The influence of item-level contextual history on lexical and semantic judgments by children and adults.

Semantic diversity quantifies the similarity in the content of contexts a word has been experienced in. Four experiments investigated its effect on lexical and semantic judgments in 9- to 10-year-olds and adults. In Experiment 1, a cross-modal semantic judgment task, participants decided whether a visually presented word matched an audio definition. Both groups were slower to respond to words high in semantic diversity, and this effect was modulated by task demands. Experiment 2 used the same items but in a lexical-decision task. Children were faster to respond to words high in diversity but there was no effect in adults, failing to replicate previous work. Experiment 3 examined possible reasons for this, and Experiment 4 tested the effect of semantic diversity on lexical decision via secondary analysis of 2 large megastudies. Overall, the facilitative effect of semantic diversity on lexical decision was robust. Our findings show that contextual experience influences subsequent lexical processing, consistent with context inducing semantic representations that reflect continuities and gradations in meaning. These gradations are captured by semantic diversity, and in turn, this interacts with task demands to influence behavioral performance. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2021 APA, all rights reserved).

A randomized, double-blind, placebo-controlled trial of heparin and aspirin for women with in vitro fertilization implantation failure and antiphospholipid or antinuclear antibodies.

OBJECTIVE: To investigate whether heparin and low-dose aspirin increase the pregnancy rate in antiphospholipid antibody or antinuclear antibody-seropositive women with IVF implantation failure. DESIGN: A double-blind, randomized, transfer-by-transfer of fresh or cryopreserved embryos, crossover trial.A hospital infertility clinic and associated IVF service. PATIENT(S): Women seropositive for at least one antiphospholipid (APA), antinuclear (ANA), or beta(2) glycoprotein I autoantibody and >or=10 embryos transferred without achieving pregnancy (n = 143). INTERVENTION(S): Subcutaneous unfractionated heparin (5000 IU b.i.d.) and aspirin (100 mg daily) (158 transfers of 296 embryos) or placebo (142 transfers of 259 embryos) from the day of embryo transfer. MAIN OUTCOME MEASURE(S): Fetal heart per embryo transferred (implantation rate). RESULT(S): There was no significant difference in pregnancy rates or implantation rates between treated and placebo cycles; for example, fetal hearts per embryo transferred implantation rates were 6.8% (20/296) and 8.5% (22/259), respectively, and the generalized estimating equation covariate adjusted relative pregnancy rate was 0.65 (95% confidence interval, 0.33-1.28). The implantation rate for seropositive trial participants (42/555, 7.6%) compared favorably with that for IVF implantation-failure patients continuing treatment outside the trial (147/3237, 4.5%). CONCLUSION(S): Heparin and aspirin did not improve pregnancy or implantation rates for APA-positive or ANA-positive patients with IVF implantation failure.