Search Results (101)

Flexible laryngoscopy (FL) is the standard diagnostic tool for vocal cord paralysis (VCP), but it involves patient discomfort, and its interpretation is subjective and operator-dependent. Dynamic digital radiography (DDR) is a novel imaging technique that acquires high-resolution sequential radiographs at a low radiation dose. While DDR has been widely applied in chest and diaphragmatic imaging, its use for laryngeal motion analysis has been poorly investigated. We present the case of a 50-year-old male referred for Computed Tomography (CT) of the neck and chest for suspected vocal cord paralysis. The referring physician did not specify the side of the suspected paralysis. Due to a language barrier and the absence of prior documentation, a detailed history could not be obtained. To assess vocal cord motion, we performed, for the first time in our Institution, a DDR study of the neck. During phonation maneuvers, DDR demonstrated fixation of the left vocal cord in an adducted paramedian position. CT confirmed this finding and did not highlight any further anomaly. This case demonstrates the feasibility of DDR as a low-cost, low-dose, non-invasive technique for functional evaluation of the larynx and may represent a valuable complementary imaging tool in laryngeal functional assessment. Full article

Speech segmentation is one of the first tasks infants face when learning their mother tongue. It has been argued that statistical learning could function as a gateway to speech segmentation in the absence of pre-existing knowledge about the language to be acquired. However, infants also segment speech with prosodic cues, such as lexical stress. Here, we review recent evidence from studies that look at how infants weigh statistical and prosodic information when segmenting continuous speech. We argue that the idea that statistical regularities have a main role in early speech segmentation, as evidenced in English-learning infants, is not found with German-learning infants. With more natural speech stimuli, German-learning infants only become sensitive to statistical regularities in the speech signal by their first birthday. We provide further support for this hypothesis by showing that there are cross-linguistic differences in how statistical models segment child-directed speech (CDS) and that CDS changes as infants grow. This suggests that speech input to younger infants is not tailored for speech segmentation with statistical cues, but that it is subject to cross-linguistic differences like prosody. Full article

Background: Preventing nutritional decline during hospitalisation is imperative in reducing the development of complications such as malnutrition and pressure injuries. However, existing malnutrition screening and assessment tools employ a reactive rather than proactive approach, using predictors to identify inpatients who are already malnourished instead of those at risk of developing hospital-acquired malnutrition. Therefore, this review aimed to identify key contextual and individual factors contributing to nutritional deterioration and their interrelatedness, and to inform strategies for preventing hospital-acquired malnutrition. Methods: A scoping review of five databases (Medline, CINAHL, Embase, All EBM Reviews and PsycINFO) up to June 2024 was conducted to include English-language studies that reported statistically significant risk factors for changes in nutritional status during hospitalisation. A directed acyclic graphing method was used to visualise the interlinkage between contextual and individual risk factors identified. PRISMA Extension for Scoping Reviews was followed in reporting. Results: Of 8215 retrieved abstracts, 51 studies were included. Four contextual (ward type; food service satisfaction; medical-related mealtime interruption; nutrition care collaboration) and four individual factors (nutritional status prior admission; hospital length of stay; multimorbidity; disease acuity) were found to significantly predict nutritional decline during hospitalisation and were closely interrelated. Conclusions: More contextual risk factors are modifiable, suggesting a need for organisational strategies to optimise collaborative nutrition care and improve patient satisfaction with hospital food services to promote early nutritional intervention, particularly within the first three days of admission and for inpatients with multimorbidity, high disease acuity, or pre-existing malnourishment. Full article

Active learning strategies and methodologies place the students at the core of the learning process. The objective is to engage students in their own learning through significant activities that involve active participation. These activities are designed to promote collaboration, reflection, and practical application of the knowledge acquired to develop cognitive, social, and emotional competences. These methodologies are of particular interest in STEM disciplines and vocational education, where practice is a key element in the assimilation of theoretical concepts. In this line, a case study is presented where active methodologies have been applied to two groups of Vocational Education and Training in the area of Computer Science to improve interest and commitment. The present study focuses on two groups of first-year students enrolled in the Web Application Design course, one in the Programming subject and the other in the Markup Language subject. Both groups are heterogeneous, composed of young adults with significantly different backgrounds, skills, and motivation. The teaching–learning process is based on active methodologies, such as Project-Based Learning, Design Thinking, Flipped Classroom, or gamification, which are adapted for different subjects in the field of Computer Science. These methodologies facilitate the experimental design and testing of diverse solutions for programming problems, thereby enhancing students’ motivation and interest, while promoting creativity and reflection. The results show an improvement in the interest and commitment of the students in both groups. Despite the fact that less than 50% of students successfully passed in the initial examination, more than 75% students passed after the second-chance examination. The findings have consistently suggested that the implementation of active methodologies leads to significant enhancements in the proficiency, development, motivation, and self-learning capabilities of students, and that these methodologies make students more aware of their learning process. Full article

Video temporal grounding (VTG) aims to localize a semantically relevant temporal segment within an untrimmed video based on a natural language query. The task continues to face challenges arising from cross-modal semantic misalignment, which is largely attributed to redundant visual content in sensor-acquired video streams, linguistic ambiguity, and discrepancies in modality-specific representations. Most existing approaches rely on intra-modal feature modeling, processing video and text independently throughout the representation learning stage. However, this isolation undermines semantic alignment by neglecting the potential of cross-modal interactions. In practice, a natural language query typically corresponds to spatiotemporal content in video signals collected through camera-based sensing systems, encompassing a particular sequence of frames and its associated salient subregions. We propose a text-guided visual representation optimization framework tailored to enhance semantic interpretation over video signals captured by visual sensors. This framework leverages textual information to focus on spatiotemporal video content, thereby narrowing the cross-modal gap. Built upon the unified cross-modal embedding space provided by CLIP, our model leverages video data from sensing devices to structure representations and introduces two dedicated modules to semantically refine visual representations across spatial and temporal dimensions. First, we design a Spatial Visual Representation Optimization (SVRO) module to learn spatial information within intra-frames. It selects salient patches related to the text, capturing more fine-grained visual details. Second, we introduce a Temporal Visual Representation Optimization (TVRO) module to learn temporal relations from inter-frames. Temporal triplet loss is employed in TVRO to enhance attention on text-relevant frames and capture clip semantics. Additionally, a self-supervised contrastive loss is introduced at the clip–text level to improve inter-clip discrimination by maximizing semantic variance during training. Experiments on Charades-STA, ActivityNet Captions, and TACoS, widely used benchmark datasets, demonstrate that our method outperforms state-of-the-art methods across multiple metrics. Full article

With continuous advancements in semiconductor technology, mastering efficient designs of high-quality and advanced chips has become an important part of science and technology education. Chip performances will determine the futures of various aspects of societies. However, novice students often encounter difficulties in learning digital chip designs using Verilog programming, a common hardware design language. An efficient self-study system for supporting them that can offer various exercise problems, such that any answer is marked automatically, is in strong demand. In this paper, we design and implement a web-based Verilog programming learning assistant system (VPLAS), based on our previous works on software programming. Using a heuristic and guided learning method, VPLAS leads students to learn the basic circuit syntax step by step, until they acquire high-quality digital integrated circuit design abilities through self-study. For evaluation, we assign the proposal to 50 undergraduate students at the National Taipei University of Technology, Taiwan, who are taking the introductory chip-design course, and confirm that their learning outcomes using VPLAS together are far better than those obtained when following a traditional method. In our final statistics, students achieved an average initial accuracy rate of over 70% on their first attempts at answering questions after learning through our website’s tutorials. With the help of the system’s instant automated grading and rapid feedback, their average accuracy rate eventually exceeded 99%. This clearly demonstrates that our system effectively enables students to independently master Verilog circuit knowledge through self-directed learning. Full article

Deaf and hard-of-hearing (DHH) children are often reported to show deficits on working memory (WM) tasks. These deficits are often characterized as contributing to their struggles to acquire spoken language. Here we report a longitudinal study of a large (N = 103) sample of DHH children who acquired American Sign Language (ASL) as their first language. Using an n-back working memory task, we show significant growth in WM performance across the 7–13-year-old age range. Furthermore, we show that children with early access to ASL from their DHH parents demonstrate faster WM growth and that this group difference is mediated by ASL receptive skills. The data suggest the important role of early access to perceivable natural language in promoting typical WM growth during the middle school years. We conclude that the acquisition of a natural visual–gestural language is sufficient to support the development of WM in DHH children. Further research is required to determine how the timing and quality of ASL exposure may play a role, or whether the effects are driven by acquisition-related corollaries, such as parent–child interactions and maternal stress. Full article

In the name of God and profit, Jorge Álvares, the first Portuguese to set foot in China, arrived in 1513 and opened a new chapter for missionary work. One of the most significant forms of “Sino-Portuguese” decorative art, ivory sculpture, is closely linked to the Portuguese mission in the Orient and serves as a witness to encounters between different cultures and religions. This study focuses on representative Sino-Portuguese ivory sculptures of the Virgin and Child from the Late Ming period through a detailed analysis of iconography and a comparative visual critique with European prototypes and Guanyin representations to discuss the significance of missionary visual imagery in cultural interactions. The ivory sculpture of the Virgin and Child is not merely an image; it is a physical object with both material and visual characteristics, acquiring its religious significance during the missionary process. The present study aims to present its artistic hybridity and demonstrate how the Chinese carvers make the Sino-Portuguese “speak” different visual languages, leading to different interpretations. It also reflects the cultural translation that occurs in the complex process of religious contact. In this space of ‘culture in between’, Christianity has been able to transcend cultural and religious boundaries. Full article

The tonal system of Cantonese is very different from that of Mandarin, which creates potential challenges for Mandarin speakers when learning Cantonese. The aim of this study was to explore second language (L2) production of Cantonese tones by advanced learners whose first language (L1) is Mandarin. Forty-one informants participated in a recording experiment to provide production data of Cantonese tones. The speech data were measured acoustically using the computer software Praat (Version 6.3.10) and were evaluated perceptually by native Cantonese speakers. The relationship between the acoustic analysis and perceptual evaluation was also explored. The acoustic and perceptual evaluations confirmed that, while the tones that the Mandarin learners of Cantonese produced were non-native-like, their production of the Cantonese T1 and T2 was good in general. Furthermore, the accuracy of the perceptual evaluations could be predicted based on the acoustic features of the L2 tones. Our findings are in line with hypotheses in current speech learning models, and demonstrate that familiar phonetic categories are easier to acquire than are unfamiliar ones. To provide a more complete picture of L2 speech acquisition, future research should investigate L2 tone acquisition using both production and perception data obtained from participants with a greater variety of L1s. Full article

This commentary critically engages with Hulstijn’s revised Basic Language Cognition (BLC) Theory, which aims to enhance explanatory power and falsifiability regarding individual differences (IDs) in language proficiency across native and non-native speakers. While commending BLC Theory’s emphasis on separating oral and written language cognition, we raise two key concerns. First, we question the theory’s exclusive alignment with usage-based approaches, arguing that its core constructs are, in principle, compatible with multiple meta-theoretical frameworks, including generative ones. As such, BLC Theory should remain neutral to maximize its cross-paradigmatic utility. Second, we address the theory’s treatment of heritage speaker bilinguals (HSs), particularly the implication that they may not typically acquire BLC. We contend that this position overlooks robust empirical evidence demonstrating that HSs develop systematic, rule-governed grammars influenced by their individual input and usage conditions. Moreover, we highlight how IDs among HSs can provide a valuable testing ground for BLC Theory, particularly regarding the role of input and literacy. We conclude that embracing theory neutrality and integrating diverse speaker data—especially from heritage bilinguals—can enhance BLC Theory’s generalizability, empirical relevance, and theoretical utility across language acquisition research. Full article

Using the analytical tool Rbrul, this study explores the object expression variations in the speech of twenty CSL (Chinese as a Second Language) learners whose first languages (L1) were English, Russian, Korean, and Japanese, and compares them to native speaker (NS) patterns. Multivariate analysis revealed that the learner patterns closely resembled NSs’ in most dimensions explored, except the learners tended to overuse overt pronouns and underuse null forms. For both CSL learners and NSs, the general patterns in object use were as follows: (1) animate objects tended to favor overt objects, while inanimate objects favored null forms, (2) switch in referents favored overt forms, while no referent change favored null, (3) specific referents favored null forms, whereas nonspecific referents favored overt expressions, and (4) conversational contexts favored null forms, but elicited narratives favored explicit forms. As for the patterns specific to learners, the findings were as follows: (1) among the four L1s included in the analysis, Japanese and Russian speakers tended to use null objects more than Korean and English speakers, (2) a stay in China of one, two, or four years tended to favor null forms, but a three-year stay favored explicit forms, and (3) high-intermediate learners tended to use null forms more frequently than advanced learners. These results indicated that learners successfully acquired null object use patterns in spoken Chinese, but they still required further development in understanding the nuances between overt object forms and null object use to enhance their sociolinguistic competence. Full article

Background: multilocular thymic cysts are uncommon acquired cysts in the anterior mediastinum caused by incomplete thymic involution. They may be associated with autoimmune diseases, such as rheumatoid arthritis and systemic sclerosis. Methods: a 61-year-old man with a history of rheumatoid arthritis for 8 years was referred to our unit because of a multiloculated mass in the anterior mediastinum with a high F¹⁸ fluorodeoxyglucose uptake at PET-CT scan. Histology showed a multilocular thymic cyst with lymphoid tissue, organized in germinal centers and internodal areas. Results: rheumatoid arthritis-related symptoms progressively disappeared after the excision of the mass. Conclusions: to our knowledge, this is the first report in the English language of rheumatoid arthritis symptoms improvement after multilocular thymic cyst surgical removal. Full article

This mixed methods study explores the effects of cumulative exposure, age of onset of acquisition (AO), parent proficiency and richness of the language environment on the grammatical development in French and English of 49 French–English bilingual children who were acquiring the languages either simultaneously (2L1) or successively (cL2). Participants (24 girls) were in 1st grade (M = 6;4, n = 20) or 5th grade (M = 10;4, n = 29), attending a state school in France, in a French–English bilingual programme. Production data come from a narrative task in each language. Parent questionnaires were used to explore environmental factors. Results show, first, that children’s age and parent proficiency were positive predictors of grammatical accuracy in English, while in French only cumulative exposure was a positive predictor. Secondly, exposure showed a stronger relationship with grammatical accuracy in cL2 children; however, only in French, the language in which children made more errors overall. Finally, we found that both 2L1 and cL2 children made gender errors, an early-acquired structure in French. A qualitative analysis of errors with gender highlights, first, the importance of language output for grammatical development, even for children receiving substantial language input and, second, the role of home factors which play a more important role than community language use in shaping grammatical development. This study underscores the complex, interconnected nature of experiential effects on bilingual grammatical development in each language. Full article

Children born preterm are at an elevated risk of language delays compared to children born full-term. However, there is a dearth of research investigating language outcomes in premature children exposed to more than one language. There is also limited empirical evidence linking the quantity and quality of parent input and language outcomes in premature children and the strength of these relationships in bilingual contexts remains unknown. Therefore, the current study examined language skills, parent input, conversational turns, and their associations at 16 months to 36 months in monolingual and bilingual children born preterm. Nine English-speaking monolingual parent–child dyads, and nine Spanish–English bilingual parent–child dyads participated in parent–child interactions that occurred over time in play-based contexts. Results revealed that preterm monolingual and bilingual children exhibited similar language abilities at all time points assessed. While both monolingual and bilingual dyads engaged in a comparable number of conversational turns at 16 m, monolingual mothers produced more words than bilingual mothers during play. Significant associations were observed between children’s vocabulary skills and their ability to combine words within and across most time points. Notably, relationships between parental input, conversational turns, and language skills were limited to a significant association between conversational turns at 16 m and vocabulary skills at 24 m. Together, findings indicate that bilingual children born preterm acquire language on the same timeline as monolingual children born preterm. While it is crucial that the current work be replicated in larger samples of children born preterm, the current work is the first to compare relationships between children’s language outcomes and the quantity and quality of parental input in monolingual and bilingual contexts. Full article

Humans segment speech naturally based on the transitional probabilities between linguistic elements. For bilingual speakers navigating between a first (L1) and a second language (L2), L1 knowledge can influence their perception, leading to transfer effects based on phonological similarities or differences. Specifically, in Spanish, resyllabification occurs when consonants at the end of a syllable or word boundary are repositioned as the onset of the subsequent syllable. While the process can lead to ambiguities in perception, current academic discussions debate the duration of canonical and resyllabified productions. However, the role of bilingualism in the visual perception of syllable and word segmentation remains unknown to date. The present study explores the use of bilingual skills in the perception of articulatory movements and visual cues in speech perception, addressing the gap in the literature regarding the visibility of syllable pauses in lipreading. The participants in this study, 80 native Spanish speakers and 195 L2 learners, were subjected to audio, visual-only, and audiovisual conditions to assess their segmentation accuracy. The results indicated that both groups could segment speech effectively, with audiovisual cues providing the most significant benefit. Native speakers performed more consistently, while proficiency influenced L2 learners’ accuracy. The results show that aural syllabic segmentation is acquired at early stages of proficiency, while visual syllabic segmentation is acquired at higher levels of proficiency. Full article