Search

This study used the lexicality effects on N400 to investigate orthographic processing in children with developmental dyslexia. Participants performed a Go/No-Go semantic judgment task; three types of stimuli—real characters (RC), pseudocharacters (PC), and noncharacters (NC)—were embedded in No-Go trials. Two types of lexicality effects (RC vs. NC and PC vs. NC) were used to reflect the sensitivity to Chinese orthographic knowledge. In typical developing children, NC elicited a more negative N400 in frontal sites and a less negative N400 in bilateral posterior sites than RC and PC. The reversed lexicality effects in anterior and posterior sites support the dual-mechanism for lexical retrieval. Children with dyslexia revealed a more negative N400 for NC in frontal sites compared with RC, suggesting that they remained sensitive to orthographic familiarity. However, no difference between NC and PC was observed, suggesting a weakness in capturing Chinese orthographic knowledge in children with dyslexia.

The effect of aldosterone on vascular smooth muscle cell function is still unclear. One method to measure vascular smooth muscle cell function is endothelial-independent vascular dilation, for which the key factor is sarcoplasmic reticulum calcium adenosine triphosphatase (SERCA).Our objective was to investigate the effect of aldosterone on vascular smooth muscle cell function and SERCA regulation.We prospectively analyzed 35 patients with primary aldosteronism (PA; 32 patients with aldosterone-producing adenoma and three patients with idiopathic hyperaldosteronism) and 30 patients with essential hypertension (EH) who were enrolled as the control group. Flow and nitrate-mediated dilation were performed in both groups and 1 year after adrenalectomy in the patients with aldosterone-producing adenoma. In addition, we investigated the effect of aldosterone on SERCA regulation in human aortic smooth muscle cells.This study took place in an academic clinical research center.Participants included 35 patients with PA and 30 patients with EH.Adrenalectomy was undertaken in patients with aldosterone-producing adenoma.The PA patients had significantly lower flow-mediated dilation (FMD) and nitrate-mediated dilation (NMD) values than the patients with EH (FMD: 13 ± 6 vs 16 ± 4; NMD: 16 ± 6 vs 19 ± 5; both P.05). FMD/NMD were significantly correlated with log 24 hour-urine aldosterone (FMD: r = -0.287, P = .048; NMD: r = -0.402, P = .005) but not blood pressure. The impaired FMD and NMD values were significantly restored 1 year after adrenalectomy (FMD: 11 ± 4 to 19 ± 7; NMD: 15 ± 6 to 21 ± 6; both P.01). Under confocal microscopy, aldosterone was shown to suppress the expression of SERCA2a of human aortic smooth muscle cells. Aldosterone significantly suppressed the expression of SERCA2a from 10(-8) M in mRNA and protein levels. This suppression was through down-regulation of mineralocorticoid receptor dependent mitochondrial transcription factors A and B2.Aldosterone impairs vascular smooth muscle cell function and suppresses SERCA 2a expression.

This study investigated how phonological saliency, deviance size, and maturation affect mismatch responses (MMRs) in early infancy. MMRs to Mandarin vowels and initial consonants were measured using a multi-deviant oddball paradigm in adults, newborns, and 6-month-olds. The vowel condition consisted of Mandarin syllable da as the standard, du as the large deviant and di as small deviant. As for initial consonant condition, we took syllable ba as standard, ga as large deviant, and ba as small deviant. While adults showed typical mismatch negativities (MMNs), newborns demonstrated broad positive MMRs (P-MMRs) to both initial consonants and vowels. For 6-month-olds, deviance size affected the polarity of MMRs to vowels. The large deviant du/da contrast elicited an adult-like MMN, while the small deviant di/da contrast elicited a P-MMR. Initial consonant changes elicited only P-MMRs, regardless of deviance size. In summary, MMRs to vowels switched from P-MMR at birth to MMN at 6 months. However, the polarity transition was not found for MMRs to initial consonants. The developmental trajectories of MMRs to vowels and initial consonants further support the phonological saliency hypothesis.

The present study investigates how age, phonological saliency, and deviance size affect the presence of mismatch negativity (MMN) and positive mismatch response (P-MMR). This work measured the auditory mismatch responses to Mandarin lexical tones, initial consonants, and vowels in 4- to 6-year-old preschoolers using the multiple-deviant oddball paradigm. The data showed the coexistence of MMN and P-MMR in the same age group when responding to the three types of syllabic features in Mandarin. The transition from a predominantly positive response to a predominantly negative response supported the multiple MMN mechanisms. Congruent with the phonological saliency hypothesis and the phonetic acquisition order of Mandarin in behavioral studies, for the compulsory elements of Mandarin syllables, lexical tones, and vowels, the larger deviants elicited adult-like MMNs, whereas the smaller deviants elicited P-MMRs. The optional elements of the Mandarin syllables, the initial consonant, only elicited P-MMR in preschoolers. These findings suggest that MMN and P-MMR index different functional characteristics and may provide information on when and how children's speech perception becomes automatic at different developmental stages.

Item difficulty is a key parameter for test items. Learning this parameter in an IRT-based context with statistical methods or machine learning-based approaches is a typical research topic in the field of educational assessment. This paper reports an exploration of using a betting mechanism to assess test takers' intrinsic uncertainty about the answers to a special type of Chinese cloze tests. Uncertainty about the answers influences test takers' behavior in betting on the candidate answers, so statistics of betting behavior serve as a conceivable incarnation of item difficulties. The proposed approach is innovative in that there is no known previous work that employed economics-based methods for this educational data mining problem. The proposed method was evaluated with more than a thousand realistic test items and with 48 native speakers of Chinese. Experimental results show encouraging connections between betting behavior and item difficulty. More specifically, we observed that participants may even lose money in very difficult tests, and they spent longer time in more challenging tests.

This study examined how maturation and the size of deviance affect the development of mismatch responses to Mandarin lexical tones by a multi-deviant oddball paradigm with both large deviant T1/T3 and small deviant T2/T3 pairs in newborns and 6-month-olds. The T1/T3 pair elicited a positive mismatch response (P-MMR) at birth but an adult-like mismatch negativity (MMN) at 6 months of age. For the T2/T3 pair, no significant MMR was seen in newborns, whereas a P-MMR was found when infants are 6 months old. Results suggest that the developmental trajectories of MMRs are dependent on the neural maturation and the discriminability of tonal changes.

We present integrated services for playing and building games for learning Chinese characters. This work is unique on two aspects: (1) students play games that are designed based on psycholinguistic principles and (2) teachers compile the games with software tools that are supported by sublexical information in Chinese. Players of the games experience and learn the grapheme-morpheme relationships underlying the writings and pronunciations of Chinese characters. Both visual and audio stimuli are employed to enhance the learning effects in the games. The software tools, utilizing structural knowledge about Chinese characters, offer instrumental information to facilitate the compilation of games. Preliminary studies with 116 participating students, in an elementary school in Taipei, showed that students who were given a one-month period to play the games improved their response time in naming tasks for reading Chinese characters. In addition, evaluation of the authoring tools by 20 native speakers of Chinese indicated that using the tools significantly improved the efficiency of preparing the games and the quality of the resulting games.

The aim of this study was to determine the relationship between mesothelin and clinical pathological characteristics and whether mesothelin can be used as a biomarker for the detection and prognosis of epithelial ovarian carcinoma, or not.Pre-operative mesothelin and CA125 levels from normal populations, patients with benign ovarian tumors and patients with ovarian carcinomas were measured. The histopathological characteristics and serum meosthelin, and CA125 levels influencing clinical outcome were evaluated comparatively.Mesothelin levels were higher in cancer patients than in those with benign ovarian tumors or in normal populations. Mesothelin, also significantly increased from early to advanced stages. Elevated mesothelin before therapy and advanced stage, revealed poorer overall survival (OS) for cancer patients. Elevated mesothelin before therapy also revealed poorer OS in cancer patients with optimal debulking surgery and in advanced-stage cancer patients.Mesothelin might be a new tumor marker for the differential diagnosis of epithelial ovarian carcinoma and a prognostic factorfor the outcome of epithelial ovarian carcinoma patients.

Background/aim: Primary aldosteronism (PA) patients are correlated to higher cardiovascular events, endothelial function, and altered cardiac structure. Macrophage-mediated low grade inflammation plays important role of aldosterone-induced myocardial and vascular fibrosis. However, theeffect of aldosterone on macrophage movementis still unclear. Methods: We investigated the effect of aldosterone on macrophage movement and its mechanism. We used THP-1 as cell model of macrophage, and transwell assay to evaluate the migration and infiltration of cell. Two periods (16 hour and 48 hour) wereused to evaluate the migration and infiltration of macrophage. Results: Aldosterone increased THP-1 migration and infiltrationsince 10−8 M at 48 hours but not 16 hours. Aldosterone induced both galectin-3 and IL-6 production in THP-1 cell. In contrast, aldosterone does not affect the production of matrix metalloproteinase-2 and tissue inhibitor of metalloproteinase-1in THP-1. The increased migration and infiltrationby aldosterone was inhibited partially by IL-6 siRNA but not galectin-3 siRNA. Aldosterone also induced Rho-ROCK up-regulation but also partially inhibited by IL-6 siRNA. The aldosterone induced cell migration and infiltration was blocked by Y27632 (Rho-ROCK inhibitor). Conclusions: Aldosterone increased microphage migration and infiltration. The process was partially involved IL-6/Rho-ROCK pathway.

Purpose: Patients with primary aldosteronism (PA) are associated with increased myocardial fibrosis. Galectin-3 is one of the most important mediators between macrophage activation and myocardial fibrosis. Our objective was to investigate aldosterone induced galectin-3 secretion and the association between galectin-3 and myocardial fibrosis in cell and human study. Methods: We investigated the possible molecular mechanism of aldosterone to induce galectin-3 secretion in THP-1 cell and the possible effect on fibroblast. Further, we conducted a prospective clinical study to evaluate the relation between plasma galectin-3 level and myocardial fibrosis (measured by cyclic variation of integrated backscatter (CVIBS)) in patients with aldosterone producing adenoma (APA) and patients with essential hypertension (EH). Repeated measurement was performed in APA patents one year after adrenalectomy. Result: Aldosterone induced gelactin-3 secretion in the THP-1 cell and the pathway was through the mineralocorticoid receptor. The induced secretion occurs via the PI3K/Akt pathway, and through the NF-κB transcription pathway. Furthermore, aldosterone induced galectin-3 expression enhanced fibrosis related factor expression in fibroblast.Patients with APA had a significant higher plasma galectin-3 level and lower CVIBS data than EH. The plasma galectin-3 level is significantly reversely correlated with CVIBS data. One year after adrenalectomy, the plasma galectin-3 level decreased and CVIBS data increased significantly in APA patients. Conclusion: Aldosterone induced galectin-3 formation in THP-1 cell and further increased myocardial fibrosis. These findings suggest galectin-3 plays an important role on the pathogenesis of aldosterone-induced myocardial fibrosis.