Linguistic experience alters an individual's perception of speech. We here provide evidence of the effects of language experience at the neural level from two magnetoencephalography (MEG) studies that compare adult American and Japanese listeners' phonetic processing. The experimental stimuli were American English /ra/ and /la/ syllables, phonemic in English but not in Japanese. In Experiment 1, the control stimuli were /ba/ and /wa/ syllables, phonemic in both languages; in Experiment 2, they were non-speech replicas of /ra/ and /la/. The behavioral and neuromagnetic results showed that Japanese listeners were less sensitive to the phonemic /r-l/ difference than American listeners. Furthermore, processing non-native speech sounds recruited significantly greater brain resources in both hemispheres and required a significantly longer period of brain activation in two regions, the superior temporal area and the inferior parietal area. The control stimuli showed no significant differences except that the duration effect in the superior temporal cortex also applied to the non-speech replicas. We argue that early exposure to a particular language produces a "neural commitment" to the acoustic properties of that language and that this neural commitment interferes with foreign language processing, making it less efficient.
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http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.neuroimage.2005.02.040 | DOI Listing |
Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A
January 2025
Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA 02139.
Protein language models (PLMs) have demonstrated impressive success in modeling proteins. However, general-purpose "foundational" PLMs have limited performance in modeling antibodies due to the latter's hypervariable regions, which do not conform to the evolutionary conservation principles that such models rely on. In this study, we propose a transfer learning framework called Antibody Mutagenesis-Augmented Processing (AbMAP), which fine-tunes foundational models for antibody-sequence inputs by supervising on antibody structure and binding specificity examples.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFPLoS One
January 2025
Department of Biomedical and Health Informatics, Tsui Laboratory, Children's Hospital of Philadelphia, Philadelphia, PA, United States of America.
Semantical text understanding holds significant importance in natural language processing (NLP). Numerous datasets, such as Quora Question Pairs (QQP), have been devised for this purpose. In our previous study, we developed a Siamese Convolutional Neural Network (S-CNN) that achieved an F1 score of 82.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFPLoS One
January 2025
Department of Clinical and Molecular Medicine, Faculty of Medicine and Health Sciences, Norwegian University of Science and Technology, Trondheim, Norway.
Associations between variants in the FTO locus and plasma concentrations of appetite related hormones are inconsistent, and might not work in a dose dependent fashion in people with obesity. Moreover, it is relevant to report meal related plasma concentrations of these hormones in persons with obesity given the growing interest in their pharmacological potential in obesity therapy. We find it clinically relevant to examine associations between the SNP rs9939609 genotypes and homeostatic appetite regulation in individuals with BMI ≥35 kg/m2.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFPediatr Phys Ther
January 2025
Department of Physical Therapy, Ellmer College of Health Sciences, Macon & Joan Brock Virginia Health Sciences, Old Dominion University, Norfolk, Virginia (Dr Khurana); Department of Pediatrics, Kasturba Medical College, Manipal Academy of Higher Education, Manipal, India (Dr Lewis); School of Exercise Science, Old Dominion University, Norfolk, Virginia (Dr Russell); Sykes Chair of Pediatric Physical Therapy, Health, and Development, University of Southern California, Division of Biokinesiology and Physical Therapy, Los Angeles, California (Dr Dusing); Department of Physiotherapy, Manipal College of Health Professions, Manipal Academy of Higher Education, Manipal, India (Dr Krishna Rao).
Purpose: Investigate the effect of structured neonatal physical therapy program (SNP) on neurodevelopmental outcomes of moderate and late preterm (MLP) infants.
Methods: Sixty MLP infants were randomly allocated to usual care (UC) or SNP. A previous publication reported the effect of neonatal component of SNP at hospital discharge.
Medicine (Baltimore)
January 2025
Division of Hematology/Oncology, Department of Pediatrics, Chang Gung Memorial Hospital, Chang Gung University, Taoyuan, Taiwan.
The increasing popularity of medical tourism has sparked interest from policymakers, researchers, and the media. Factors influencing medical tourism include service quality, availability, economics, and cultural differences. This study aims to analyze the key factors that influence destination selection for medical tourists.
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