Unforced Revision in Processing Relative Clause Association Ambiguity in Japanese: Evidence Against Revision as Last Resort.

The current study tackles a long standing question of whether comprehenders perform structural revision when it is not forced by grammar or not. Using an eye-tracking reading paradigm, we addressed this issue by making use of global structural ambiguity in Japanese. Our results show that comprehenders initially associate a relative clause with the first potential head noun and that they revise this analysis when the second noun is lexico-semantically possible as the relative clause head, but do not when it is impossible. The results are incompatible with the Revision as Last Resort hypothesis. Instead, they support the parsing with unforced revision that is immediately sensitive to lexical properties. We argue that our results cannot be accounted for by serial modular processing models but that they can be explained by ranked-parallel interactive processing models. Furthermore, we propose that head-finality is a key factor involved in the availability of unforced revision.

[Chemotherapy-Induced Reactivation of Hepatitis B in Recurrent Breast Cancer - A Case Report].

It is known that reactivation of hepatitis B virus (HBV) is an important complication of chemotherapy, and it can cause fatally severe hepatitis in some cases. A 72-year-old woman, underwent radical mastectomy for left breast cancer at the age of 35 years. In January 2008, local recurrence and multiple bone metastases occurred, and chemotherapy was started. S-1(80 mg/day for 28 consecutive days followed by a 14-day rest period)was used as the fourth-line of treatment, but grade 3 anemia(Hb 6.6 g/dL)developed at the end of seventh course. Therefore, blood transfusion was performed. Five months after transfusion, blood tests showed elevated liver function markers and HBs antigen positivity, so post-transfusion hepatitis was suspected. However, it was diagnosed as de novo hepatitis caused by reactivation of HBV from occult infection, as the patient's stored sample before the transfusion tested positive for HBV-DNA. The hepatitis did not become severe, but it was a persistent infection with continued administration of a nucleoside analog. Identifying the reactivation risk and taking appropriate action based on guidelines are necessary for administering chemotherapy safely to patients with occult HBV infection.

Lexically independent representation of the monotransitive structure.

Many previous studies have shown that syntactic priming is stronger when the verb is repeated between the prime and target sentences. This phenomenon is known as the lexical boost and has been interpreted as evidence for a direct association between individual verbs and structural information. However, in previous experiments, we found no lexical boost with the monotransitive structure and argued that this structure is not associated with individual lexical items. The results of these experiments instead suggested that monotransitive structure information is represented at the category-general level. The current study examined whether this finding generalises to verbs that can take either a monotransitive structure or a ditransitive structure. Our results demonstrated a lexical boost with double object ditransitive primes but not with monotransitive primes. This suggests that the monotransitive structure is indeed represented at the category-general level across different classes of verbs, whereas other structures are represented at the lexically specific level.

L2 Learners Do Not Ignore Verb's Subcategorization Information in Real-Time Syntactic Processing.

This study addressed the question of whether L2 learners are able to utilize verb's argument structure information in online structural analysis. Previous L2 research has shown that L2 learners have difficulty in using verb's intransitive information to guide online syntactic processing. This is true even though L2 learners have grammatical knowledge that is correct and similar to that of native speakers. In the present study, we contrasted three hypotheses, the initial inaccessibility account, the intransitivity overriding account, and the fuzzy subcategorization frame account, to investigate whether L2 learner's knowledge of intransitive verbs is in fact ignored in L2 online structural analysis. The initial inaccessibility account and the fuzzy subcategorization frame account predicted that L2 learners cannot access intransitivity information in building syntactic structures in any situation. The intransitivity overriding account predicted that intransitivity information is accessed in L2 parsing, but this process is overridden by the strong transitivity preference when a verb is followed by a noun phrase. Importantly, the intransitivity overriding account specifically predicted that L2 learners would be able to use intransitive information in online syntactic processing when a noun phrase does not appear immediately following a verb. We tested the three accounts in an eye-tracking reading experiment using filler-gap dependency structures. We manipulated verb's transitivity information and lexically based plausibility information and tested English native speakers as a control L1 group (N = 29) and Japanese-English L2 participants (N = 32). The results showed that L2 learners as well as native speakers processed sentences differently depending on the subcategorization information of the verb, and adopted transitive analysis only when the verb was optionally transitive, providing support for the intransitivity overriding. The results further demonstrated that L2 learners had strong expectations for the transitive structure, which is consistent with the view proposed by the hyper-active gap-filling hypothesis. In addition, the results showed that the semantic mismatch in the incorrect transitive analysis facilitated native speaker's processing but caused difficulty for L2 learners. Together, the current study provides evidence that L2 learners use intransitive information of the verbs to guide their structural analysis when there are no overriding constraints.

Radiological changes in the formation of Brodie's abscess by sequential magnetic resonance imaging: a case report.

Brodie's abscess is a relatively rare subacute form of osteomyelitis. Early diagnosis is challenging because of its insidious onset and vague symptoms. Magnetic resonance imaging is helpful in the diagnosis of Brodie's abscess; however, to date, no study has described the imaging findings of this disease in the early stage. Here, we present the case of a 14 year-old boy with Brodie's abscess in the proximal tibia. The lesion initially presented as a bone marrow edema in the proximal metaphysis of the left tibia on MRI and was misinterpreted as a bone bruise. Further radiological examination was performed 1 month later; this revealed the formation of an abscess cavity, which suggested Brodie's abscess. The patient was referred to our hospital and underwent curettage and debridement, which led to the definitive diagnosis of Brodie's abscess on histopathological findings and bacterial culture. On careful retrospective evaluation, the initial radiological findings suggested a microabscess on the metaphyseal side of the growth plate and bone marrow edema spreading from the lesion to the epiphysis. These radiological changes could be reliable evidence proving that the metaphyseal side of the growth plate is the origin of Brodie's abscess. Moreover, bone marrow edema with suspected microabscess in the metaphysis of the long bones can be the initial stage of the formation of Brodie's abscess and should be carefully followed up.

MR Imaging of Mushroom-like Skin Adnexal Tumors in the Scalp: A Report of Two Cases.

Few studies had been published regarding imaging findings of skin adnexal tumors. We experienced two giant cases of them with a characteristic mushroom-like growth pattern. MRI showed a circumscribed mushroom-like shaped mass extruding from the subcutaneous tissue with microcystic lesions. Although differentiation between benignancy and malignancy may be difficult by radiological examinations, MRI may be helpful to identify its origin and differentiate soft tissue tumors with skin adnexal tumors in having these imaging findings.

An Extra Cue Is Beneficial for Native Speakers but Can Be Disruptive for Second Language Learners: Integration of Prosody and Visual Context in Syntactic Ambiguity Resolution.

It has long been debated whether non-native speakers can process sentences in the same way as native speakers do or they suffer from certain qualitative deficit in their ability of language comprehension. The current study examined the influence of prosodic and visual information in processing sentences with a temporarily ambiguous prepositional phrase ("Put the cake on the plate in the basket") with native English speakers and Japanese learners of English. Specifically, we investigated (1) whether native speakers assign different pragmatic functions to the same prosodic cues used in different contexts and (2) whether L2 learners can reach the correct analysis by integrating prosodic cues with syntax with reference to the visually presented contextual information. The results from native speakers showed that contrastive accents helped to resolve the referential ambiguity when a contrastive pair was present in visual scenes. However, without a contrastive pair in the visual scene, native speakers were slower to reach the correct analysis with the contrastive accent, which supports the view that the pragmatic function of intonation categories are highly context dependent. The results from L2 learners showed that visually presented context alone helped L2 learners to reach the correct analysis. However, L2 learners were unable to assign contrastive meaning to the prosodic cues when there were two potential referents in the visual scene. The results suggest that L2 learners are not capable of integrating multiple sources of information in an interactive manner during real-time language comprehension.

Breast-conserving surgery using supine magnetic resonance imaging in breast cancer patients receiving neoadjuvant chemotherapy.

BACKGROUND: Success of breast-conserving surgery (BCS) following neoadjuvant chemotherapy (NAC) depends on accurate assessment of the initial lesion. We developed a new procedure (NIPR) in which initial naked magnetic resonance images are projected onto the skin before BCS. METHODS: Thirty-five breast cancer patients underwent supine oblique MRI of the operative area. In 20 DCIS patients, the metallic clips were reproduced by projection on the skin using NIPR, and discrepancies between the projection site and clip were measured on X-rays. Fifteen patients (T1;3,T2;8,T3;4 cases) treated with NIPR were compared to 20 (T1;5 , T2;15 cases) treated using the conventional method with regard to excision area and additional excision rate of BCS after NAC. RESULTS: The median discrepancy (linear distance) was 2.6 mm. NIPR significantly reduced the excision area and additional excision rate in T1 and T2 compared to the conventional method (P<0.05). CONCLUSIONS: NIPR is a reliable technique for BCS following NAC with significant reductions in excision area and additional excision rate and superior cosmetic results.

Syntactic priming in comprehension: the role of argument order and animacy.

Two visual-world eye-movement experiments investigated the nature of syntactic priming during comprehension--specifically, whether the priming effects in ditransitive prepositional object (PO) and double object (DO) structures (e.g., "The wizard will send the poison to the prince/the prince the poison?") are due to anticipation of structural properties following the verb (send) in the target sentence or to anticipation of animacy properties of the first postverbal noun. Shortly following the target verb onset, listeners looked at the recipient more (relative to the theme) following DO than PO primes, indicating that the structure of the prime affected listeners' eye gazes on the target scene. Crucially, this priming effect was the same irrespective of whether the postverbal nouns in the prime sentences did ("The monarch will send the painting to the president") or did not ("The monarch will send the envoy to the president") differ in animacy, suggesting that PO/DO priming in comprehension occurs because structural properties, rather than animacy features, are being primed when people process the ditransitive target verb.

Angiosarcoma arising in the breast following breast-conserving surgery with radiation for breast carcinoma.

We report a case of angiosarcoma arising in the breast following breast-conserving surgery with radiation therapy for breast carcinoma. The patient, a 49-year-old postmenopausal woman, had undergone breast-conserving surgery for invasive ductal carcinoma of the left breast (pT2 pN0 M0 Stage IIA). Adjuvant radiotherapy (50 Gy with a booster dose to the tumor bed of 10 Gy) was then performed for the residual breast tissue and the patient was treated with hormone therapy (tamoxifen, 20 mg daily) for 5 years. She presented with skin erosion with bleeding 10 years after the initial operation. Incisional biopsy revealed angiosarcoma of the breast, and total mastectomy was subsequently performed. The patient was the treated with chemotherapy (weekly paclitaxel, 80 mg/m2 x cycles) and has remained well without evidence of local or distant recurrence.

Development of multidrug resistance type I P-glycoprotein function during in vitro maturation of porcine oocyte.

The present study was performed to evaluate the expression and function of P-glycoprotein (P-gp) encoded the multidrug resistance type I (MDR1) gene, protecting from xenotoxics, in porcine oocyte during in vitro maturation. Cumulus-oocyte complexes (COCs) were cultured to obtain the germinal vesicle (GV), first metaphase and second metaphase (MII) oocytes. The P-gp function was assessed by means of the rhodamine 6G (R6G) efflux from oocytes with P-gp inhibitors such as verapamil and PSC-833. The MDR1 transcript was detected in the GV and MII oocytes by RT-PCR analysis using primer sets based on the human gene. P-gp inhibitors significantly blocked the R6G efflux from the MII oocytes, whereas the reagents were ineffective in the GV oocytes. The R6G efflux from oocytes was accelerated at the MII stage more than at the GV stage. Thus, the MDR1-type P-gp function is poor at the GV stage, but the function improves during oocyte maturation.

Progesterone regulation of the expression and function of multidrug resistance type I in porcine granulosa cells.

P-glycoprotein (P-gp) coded with the multidrug resistance type I (MDR1) is expressed in various normal tissues including ovaries and may function as detoxification and steroid transport. The present study was performed to analyze the expression and function of MDR1 in granulosa cells stimulated with FSH, LH, estradiol-17beta (E) and progesterone (P). The granulosa cells isolated from porcine ovarian follicles were cultured for 24h in a serum-supplemented medium, and then cultured for 48h with the hormones in a serum-free culture medium. MDR1 was highly expressed in large follicles and induced in cultured granulosa cells stimulated with LH as revealed by RT-PCR. Highly expressed MDR1 resulted in the increased P-gp activity. However, FSH had no effect. P significantly increased the MDR1 expression and P-gp activity in the cells stimulated with LH, whereas E had no stimulatory effect. Aminoglutethimide suppressed the MDR1 expression and P-gp activity, but which were completely restored by P. These results indicate that P participates in MDR1 expression and P-gp function of granulosa cells.

Dynamic enhanced MRI predicts chemosensitivity in breast cancer patients.

BACKGROUND: Primary chemotherapy for breast cancer is effective as postoperative adjuvant therapy. However, one of the critical disadvantages was a treatment delay for patients with progressive disease. The present study attempts to clarify quantitative parameters on MRI which can be used to predict the sensitivity to treatment in breast cancer patients. METHODS: The subjects consisted of 26 patients with invasive ductal breast cancer who received primary chemotherapy before surgery. The mean maximum tumor dimension was 3.3cm, and 21 cases had nodal involvements. Three cases demonstrated histological grade 3. Dynamic enhanced MRI was evaluated at three different time periods; prior to, in the midst of preoperative chemotherapy, and just before the initial operation. The signal intensity ratio (SIR) and early contrast uptake (ECU) were calculated, as well as the correlation between these dynamic data and the tumor reduction rates were analyzed retrospectively. P-values of less than 0.05 were considered to indicate statistically significant. RESULTS: Responders to chemotherapy had the significantly higher SIR and ECU values than non-responders (p=0.0454 and 0.0334, respectively). ECU value significantly decreased as tumor reduction by chemotherapy (p=0.0028). Pathological tumor dimension was significantly correlated with the tumor size estimated on presurgical MRI (p<0.0001). CONCLUSIONS: Our current series demonstrated the significant correlation between pretreatment MRI data and tumor reduction by chemotherapy in breast cancer patients. With these results, it seems possible to define good and non-responders prior to treatment.

It's Harder to Break a Relationship When you Commit Long.

Past research has produced evidence that parsing commitments strengthen over the processing of additional linguistic elements that are consistent with the commitments and undoing strong commitments takes more time than undoing weak commitments. It remains unclear, however, whether this so-called digging-in effect is exclusively due to the length of an ambiguous region or at least partly to the extra cost of processing these additional phrases. The current study addressed this issue by testing Japanese relative clause structure, where lexical content and sentence meaning were controlled for. The results showed evidence for a digging-in effect reflecting the strengthened commitment to an incorrect analysis caused by the processing of additional adjuncts. Our study provides strong support for the dynamical, self-organizing models of sentence processing but poses a problem for other models including serial two-stage models as well as frequency-based probabilistic models such as the surprisal theory.

Persistence of Initial Misanalysis With No Referential Ambiguity.

Previous research reported that in processing structurally ambiguous sentences comprehenders often preserve an initial incorrect analysis even after adopting a correct analysis following structural disambiguation. One criticism is that the sentences tested in previous studies involved referential ambiguity and allowed comprehenders to make inferences about the initial interpretation using pragmatic information, suggesting the possibility that the initial analysis persisted due to comprehenders' pragmatic inference but not to their failure to perform complete reanalysis of the initial misanalysis. Our study investigated this by testing locally ambiguous relative clause sentences in Japanese, in which the initial misinterpretation contradicts the correct interpretation. Our study using a self-paced reading technique demonstrated evidence for the persistence of the initial analysis with this structure. The results from an eye-tracking study further suggested that the phenomenon directly reflected the amount of support given to the initial incorrect analysis prior to disambiguating information: The more supported the incorrect main clause analysis was, the more likely comprehenders were to preserve the analysis even after the analysis was falsified. Our results thus demonstrated that the preservation of the initial analysis occurs not due to referential ambiguities but to comprehenders' difficulty to fully revise the highly supported initial interpretation.

Port site recurrence diagnosed by positron emission tomography after laparoscopic surgery for colon cancer.

Port site recurrence after laparoscopic surgery for colorectal cancer patients is a rare complication. We report a case of port site recurrence in a 46-year-old woman that was detected by positron emission tomography (PET) using 18[F]-fluoro-deoxyglucose (FDG). Surgical treatment consisted of laparoscopic ileo-cecal resection and lymph node dissection. At her nine months postoperative follow-up examination, her serum carcinoembryonic antigen (CEA) levels had raised to 15.8ng/mL. Although computed tomography and colonoscopic examination were performed, lung, liver and local recurrence in the colon were not detected. FDG-PET was then performed and detected a higher concentration of FDG at the port site in the abdominal wall. Port site recurrence was diagnosed clinically and surgical resection of tumor at the port site was performed. Pathology revealed a moderately differentiated adenocarcinoma diagnosed as port site recurrence. This case suggests that FDG-PET is an important examination for the detection of port site recurrence when serum CEA levels are rising and routinely radiographic examinations are unable to detect the site of recurrence.

Predicting the unbeaten path through syntactic priming.

A number of previous studies showed that comprehenders make use of lexically based constraints such as subcategorization frequency in processing structurally ambiguous sentences. One piece of such evidence is lexically specific syntactic priming in comprehension; following the costly processing of a temporarily ambiguous sentence, comprehenders experience less processing difficulty with the same structure with the same verb in subsequent processing. In previous studies using a reading paradigm, however, the effect was observed at or following disambiguating information and it is not known whether a priming effect affects only the process of resolving structural ambiguity following disambiguating input or it also affects the process before ambiguity is resolved. Using a visual world paradigm, the current study addressed this issue with Japanese relative clause sentences. Our results demonstrated that after experiencing the relative clause structure, comprehenders were more likely to predict the usually dispreferred structure immediately upon hearing the same verb. No compatible effect, in contrast, was observed on hearing a different verb. Our results are consistent with the constraint-based lexicalist view, which assumes the parallel activation of possible structural analyses at the verb. Our study demonstrated that an experience of a dispreferred structure activates the structural information in a lexically specific manner, leading comprehenders to predict another instance of the same structure on encountering the same verb.

The development of Japanese passive syntax as indexed by structural priming in comprehension.

A number of previous studies reported a phenomenon of syntactic priming with young children as evidence for cognitive representations required for processing syntactic structures. However, it remains unclear how syntactic priming reflects children's grammatical competence. The current study investigated structural priming of the Japanese passive structure with 5- and 6-year-old children in a visual-world setting. Our results showed a priming effect as anticipatory eye movements to an upcoming referent in these children but the effect was significantly stronger in magnitude in 6-year-olds than in 5-year-olds. Consistently, the responses to comprehension questions revealed that 6-year-olds produced a greater number of correct answers and more answers using the passive structure than 5-year-olds. We also tested adult participants who showed even stronger priming than the children. The results together revealed that language users with the greater linguistic competence with the passives exhibited stronger priming, demonstrating a tight relationship between the effect of priming and the development of grammatical competence. Furthermore, we found that the magnitude of the priming effect decreased over time. We interpret these results in the light of an error-based learning account. Our results also provided evidence for prehead as well as head-independent priming.

Immediate use of prosody and context in predicting a syntactic structure.

Numerous studies have reported an effect of prosodic information on parsing but whether prosody can impact even the initial parsing decision is still not evident. In a visual world eye-tracking experiment, we investigated the influence of contrastive intonation and visual context on processing temporarily ambiguous relative clause sentences in Japanese. Our results showed that listeners used the prosodic cue to make a structural prediction before hearing disambiguating information. Importantly, the effect was limited to cases where the visual scene provided an appropriate context for the prosodic cue, thus eliminating the explanation that listeners have simply associated marked prosodic information with a less frequent structure. Furthermore, the influence of the prosodic information was also evident following disambiguating information, in a way that reflected the initial analysis. The current study demonstrates that prosody, when provided with an appropriate context, influences the initial syntactic analysis and also the subsequent cost at disambiguating information. The results also provide first evidence for pre-head structural prediction driven by prosodic and contextual information with a head-final construction.