•Stereotypical and syntactic cues were manipulated in a factorial design.•ERPs time-locked to stereotype-biased words during sentence reading were recorded.•We observed strong predominance of ...stereotypes in guiding language processing.
Many studies have provided evidence for the automaticity and immediacy with which stereotypical knowledge affects our behavior. However, less is known about how such social knowledge interacts with linguistic cues during comprehension. In this ERP sentence processing study we took advantage of the rich grammatical gender morphology of Spanish to explore the processing of role nouns in which stereotype and grammatical cues were simultaneously manipulated, in a factorial design. We show that stereotypical knowledge overrides syntactic cues, highlighting the immediacy with which stereotype knowledge is activated during language comprehension and supporting proposals claiming that social knowledge impacts on language processing differently from other forms of semantics.
Biliary atresia is a major cause of extrahepatic obstructive jaundice in neonates. Early Kasai operation is the gold standard of treatment. In this study, we evaluated the effectiveness of stool ...color card screening by using claims data from the National Health Insurance Research Database.
This was a retrospective cohort study. Data from medical charts of all inpatients who were diagnosed with biliary atresia from 1996 to 2008 were collected from Taiwan's National Health Insurance Research Database. Patients who received a Kasai operation or liver transplant were identified by the Operation code. The patients' gender, age at admission, and type of operation were collected and analyzed.
From 1996 to 2008, the overall incidence of biliary atresia was 1.48 per 10,000 live births. The median age at first admission for patients with suspected biliary atresia decreased after the implementation of stool color card screening (47 vs 43 days). The proportion of very late referral decreased from 9.5% to 4.9%. The median age of Kasai operation advanced from 51 to 48 days. The proportions of Kasai operation within 60 days of age were 68.9% before and 73.6% after screening program.
Stool color card screening seemed to increase parents' and physicians' awareness of biliary atresia. It also was associated with a decline in the proportion of late referral. Thus, screening might be especially effective in areas with high a proportion of late referral. Improvements in the speed of workup and the operation room should be the focus of education and training in the future.
The gender information in written Chinese third person pronouns is not symmetrically encoded: the character for "he" (, with semantic radical , meaning human) is used as a default referring to every ...individual, while the character for "she" (, with semantic radical , meaning woman) indicates females only. This critical feature could result in different patterns of processing of gender information in text, but this is an issue that has seldom been addressed in psycholinguistics. In Chinese, the written forms of the reflexive pronouns are composed of a pronoun plus the reflexive "/self" (/himself and /herself). The present study focuses on how such gender specificity interacts with the gender type of an antecedent, whether definitional (proper name) or stereotypical (stereotypical role noun) during reflexive pronoun resolution. In this event-related potential (ERP) study, gender congruity between a reflexive pronoun and its antecedent was studied by manipulating the gender type of antecedents and the gender specificity of reflexive pronouns (default: /himself vs. specific: /herself). Results included a P200 "attention related" congruity effect for /himself and a P600 "integration difficulty" congruity effect for /herself. Reflexive pronoun specificity independently affected the P200 and N400 components. These results highlight the role of /himself as a default applicable to both genders and indicate that only the processing of /herself supports a two-stage model for anaphor resolution. While both reflexive pronouns are evaluated at the bonding stage, the processing of the gender-specific reflexive pronoun is completed in the resolution stage.
Hyperoxia is often used in the treatment of neonates. However, protracted use of hyperoxia leads to significant morbidity. The purpose of this study was to evaluate the effects of vitamin B-6 ...supplementation on oxidative stress and inflammatory responses in neonatal rats undergoing hyperoxia therapy. The study consisted of 2 parts: a survival study and a vitamin B-6 efficacy study for 16 days. Neonatal rats were randomly divided into either the control group, B-6 group (subcutaneously injected with 90 mg/kg/d of pyridoxal 5′-phosphate PLP), O2 group (treated with 85% oxygen), or O2 + B-6 group (simultaneously treated with 85% oxygen and 90 mg/kg/d PLP). After the survival study was done, the vitamin B-6 efficacy study was performed with duplicate neonatal rats sacrificed on the 3rd, 6th, 9th, and 16th day. Serum inflammatory cytokines, tissue pathology, and malondialdehyde (MDA) levels were measured. In the survival study, the survival rate of neonatal rats in the control, B-6, O2, and O2 + B-6 group on the 16th day were 100%, 100%, 25%, and 62.50%, respectively. The efficacy study showed lung polymorphonuclear granulocyte (PMN) and macrophage infiltration, increased liver hemopoiesis, and higher MDA levels in liver homogenates at days 3 through 16 in the O2 group. Vitamin B-6 supplementation considerably increased serum inflammatory cytokines in either the 6th or 9th day and decreased liver MDA level before the 6th day. These results indicate that neonatal rats receiving hyperoxia treatment suffered divergent serum inflammatory responses and were in increased liver oxidative stress. Vitamin B-6 supplementation seemed to improve survival rates, change systemic inflammatory response, and decrease liver oxidative stress while neonatal rats were under hyperoxia treatment.
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•Hyperoxia leads to lung and liver pathological change in neonatal rats.•Lung inflammatory cell and liver oxidative stress were increased under hyperoxia.•Effect of hyperoxia on serum cytokine was divergent and depend on time.•B-6 supplement increased survival rate and decreased liver oxidative stress.•B-6 supplement temporally elevated serum cytokine.
Can a linguistic device of a language orient its speakers to a particular aspect of the world and result in increased sensitivity to that aspect? The question was examined with respect to the ...biological gender marker in English and the lack of it in Chinese. In Experiment 1, English and Chinese participants listened to stories and answered gender and non-gender related questions immediately after. It was found that, relative to the non-gender-related questions, the English participants were much faster and more accurate than the Chinese participants in answering the gender-related questions. In Experiment 2, English and Chinese participants were asked to determine which of two pictures matched the sentence shown immediately before. Relative to the non-gender-related sentences, the English participants were less slower and more accurate than the Chinese participants in responding to the gender-related sentences. The findings support the view that language can have an effect on information processing in human cognition.
► English verbs require explicit markings of tense and aspect, whereas Chinese do not. ► English speakers conceive of event time as segmented, whereas Chinese speakers as continuous. ► English ...speakers perceive “present” as a scalar point, whereas Chinese speakers as a bidirectional vector. ► Chinese “present” extends to include near future and recent past.
Expectations and judgments about the flow of time appear to be cognitively and culturally malleable. Here we explored the possibility that this malleability is responsive to relevant linguistic influences. Specifically, we hypothesized that an extended present time frame, which compresses imminent and completed events into the present, is the default for speakers of tenseless languages. We examined descriptions and judgments of pictured actions by speakers of Chinese, a tenseless language, and of English, a tensed language. Experiment 1 elicited verbal descriptions of imminent, ongoing, and completed actions. Overall, Chinese descriptions adhered less closely to the implicit tri-phasic temporal framing than English ones (64% vs. 88%), instead showing a strong tendency to describe most events as ongoing. Although this tendency among Chinese speakers was easily adjusted when the tri-phasic temporal framework was imposed through instructions (Experiment 2), nonlinguistic tasks yielded data consistent with the extended present view. In Experiment 3, Chinese speakers produced a narrower time window (distance between the imminent and completion time points) than English speakers when they were asked to mark on a time line the points of occurrence for imminent, ongoing, and completed actions. Conversely, Experiment 4 showed that Chinese speakers produced a wider, extended time window than English speakers when they were asked to mark the actual durations of actions. Taken together, the results indicate that, in the domain of simple episodic actions, the absence of tense in Chinese leads speakers to focus by default on temporal continuity as opposed to temporal segmentation.
Chinese and English speakers seem to hold different conceptions of time which may be related to the different codings of time in the two languages. Employing a sentence–picture matching task, we have ...investigated this linguistic relativity in Chinese–English bilinguals varying in English proficiency and found that those with high proficiency performed differently from those with low proficiency. Additional monolingual English data, reported here, showed further that high-proficiency bilinguals performed similarly to the English monolinguals, suggesting that Chinese speakers’ sensitivity to the time of an action event might be modifiable according to the extent of their experience with a tensed language.
An event consists of several components and properties such as the manner and path of motion or the temporal phases of an action. Languages
tend to employ different linguistic devices to encode these ...components and
properties, resulting in their differential codability. For example, manner
of motion in a motion event is highly codable in English because it is
carried by the main verb (e.g., walk versus run), and every clause requires a
verb. In French, manner is an optional addition to a clause that is already
complete. For example, in English, Sentence (1a) can be expressed as
Sentence (1b) by using the verb run, which encodes the manner of entering.
In contrast, the corresponding sentence in French can only be expressed as
Sentence (2), which encodes the manner by adding an adverbial phrase
(Slobin, 2003, p. 162).
碩士
國立成功大學
認知科學研究所
96
The Linguistic Relativity Hypothesis states that different languages take on different lexical and grammatical forms and these can bias speakers’ attention towards different ...aspects of the world. Accordingly, speakers of different languages will develop somewhat different views of the world. The Hypothesis was tested in this thesis with respect to the linguistic forms of tense and gender in English and Mandarin Chinese. In terms of tense, English uses tense markers, but Chinese does not. Therefore, it was predicted that (1) English speakers would be more accurate in capturing the time of an event than Chinese speakers, and (2) English speakers tended to employ a larger time scale (more fine-grained) than Chinese speakers. In terms of gender, English marks third-person singular pronouns for biological gender, while Chinese does not. Therefore, it was predicted that the biological gender of a person would be more readily accessible for English speakers than for Chinese speakers. Experiments 1, 2 and 3 tested the tense predictions. Experiments 4 and 5 tested the gender prediction.
Experiments 1 and 2 asked English and Chinese participants to verbally describe action events shown in photographs, which were taken at three different time points (future: is about to cross over a log, present: is crossing over a log, past: has crossed over a log). It was found that English participants were more accurate in capturing the times of the events, whereas Chinese participants were particularly poor in capturing the past and the future times of the events. When instructed to pay special attention to the time of an event when describing it, Chinese participants improved their descriptions of the past and the future events, but at the cost of the present events. Experiment 3a and 3b used the same photographs or their correct verbal descriptions and asked English and Chinese participants to mark on a time line to indicate when an event occurred. The midpoint on the time line was pre-designated as the present time. A time window was calculated by measuring the distance between the marked past and the marked future for an event. It was found that the English participants employed a larger time window than the Chinese speakers. Experiment 3c asked the same participants to mark on a space line to indicate the position of an object relative to a reference, as described in a sentence. The midpoint on the space line was pre-designated as the location of the reference object. The English participants also displayed a larger left-right window size than the Chinese participants. Experiment 3d asked the same participants to mark on a time to indicate the position of a target date relative to a reference date, as shown on the computer screen. The midpoint on the time line was pre-designated as the location of the reference date. The date interval between the target date and the reference date was designed as 1 day, 2 days, 3 days, 5 days, and 10 days. It was found that English participants employed a larger time window for date than Chinese participants and a trend was found in accordance with each date interval.
Experiment 4 played short passages to English and Chinese participants. Each passage contained a target character whose gender was made apparent by the mention of a content-related cue (e.g., having a mustache or wearing a skirt). In addition, third-person singular pronouns (he or she in the English version, and ‘ta’ in the Chinese version) appeared a number of times for referring to the character. After listening to each passage, the participants had to answer three questions, one of which addressed the gender of the target character. It was found that the participants responded to the gender questions faster than to the non-gender questions. Moreover, the English participants were much faster than the Chinese participants. They were also more accurate. Experiment 5 asked English and Chinese participants to determine which of two pictures matched the sentence previously shown. In some cases, the match was based on the gender of the person (e.g., he/she is a doctor), while in others, it was based on the profession of the person (e.g., he is a doctor/teacher) or simply on the objects (e.g., there are two oranges/apples) shown and described. It was found that the participants responded to the gender trials more slowly than to the non-gender trials; however, the English participants were less slower than the Chinese participants. The English participants also responded to the gender trials more accurately than the Chinese participants.
Taken together, the results of the five experiments were consistent with the predictions of the Linguistic Relativity Hypothesis, with respect to tense and gender.
碩士
大仁科技大學
休閒事業管理研究所
106
Taiwanese Opera is a comprehensive art that combines music, drama, dance, and art. It plays an important role in local opera. In the early days of traditional agricultural ...society in Taiwan, watching an opera at temple used to be the most popular leisure and entertainment for people. However, with the changes of the times and the impact of diversified entertainment, it is a pity that Taiwanese operas are gradually declining.
How we can demonstrate the local color and spirit and explore the identity and mainstream value for this land is critical. This is one of the motivations for this study. Through the performance and appreciation of traditional operas, the study is going to explore whether Taiwanese opera will promote the attitudes of students in learning about cultural and leisure activities. This is the second motivation.
The study investigated part of students from grade 4 to 6 in Wu Chiang Primary School where I work. The study takes the teachers as researchers, activities relate
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