual variability in motor-related and lexicosemantic conflict resolution performance beyond vocabulary measures. We reasoned that a different pattern of interactions for production and comprehension would point to distinct processes across these tasks, whereas interactions with the same individual performance task would indicate similar conflict-related processes. We found that beyond a significant role of vocabulary, only a measure of context-dependent lexical ambiguity resolution interacted with the animacy manipulation in the production and the comprehension task. These findings suggest a role for linguistic knowledge and similar lexically driven competitive processes in both sentence production and comprehension. Alongside current computational models, these results raise the possibility that despite different task demands, some production and comprehension competitive processes are not entirely distinct from one another nor separable from lexical knowledge. Implications for current views on the relationship between sentence production and comprehension are discussed. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2022 APA, all rights reserved).

Animacy-induced conflict in sentence production and comprehension from late childhood to adolescence.

Some animacy configurations elicit parallel semantic interference in adult production and comprehension; for example, phrases with similar animate nouns like the man that the girl is hugging are more difficult than phrases like the doll that the girl is hugging. Yet little is known about how this interference manifests in development, particularly, beyond early childhood. Because frontal brain maturation and cognitive control improvements are known to occur across late childhood and adolescence, we investigated (a) how animacy-induced difficulty in production and comprehension vary with age throughout this period and (b) whether control processes reflected in the backward digit span (BDS) test uniquely explained these differences besides other language measures. In separate tasks, participants (8- to 15-year-old children; N = 91) heard auditory descriptions of depicted characters, produced characters' descriptions, and completed BDS, vocabulary, and reading experience tests. Results indicated that, as in adults, animacy modulated performance in production and comprehension across all ages. The animacy modulation interacted with age in production but not in comprehension, suggesting age-related animacy differences in production but relatively stable differences in comprehension despite processing speed improvements. Importantly, these age-related production differences were also modulated by the BDS scores; only participants with higher BDS scores displayed age-related animacy differences. Together, these results indicate that comprehension and production develop at different rates and that the development of BDS performance interacts with age-dependent changes in sentence planning from late childhood to adolescence. More generally, the study highlights tasks' disparities to be explained by cognitive and developmental models of language.

Associations of imbalance of intestinal flora with severity of disease, inflammatory factors, adiponectin, and vascular endothelial function of hypertension patients.

To explore the relationship between the severity of hypertension and the imbalanced intestinal flora, inflammatory factors, adiponectin (ADPN) and vascular endothelial function in primary hypertension patients. According to the grading criteria for hypertension, in total of 60 patients with primary hypertension in our hospital from April to July, 2020 were divided into Grade 1 group (n = 20), Grade 2 group (n = 20), and Grade 3 group (n = 20). The feces of the research subjects were collected to extract the deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA) and detect its composition of intestinal flora. Subsequently, the peripheral blood was collected to determine the changes in inflammatory factors interleukin-2 (IL-2), IL-4, tumor necrosis factor-α (TNF-α) and IL-1ß, serum immunoglobulin G (IgG) and IgM, ADPN and vascular endothelial function-related endothelin-1 (ET-1), nitric oxide (NO), vascular endothelial growth factor (VEGF), and intercellular adhesion molecule-1 (ICAM-1). There were no significant differences in the gender, age, and body mass index (BMI), the proportion of smokers, diet habit, probiotics and antihypertensive medication use, and number of diabetic cases among groups (p > 0.05). We found an inverse association between blood pressure measures and microbial diversity, in particular microbial richness (p < 0.05). Among the four major kinds of intestinal flora, the composition of firmicutes (p < 0.05) and bacteroidetes (p < 0.05) showed obvious differences among the three groups, and they had consistent trends with the changes in the abundance of firmicutes and bacteroidetes. Intestinal flora imbalance is closely related to the severity of hypertension, inflammatory factors, ADPN, and vascular endothelial function.

Value of shear wave elastography in the diagnosis and evaluation of cervical cancer.

The aim of the present study was to explore the value of shear wave elastography (SWE) in the differential diagnosis of cervical disease and to evaluate the infiltration of cervical cancer. A total of 40 inpatients with cervical cancer, 40 inpatients with cervical benign lesion and 40 healthy volunteers encountered between October 2014 and January 2017 were enrolled. All patients and volunteers underwent conventional ultrasound (US) and SWE examinations. The malignancy and the size (including long, tranverse and anteroposterior diameter) of the lesion were assessed on US. The elastic score, strain ratio, shear wave speed (SWS) and the size of lesions were determined on SWE. Infiltration of the uterus and vaginal vault were also evaluated on US and SWE. The SWS values of cervical cancers, cervical benign lesions and normal cervixes groups were compared. The results suggested that the optimal cut-off elasticity score for predicting cervical cancers was 3 points. The strain ratio between the cervical cancers and the cervical benign lesions exhibited a significant difference (P<0.01). The mean value of SWS for cervical cancers was significantly higher than that of cervical benign lesions and normal cervix (P<0.05). Regarding the lesion size and volume, SWE and pathological measurements were larger than those determined by US (P<0.05 for each). The lesion volume on SWE and pathological measurements exhibited no significant difference (P>0.05). Compared to the pathological diagnosis of focal infiltration of uterus and vaginal vault, the diagnostic accuracy of SWE was higher than that of US. In conclusion, SWE may be used to differentiate between cervical benign lesions and cervical cancers. The elastic score, strain ratio and SWS of cervical cancers were higher than those of cervical benign lesions. Furthermore, SWE is able to evaluate the infiltration of cervical cancer.

An alternative type of fullerene products from the reaction of [60]fullerene with alkoxides and subsequent derivatization.

Reaction of [60]fullerene with freshly prepared RCH(2)CH(2)ONa/RCH(2)CH(2)OH (R = H, Me, Et, Ph) in anhydrous toluene in the presence of air unexpectedly afforded fullerene products with a C(60)-fused tetrahydrofuran ring skeleton and an acetal moiety, which could be further transformed into C(60)-fused dihydrofurans, tolyl-substituted C(60)-fused tetrahydrofuran, and methanofullerenes bearing a formyl group by boron trifluoride etherate. Possible reaction mechanisms are proposed to explain the formation of different fullerene products.