The Effect of Non-sentential Context Prosody on Homographs' Lexical Activation in Persian.

This study examines the effect of non-sentential context prosody pattern on lexical activation in Persian. For this purpose a questionnaire including target and non-target words is used. The target words are homographs with two possible stress patterns belonging to different syntactic categories. Participants are asked to read out the words aloud and note the first word that comes to their mind. The results show that by reading the target words, both meanings of the target words are activated in mind and the prosodic pattern of the non-sentential preceding context does not affect the activation of the other stress pattern meaning. This result suggests that the metrical prosodic pattern of non-sentential context is not a strong constraint to determine which meaning of the target word must be activated. The experiment also illustrates that the stress pattern used to read the target words does not necessarily matches the stress pattern of the target word which relates to the written word. These findings confirm Swinney (Verb Learn Verb Behav 18:645-665, 1979) and Elston-Güttler and Friederici's (J Mem Lang 52(2):256-283, 2005) finding that both meanings of an ambiguous word are accessed at the first stage. This study shows that in lack of semantic context, Persian natives behave homographs as ambiguous words and there is no bias towards preferring one meaning over another.

Insomnia in Iranian traditional medicine.

CONTEXT: Insomnia is one of the most prevalent sleep disorders characterized by sleep difficulty that impairs daily functioning and reduces quality of life. The burden of medical, psychiatric, interpersonal, and societal consequences of insomnia expresses the importance of diagnosing and treatment of insomnia. The aim of study was to investigate causes of insomnia from the viewpoint of Iranian traditional medicine. EVIDENCE ACQUISITION: In this review study, we searched insomnia in a few of the most famous ancient textbooks of Iranian traditional medicine from different centuries. This books includeThe Canon of Medicine by Avicenna (the first version of Beirut), Zakhire Kharazmshahi by Jurjani (the scanned version of Bonyade Farhang-e Iran), Malfaregh by Razes (the first version of Iran University of Medical Sciences), and Aqili's cure by Aqili (the first version of Iran University of Medical Sciences). RESULTS: This study found that in Iranian traditional medicine manuscripts, insomnia was called sahar and even though many factors induce insomnia, most of them act through causing brain dystemperament. CONCLUSIONS: The brain dystemperament is considered one of the main causes of insomnia and insomnia can be well managed with an organized line of treatment, by correcting the brain dystemperament through elimination of causes. This study helps to find new solutions to treat insomnia.