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This study aimed to investigate the application of ultrasound to the learning of swallowing maneuver. Forty non-dysphagic adults of both genders who were naive to the Mendelsohn maneuver participated in the study. They were randomly assigned to receive ultrasound or surface electromyography (sEMG) as biofeedback when acquiring the Mendelsohn maneuver. Thirty-eight subjects (n = 19) completed the Learning phase. Accuracy of executing the Mendelsohn maneuver was measured immediately (Post-training percentage accuracy) and one week post-training (Retention percentage accuracy). Whereas comparable numbers of training blocks were completed by the two groups (t(31.51) = 3.68, p = 0.330), the Ultrasound group attained significantly higher percentage accuracies than the sEMG group at both Post-training (t(28.88) = 4.04, p

Swallowing is a complex process that involves precise coordination among oral and pharyngeal structures, which is essential to smooth transition of bolus and adequate airway protection. Tongue base retraction and hyolaryngeal excursion are two significant swallowing movements, and their related events can be examined using ultrasound imaging, which is physically and radioactively non-invasive. The present study aimed to 1) establish the temporal sequences and timing of swallowing events identified using ultrasound imaging, and 2) investigate the variability of the above temporal sequences and 3) investigate the effect of bolus type on the variability of temporal sequences in non-dysphagic individuals. Forty-one non-dysphagic young adults of both genders (19 males and 22 females) participated in the study. Ultrasound images were acquired mid-saggitally at their submental region during swallowing of boluses with different volume (i.e. 5mL or 10mL) and consistencies (i.e. IDDSI Levels 0 and 4). Timing and sequence of six events 1) displacement onset (TBOn), 2) maximum displacement (TBMax) and 3) displacement offset of tongue base retraction (TBOff); and, 4) displacement onset (HBOn), 5) maximum displacement (HBMax) and 6) displacement offset of the hyoid bone excursion (HBOff) were extracted from the ultrasound images. Out of the 161 swallows, 85.7% follow a general sequence of HBOn < TBOn < HBMax < TBMax < HBOff < TBOff. Percentage adherence to six anticipated paired-event sequences was studied. Results suggested the presence of individual variability as adherence ranged from 75.8% to 98.1% in four of the anticipated sequences, leaving only two sequences (HBOn < TBMax and TBMax < HBOff) obligatory (i.e. 100% adherence). For non-obligatory sequences, it was found that bolus type may have an effect on the level of adherence. Findings of the present study lay the groundwork for future studies on swallowing using ultrasound imaging and also the clinical application of ultrasonography.

This study aimed to investigate the learning effectiveness of reading picture books with EMPATHICS elements using dialogic reading techniques in enhancing young children’s English language learning and creativity. EMPATHICS is an acronym of Emotion and Empathy, Meaning and Motivation, Perseverance, Agency and Autonomy, Time, Habits of Mind, Intelligences, Character Strengths, and Self Factors (Oxford, 2016). It adopted a quasi-experimental design, and 78 kindergarten children aged from 4 to 5 years old in a cluster group were randomly assigned to the experimental and control groups. Both groups read the same four picture books with their homeroom teachers, including two readers suggested in the curriculum and two picture books with enriched elements for 12 sessions over 8 weeks. A doubly multivariate analysis was used to measure the main time and group effects and the interaction effect on the performance of English receptive vocabulary, syntactic complexity, and verbal creativity of the two groups across three different times. There were significant differences only in the interactive effect on syntactic complexity. Children in the experimental condition gave responses with more complex syntactic structures. Significant time effects for receptive vocabulary, syntactic complexity, and verbal creativity were observed in all children. Reading enriched English texts better prepares children to creatively and effectively express themselves. This study extends previous research in two ways. First, this study is one of the few studies on the effectiveness of dialogic reading using EMPATHICS-enriched picture books among young language learners. Second, this study investigates the effects of dialogic teaching on English as a second language development in young children. The educational implications will be discussed.

While an enormous amount of research has been done on the deficient conversation skills in individuals with autism spectrum disorders (ASD), little is known about their performance on presuppositions, a domain of knowledge that is crucial for successful communication. This study investigated the comprehension of four types of presupposition, namely existential, factive, lexical and structural presuppositions, in school-age Cantonese-speaking children with and without ASD. A group of children with ASD (n = 21), mean age 8.8, was compared with a group of typically developing children (n = 106). Knowledge of presuppositions was evaluated based on children's ability to judge whether a given utterance was a correct presupposition of a preceding utterance. Children with ASD were found to show a deficit in the comprehension of presuppositions, even after controlling for differences in general language ability and non-verbal intelligence. The relative difficulty of the four types of presupposition did not differ between the two groups of children. The present findings provide new empirical evidence that children with ASD have a deficit in the comprehension of presuppositions. Future research should explore whether the deficit in the comprehension of presuppositions is related to the development of theory of mind skills in children with ASD.

Built on a previous finding that children with autism spectrum disorders (ASD) had difficulty comprehending presuppositions, a domain of knowledge which is crucial for successful communication, the present study investigated the comprehension of seven types of presupposition trigger - namely definite descriptions, factive predicates, change-of-state verbs, implicative verbs, iteratives, temporal clauses, and counterfactual conditionals - in Cantonese-speaking children with and without ASD. Twenty-seven children with ASD (mean age 9.07) were compared with 23 typically developing (TD) children matched on chronological age and 21 TD children matched on language ability (LA). Knowledge of presupposition triggers was evaluated on the basis of children's ability to judge whether a given utterance was a correct presupposition of a preceding utterance. Children with ASD were found to perform significantly worse than TD children matched on chronological age in comprehending the seven types of presupposition trigger, but they performed similarly to TD children matched on language ability. After the effects of chronological age, language ability, and non-verbal intelligence were controlled for, children with ASD were still found to show a deficit in comprehending the presupposition triggered by a temporal clause, relative to the two groups of TD children. Future studies should investigate the factors contributing to this specific deficit in children with ASD, such as executive functioning and theory of mind.

While it has been proposed, following relevance theory, that similes can be understood at a purely literal level on a par with literal statements, it remains unclear whether children with high-functioning autism spectrum disorders (HFASD) perform similarly to typically developing (TD) children in comprehending literal statements and similes. The present study investigated comprehension of literal statements and similes in Cantonese-speaking children with HFASD and TD children matched on both chronological age and verbal mental age. An utterance-picture matching task was devised to assess their comprehension of literal statements and similes in Cantonese. Overall results showed that Cantonese-speaking children with HFASD performed worse than TD children in comprehending literal statements and similes, and both groups showed more difficulty in comprehending similes than literal statements. After the effects of chronological age and verbal mental age were controlled for, no group difference was found between children with HFASD and TD children in comprehending literal statements, whereas the group difference in simile comprehension still existed, suggesting that children with HFASD showed deficits in comprehending similes relative to TD children. These findings challenge the proposal that similes can be understood at a purely literal level on a par with literal statements. Future studies should investigate the role of different aspects of language ability and different levels of theory-of-mind skills in comprehension of similes and metaphors in children with HFASD.

According to the study by Griffin and Bartholomew (1994), in Western context, the adult attachment internal working model was found to consist two components: (i) the self model, and (ii) the other model. The current study was grounded on Griffin's and Bartholomew's study to investigate the adult internal working model of self and other in Chinese context. Moreover, by confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) and item response theory (IRT), the Attachment Style Questionnaire (ASQ; Van Oudenhoven et al., 2001) was condensed to become the ASQ — Short Form. In addition, the four attachment prototypes, namely, secure, fearful-avoidant, preoccupied and dismissing as well as the adult internal working model of self and other were found to be present in Chinese culture.

Background. Oxford Cognitive Screen is designed for assessing cognitive functions of poststroke patients. This study was aimed to assess the psychometric properties of the Chinese (Putonghua) version of the Oxford Cognitive Screen-Putonghua (OCS-P) for use among poststroke patients without neglect. Methods. Expert review panel evaluated content validity of the Chinese-translated items. After pilot tested the translated items, the patients and healthy participants completed the OCS-P as well as the Montreal Cognitive Assessment (MoCA-ChiB) and Goldenberg’s test. A group of patients completed OCS-P for the second time within seven days. Data analyses included confirmatory factor analysis, item difficulty and item-total correlation, inter- and intrarater reliability, internal consistency, and between-group discrimination. Results. One hundred patients and 120 younger (n=60) or older (n=60) healthy participants completed all the tests. Modifications were required for items in the “Picture Naming”, “Orientation”, and “Sentence Reading” subscales. Confirmatory factor analysis revealed a three-factor structure for the OCS-P subscales. The internal consistency coefficients for the three identified test dimensions were 0.30 to 0.52 (Cronbach’s alpha). Construct validity coefficients between the OCS-P and MoCA-ChiB subscales were 0.45 < r < 0.79 (p<0.001) and the “Praxis” subscale of OCS-P and Goldenberg’s test was r=0.72 (p<0.001). The interrater reliability coefficients for the subscales were in general higher than the intrarater reliability coefficients. The “Picture Naming” and “Numerical Cognition” subscales were the most significant (p=0.003) for differentiating patient participants from their older healthy counterpart. Conclusion. This study generated satisfactory evidence on the content validity, substantive validity, construct validity, inter- and intrarater reliability, and known-group discrimination of the OCS-P. They support its application among poststroke patients who speak Putonghua. Future studies could review the existing five-dimension domains for improving its structural validity and internal consistency as well as generate evidence of the OCS-P for use among the poststroke patients with neglect.

This study investigated the contributions of different cognitive measures in predicting the three types of Chinese characters: regular phonetic compounds, irregular phonetic compounds and non-phonetic compounds. A total of 246 Grade 3 children (mean age = 8.63 yrs) were tested using a bunch of tasks including phonological processing, orthographic processing, morphological processing, rapid automatised naming and Chinese character naming. Results showed that advanced phonological processing skills contributed largely to regular phonetic compounds naming while other cognitive measures predict the naming of the other two types of characters. The results imply that the skills underlying the learning of regular phonetic compounds are different from that of irregular phonetic compounds and non-phonetic compounds, which are similar. Data from three poor readers whose performances pattern on naming different types of Chinese characters agreed with the pattern predicted by their performances in different cognitive tasks provide further support to the claim. Theoretical and pedagogical implications were discussed.

This is a short report of the investigation of the relationship between awareness of morphosyntactic structures in Chinese compound words and reading abilities on 268 fourth graders studying in three mainstream schools in Shenzhen. All children were assessed using reading and cognitive tasks including rapid automatized naming, phonological, orthographic and morphological awareness. A compound production task using pseudo compound words with different morphosyntactic structures in the first and second levels as stimuli was also conducted. Results of ANOVA indicated that main effect of first level morphosyntactic structures, main effect of second level morphosyntactic structures and interaction effects between the two were significant. Children's awareness of different morphosyntactic structures were affected by frequency of usage of individual morphosyntactic structures in the language. Results of hierarchical regression analyses revealed that the awareness of morphosyntactic structures in Chinese compound words is strongly associated with Chinese reading abilities. Theoretical and clinical implications were discussed.

The present study investigated the significance of auditory discrimination and the use of phonological and orthographic codes during the course of reading development in Chinese students who are deaf or hard of hearing (D/HH). In this study, the reading behaviors of D/HH students in 2 tasks— a task on auditory perception of onset rime and a synonym decision task—were compared with those of their chronological age–matched and reading level (RL)–matched controls. Cross-group comparison of the performances of participants in the task on auditory perception suggests that poor auditory discrimination ability may be a possible cause of reading problems for D/HH students. In addition, results of the synonym decision task reveal that D/HH students with poor reading ability demonstrate a significantly greater preference for orthographic rather than phonological information, when compared with the D/HH students with good reading ability and their RL-matched controls. Implications for future studies and educational planning are discussed.

With the rapid bloom in the use of Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs), the human lives have actually becoming more and more convenient. However, the unpleasant incident cyber-victimization (CV) has also appeared which means people would possibly become the victim of bully cases via the ICTs platforms. The objective of the present study is to examine the association between CV, personality traits, parental relationship and school climate, and some psychological consequences, which includes anxiety, depression, and self-esteem. In the study, questionnaires were disturbed with the year 1–4 undergraduate students studying in one Hong Kong University. There are 196 participants, which aged from 17 to 24 years old (M = 20.16, SD = 1.78) and the participants consisted of 58 male (29.6 %) and 138 female (70.4 %). The findings indicate that extraversion and psychoticism have positive association with CV, while agreeableness and student commitment have negative association with CV. The variables also significantly predict CV. Also, CV has positive relationship with and significantly predicts anxiety and depression. Intervention and preventive strategies would be discussed based in the research findings.

This study recruited 305 participants (237 females and 68 males) to complete a survey consisting of six scales in examining the structural relationships among English learning motivation, foreign language speaking anxiety, perceived English competence, willingness to communicate, English learning engagement, and motivational intensity in Hong Kong secondary students. First, English learning motivation (integrative, instrumental) negatively predicts foreign language speaking anxiety, which acts as a mediator between learning motivation and willingness to communicate (speak, read, write, and listen). Second, perceived English competence, which is also a significant mediator between learning motivation and willingness to communicate (speak, read, write, listen), could be predicted positively by learning motivation. This paper might be the first to investigate on the relationships between these constructs within the context of Hong Kong. It serves as a preliminary study to explore the casual relationships of HK secondary students’ psychological aspects in second language acquisition, while validating the instruments to be used in HK. On the pedagogical level, educators could understand the effects of students’ motivational orientations and eventually facilitate English learning through altering students’ affective factors.

The present study is conducted to investigate the impact of perceived parenting style on self-regulated learning and academic procrastination with mediating effect of achievement emotion. The sample of this study consisted of 218 undergraduates through convenient sampling from universities in Hong Kong. Parenting Authority Questionnaire, Academic Emotion Questionnaire, Motivated Strategies for Learning Questionnaire, and Procrastination Scale were used to collect the data. To analyze the data, reliability was investigated by Cronbach’s alpha. Correlation, path analysis, and structural equation modeling were also conducted. Result found that perceived parenting style is significantly associated with achievement emotion. And achievement emotion is significantly associated with self-regulated learning and academic procrastination. Result of the structural equation modeling also found that perceived authoritative parenting style show an impact on positive achievement emotion (enjoyment, hope and pride) and in succession affect the self-regulated learning and academic procrastination. The present study concerns mainly on the complex relationship among perceived parenting style, achievement emotion, self-regulated learning, and academic procrastination. It may bring the practical significance to Hong Kong parent to aware the effect of their parenting style on children’s learning strategies and procrastination style. It may also bring some insight on enhancing student’s self-regulated learning behaviors and reduce student’s academic procrastination.

The Individual-Oriented Achievement Motivation Scale (IOAMS; Yang and Yu in Social- and individual-oriented achievement motives: conceptualization and measurement, 1988) is a reliable and valid measurement tool assessing an individual’s individual-oriented achievement motivation (IOAM). IOAM exhibits a functionally automatized (hence still intrinsic) desire via which the process of achievement-related behaviours, standards of excellence, and evaluation of performance or outcome are perceived and determined by an individual oneself. The IOAMS (Yang and Yu 1988) is a reliable and valid measurement tool assessing an individual’s IOAM. Chang et al. (J Psychol Chin Soc 1(2):39–63, 2000) found that IOAMS consisted of a sole single-order factor using varimax rotation method. Chang’s et al. research was conducted in Singapore, there may be cultural differences between Singaporean and Hong Kong’s contexts. Furthermore, varimax rotation method is for exploratory purpose for investigating the factorial structure of the IOAMS. Since the current study targeted at Hong Kong individuals, the present study addressed the issue of cultural difference. Furthermore, in the current study, a confirmatory approach was employed to examine the factorial structure of IOAMS. Hence, the IOAMS was reexamined in Hong Kong context. With confirmatory factor analysis and item response theory, the 30-item IOAMS was condensed to become a 12-item IOAMS-Short Form (IOAMS-SF).

WhatsApp is the most popular smartphone messenger application all over the world in 2015, which have more than 700 million users in the world. Nowadays, it is common to find people addicted to the WhatsApp because they text any time at any place. Confirmatory factor analysis was conducted to evaluate the construct validity of the questionnaires, whereas reliability was indicated by Cronbach’s alpha. The researchers establish the relationship among several variables and constructs by using structural equation model. This study has included 203 participants in Hong Kong. The researchers examined the relationship among WhatsApp’s addiction, emotion regulation, personality, academic performance decrement, and social connection of WhatsApp’s attitude. It is found that personality (neuroticism) is significantly associated with emotion regulation, while emotion regulation is significantly associated with WhatsApp addiction and finally WhatsApp’s addiction is significantly associated with academic performance decrement and social connection of WhatsApp’s attitude. The result of the model indicates that emotion regulations were the risk factors of WhatsApp’s addiction and WhatsApp’s addiction would affect the academic and social connection.

The current study investigated the development of morphemic processing in reading Chinese compound words. A total of 14 grade 2 children and 17 grade 6 children were recruited. A word-naming task and a character- naming task were conducted. Significant boundedness effects were observed in both word and character-naming tasks in grade 2. In contrast, significant boundedness effect was only found in character naming but not in word naming in grade 6. Results revealed that the functional size of morphemes that beginning readers can manipulate progresses from large to small grain size. This developmental pattern provides supplementary information to the psycholinguistic grain size theory (Ziegler & Goswami, 2005) to better explain reading development of Chinese. Educational and clinical implications were also discussed.

The influence of feed-forward consistency (FFC) (i.e., the consistency of mapping from the orthographic form to the pronunciation of the whole character) on character recognition and reading aloud ...

This study investigated the role of sensory feedback during the production of front vowels. A temporary aftereffect induced by tongue loading was employed to modify the somatosensory-based perception of tongue height. Following the removal of tongue loading, tongue height during vowel production was estimated by measuring the frequency of the first formant (F1) from the acoustic signal. In experiment 1, the production of front vowels following tongue loading was investigated either in the presence or absence of auditory feedback. With auditory feedback available, the tongue height of front vowels was not modified by the aftereffect of tongue loading. By contrast, speakers did not compensate for the aftereffect of tongue loading when they produced vowels in the absence of auditory feedback. In experiment 2, the characteristics of the masking noise were manipulated such that it masked energy either in the F1 region or in the region of the second and higher formants. The results showed that the adjustment of tongue height during the production of front vowels depended on information about F1 in the auditory feedback. These findings support the idea that speech goals include both auditory and somatosensory targets and that speakers are able to make use of information from both sensory modalities to maximize the accuracy of speech production.

Metalinguistic awareness (an awareness about the structure of orthography) had been considered vital for reading acquisition. The awareness of phonological regularity and consistency had been found in advanced readers in recent research. Evidence based on simplified Chinese suggested the effect of semantic transparency on reading in school readers. Studies based on traditional Chinese also reported that reading acquisition, including the development of metalinguistic awareness, is affected by script, properties of characters in school curricula, approaches and strategies of reading training. This paper reports the comparison between corpora of simplified Chinese characters based on primary school textbooks and the updated Hong Kong Corpus of Primary School Chinese (HKCPSC). The proportion of characters in the total curriculum, the ratio of phonetic-semantic compounds, visual complexity (defined by the number of strokes) and the levels of phonetic regularity and semantic transparency of Chinese characters across grades in the two corpora are compared. Two marked differences found are the frequency-weighted proportion of regular characters and the proportion of semantically transparent characters across grades. The relationships between the data and recent findings of reading development in Chinese are discussed.

This study investigated the hypothesis that the main component character which contributes more to the whole-word meaning is used as an access code in reading. Grade 1, 3, and 5 readers were asked to read aloud two-character Chinese compound words (modifier, supplement, and coordinative words) with four patterns of component character frequency (high-high, high-low, low-high, and low-low). Results showed that the main component character effect was present for all three types of word structures, and the use of the main component character as a reading strategy was found in grade 3 and 5 children in their reading. It was proposed that representations of low-frequency Chinese compounds are stored in morphologically decomposed form and that word structure information has a role in the processing of compound words.

The present study made a reference to Zhu Dexi's phrase-based grammar approach to analyse Cantonese utterances hierarchically into 14 syntactic structures (SS). A total of 68 speech samples from Cantonese-speaking children with and without Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) were collected. The mean length of utterance in words (MLUw), the number of syntactic structures (NOSS), the number of different syntactic structures (NODSS) and the flexibility of syntactic structures (FSS) of the samples were calculated. Comparisons among four groups of typically developing (TD) children revealed that all the indexes show developmental changes across age stages. Comparisons between ASD subjects and their age-matched (AM) and MLUw-matched (MM) normal peers were done. MLUw, NOSS and NODSS and FSS could be used to distinguish autistic children from their AM normal peers, but only FSS could be used to distinguish ASD from MM groups qualitatively and quantitatively. The lack of production of SP, V1O/SV2 and Coord1Coord2 with low FSS may be one of the factors that will affect ASD children's further syntactic development.

Moyamoya disease is a rare, progressive, occlusive cerebrovascular condition that has previously been noted to be associated with cortical deafness. Other forms of auditory deficit, such as auditory processing disorder, have rarely been considered in the assessment of patients with moyamoya disease. A case of central auditory processing disorder is presented in a 26-year-old female of Chinese ethnicity with moyamoya disease. The patient had bilateral, near-normal hearing thresholds and normal immittance audiometry results. However, she displayed poor speech perception in noise and her results for other auditory processing tasks were markedly abnormal. These findings suggest that patients with moyamoya disease may benefit from a full auditory assessment that includes tests of auditory processing skills.

This study investigated the development of the mental representation of Chinese disyllabic words. Unlike alphabetical languages, Chinese is a logographic system where character is the basic unit of meaning. Most Chinese words are composed of two characters. Theoretically, Chinese compound word can be read either as a whole unit or as the component character. Subjects were asked to read aloud a list of two-character words, controlled for word and component character frequencies across grades. The correct percentage was analyzed using three two-way analyses of variance. Results indicated that children are able to make use of both levels of reading as early as Grade 1. Lower graders tended to use both the component character level reading processes more, while higher graders tended to read words as whole units more.

This article reports, for the first time, type and token frequencies of tones, onsets, codas, rimes, and syllables of Hong Kong Cantonese. The information is derived from a computerized spoken corpus, the Hong Kong Cantonese adult language corpus (HKCAC; LeungLaw, 2001), consisting of more than 140,000 character-syllable units. Since the HKCAC is based on recordings of connected speech, comparisons are made with respect to the inventories of various phonological units between the HKCAC and standard descriptions of the Cantonese phonological system--in particular, Fok (1974) and Bauer and Benedict (1997). It is hoped that the frequency information presented here will become a valuable tool for future psycholinguistic and linguistic research in this language. The full set of these frequency counts may be downloaded from the Psychonomic Society Web archive at www.psychonomic.org/ archive/.

Normal Hong Kong schoolchildren readers from grades 1, 2 and 3 were involved in this experiment to find out at which grade the sub-character processing is employed to memorize newly learned Chinese characters. Subjects were required to work on a delayed-recall task with pseudo-characters constructed using different radical frequencies controlled across grades. Prior to the recall, verbal and visual intervening tasks were inserted to determine the use of phonological and visual memories in memorizing radicals with different frequencies. A significant frequency effect was found in the second graders but not in the first graders. Results suggested that subcharacter processing to memorize newly learned Chinese characters developed in the children starting from the second grade. The second graders' performances on high frequency radicals were affected by both verbal and visual intervening tasks, but their performances in low frequency radicals were affected more by visual intervening tasks than by verb...

This study investigated the developmental trend of reading processing of Chinese two-character compound words in normal primary school-aged readers in Hong Kong. As the component characters of a Chinese multi-character compound word could be viewed as single morphemes, it was hypothesized that a compound word could be read as a meaningful whole, its component characters, or both. Previous studies (Zhang and Peng, 1992; Peng et al., 1999; etc.) showed that adults used both whole-word-level and character-level processing for reading Chinese multi-character words and there were interaction effects between word and component character frequencies. In the present study, subjects were asked to read aloud two-character words that were controlled for word and component character frequencies according to grades. The results suggested that word-level and component-character-level reading processing were developed in children as early as grade one. Lower graders tended to use the component-character-level re...

This paper reports the performances of two Cantonese aphasics on tasks examining their sentence processing deficits. The data on sentence comprehension show that thematically noncanonical sentences, full passives, and subject-gap sentences present greater difficulty to these patients than canonical sentences, truncated passives, and object-gap sentences, respectively. These patterns are consistent with previous observations on Chinese aphasics and are expected given the structural differences between Chinese and English. In a Cantonese grammaticality judgment test, a set of structures are identified that can elicit clear judgments from normal subjects and aphasics, contrary to the claim that grammaticality judgments in Chinese are probabilistic and fragile. Most interestingly, the patients' overall performance patterns reveal a double dissociation between sentence comprehension and judgment of sentence well-formedness, suggesting that the two tasks are supported by independent processing mechanisms.

This paper begins with a brief review of major theoretical accounts of English aphasic sentence comprehension, including the mapping hypothesis (Linebarger et al. 1983), the interpretive strategy proposed in Caplan (1985), and the trace-deletion hypothesis in Grodzinsky (1990). We then discuss some of the syntactic differences between Chinese and English with particular reference to the relativized and passive constructions, and formal linguistic analyses of these structures. In light of these syntactic differences a study was conducted investigating the ability of four Cantonese Chinese aphasic patients to comprehend auditorally and visually presented sentences. The results showed a dissociation between full and truncated passives in two patients, and a tendency suggesting that subject-relative sentences were more difficult to interpret than subject object-relatives. On the basis of their performance patterns we hypothesize about the nature of impairment of each patient by making reference to th...

OBJECTIVE. To evaluate the prevalence of dysmenorrhoea, its impact, and management approaches in Hong Kong university students, and to compare between medical and non-medical students for any potential differences in coping strategies. DESIGN. Cross-sectional questionnaire survey. SETTING. The University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong. PARTICIPANTS. A total of 240 undergraduate (128 medical and 112 non-medical) students. MAIN OUTCOME MEASURES. Data on the presence and severity of dysmenorrhoea, its impact on daily life, management approaches, specific strategies, and their self-perceived effectiveness were obtained and analysed. RESULTS. In these subjects, the prevalence of dysmenorrhoea was 80% (95% confidence interval, 75-85%) with a mean (standard deviation) pain score of 5.0 (1.7). The most common impacts on daily life included reduced ability to concentrate and/or disturbance with study (75%) and changes in normal physical activity (60%). Only 6% sought medical advice, while 70% practised self-management. Pain scores and pain affecting normal physical activities were important predictive factors for self-management and for management based on pharmacological or non-pharmacological means. The commonest specific strategies used were a warm beverage (62%), paracetamol (57%), and sleeping (45%), while the most effective strategies were non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs (100%), traditional Chinese medicine (93%), and dietary/nutritional supplements (92%). Regarding the comparison of medical and non-medical students, the former used fewer pharmacological strategies among the various management approaches investigated. CONCLUSION. With data showing dysmenorrhoea as a very common condition having a significant impact in the Hong Kong community, primary care doctors should reassure young women with dysmenorrhoea that it is a common experience in the same age-group. Health education on the existence of effective treatment from medical practitioners could help women whose dysmenorrhoea was not controlled by self-management.