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Semantic support and sex differences in toddlers’ spoken word recognition
No full textResearch shows that as toddlers’ vocabularies expand, words in the early lexicon become increasingly interconnected through shared phonological and semantic features. Understanding how these dimensions jointly shape lexical organization is central to theories of early spoken word recognition. The present study investigated how the simultaneous presence of phonological and semantic similarity between nouns influences lexical activation during spoken word recognition. We presented 21-month-old English monolinguals with an intermodal preferential looking task adapted to a priming paradigm while their eye movements were recorded with an eye-tracker. Participants heard a spoken noun (prime) followed by a related or unrelated spoken noun (target). The experiment included three conditions: Phonologically Related, where prime-target pairs share the initial phonemes (e.g., toe-toast); Phono-Semantically Related, where prime-target pairs share the initial phonemes and belong to the same semantic category (e.g., turkey-turtle); and Unrelated, where prime-target pairs do not share the initial phonemes and do not belong to the same semantic category (e.g., bubble-toast and box-turtle). Results revealed two key findings: (1) Targets in the Phonologically Related condition elicited significantly fewer looks than the Unrelated condition, suggesting phonological interference. (2) Targets in the Phono-Semantically Related condition elicited significantly more looks than both the Unrelated and Phonologically Related conditions, indicating strong facilitation when both cues are present. Additionally, girls demonstrated more pronounced word recognition than boys. This study extends our understanding of the interactive roles of phonological and semantic cues, as well as sex differences, in mental lexical organization among young toddlers
The association between intimate partner violence and suicide ideation and attempts among women: a systematic review and meta-analysis
No full textMeta-inner humor beliefs and problematic social media use: a six-month longitudinal test of metacognitive pathways
No full textNo previous studies have ever examined humor as a diffusion strategy in the context of technology use. The present study is the first to investigate whether meta-inner humor beliefs (MIHBs) are prospectively associated with problematic social media use (PSMU) via metacognitions about social media use. A prospective, two-wave longitudinal design with a bidirectional cross-lagged panel (CLPA) model was used to examine associations between adaptive and maladaptive MIHBs on PSMU, examining the indirect pathway of positive and negative metacognitions about social media use (meta-SMUs). The study was conducted across two waves at a six-month interval. At Wave 1, a large community sample (N = 1,253; 58.2 % females; age = 36.8 years [SD ± 14.1]) participated in the study, and at Wave 2, 78.1 % of the starting sample completed the follow-up assessment. Results from the bidirectional CLPA showed that adaptive MIHBs at Wave 1 were significantly associated with lower negative and positive meta-SMUs at Wave 2. In contrast, maladaptive MIHBs were only associated with higher negative meta-SMUs at Wave 2. Also, negative meta-SMUs predicted an increase in PSMU six months later, whereas it was non-significant for positive meta-SMUs. Analyses of bidirectional indirect pathways demonstrated that adaptive MIHBs were indirectly related to lower PSMU through reduced negative metacognitions, while maladaptive MIHBs were indirectly related to higher PSMU through elevated negative metacognitions. Multi-group analyses established full longitudinal measurement and structural invariance across gender. The findings underscore the potential role of humor-related metacognitive pathways in the maintenance of PSMU, suggesting that humor-based psychotherapeutic approaches warrant further investigation
What about the family in intrafamilial child sexual abuse? There is significantly more familial dysfunction in families with intrafamilial child sexual abuse than in other families
No full text
Devolution and local government reorganisation
No full textThe English Devolution and Community Empowerment Bill formerly called the “Devolution and Local Government Reorganisation Bill” is currently going through Parliament. This is a presentation about its two main components:
Devolves Powers from central to local government via elected Mayors and Combined Authorities
Reorganises local government in two tier areas of government into a single unitary tier (Reconfiguration of existing structures and responsibilities
PanForest: predicting genes in genomes using random forests
No full textMotivation: The presence or absence of some genes in a genome can influence whether other genes are likely to be present or absent. Understanding these gene co-occurrence and avoidance patterns reveals fundamental principles of genome organisation, with applications ranging from evolutionary reconstruction to rational design of synthetic genomes.
Implementations: PanForest, presented here, uses random forest classifiers to predict the presence and absence of genes in genomes from the set of other genes present. Performance statistics output by PanForest reveal how predictable each gene’s presence or absence is, based on the presence or absence of other genes in the genome. Further, PanForest produces statistics indicating the importance of each gene in predicting the presence or absence of each other gene. The PanForest software can run serially or in parallel, thereby facilitating the analysis of pangenomes at Network of Life scale.
Results: A pangenome of 12,741 accessory genes in 1,000 Escherichia coli genomes was analysed in around 5 hours using 8 processors. To demonstrate PanForest’s utility, we present a case study and show that certain genes associated with resistance to antimicrobial drugs reliably predict the presence or absence of other genes associated with resistance to the same drug. Further, we highlight several associations between those genes and others not known to be associated with antimicrobial resistance (AMR), or associated with resistance to other drugs. We envisage PanForest’s use in studies from multiple disciplines concerning the dynamics of gene distributions in pangenomes ranging from biomedical science and synthetic biology to molecular ecolog
