A refill for the brain mineralocorticoid receptor: The benefit of cortisol add-on to dexamethasone therapy

Endocrinology, Early Release.


http://ift.tt/2hmnZKh

17β-HSD type 12-like is responsible for maturation-inducing hormone synthesis during oocyte maturation in masu salmon

Endocrinology, Early Release.


http://ift.tt/2hxjCdo

Diet polyphenol curcumin stimulates hepatic Fgf21 production and restores its sensitivity in high fat diet fed male mice

Endocrinology, Early Release.


http://ift.tt/2hmoBPL

Gestational Hyperandrogenism in Developmental Programming

Endocrinology, Early Release.


http://ift.tt/2hxn87e

Silencing Med12 Gene Reduces Proliferation of Human Leiomyoma Cells Mediated via Wnt/β-Catenin Signaling Pathway

Endocrinology, Early Release.


http://ift.tt/2hmuMU8

Visual Context Enhanced: The Joint Contribution of Iconic Gestures and Visible Speech to Degraded Speech Comprehension

Purpose

This study investigated whether and to what extent iconic co-speech gestures contribute to information from visible speech to enhance degraded speech comprehension at different levels of noise-vocoding. Previous studies of the contributions of these 2 visual articulators to speech comprehension have only been performed separately.

Method

Twenty participants watched videos of an actress uttering an action verb and completed a free-recall task. The videos were presented in 3 speech conditions (2-band noise-vocoding, 6-band noise-vocoding, clear), 3 multimodal conditions (speech + lips blurred, speech + visible speech, speech + visible speech + gesture), and 2 visual-only conditions (visible speech, visible speech + gesture).

Results

Accuracy levels were higher when both visual articulators were present compared with 1 or none. The enhancement effects of (a) visible speech, (b) gestural information on top of visible speech, and (c) both visible speech and iconic gestures were larger in 6-band than 2-band noise-vocoding or visual-only conditions. Gestural enhancement in 2-band noise-vocoding did not differ from gestural enhancement in visual-only conditions.

Conclusions

When perceiving degraded speech in a visual context, listeners benefit more from having both visual articulators present compared with 1. This benefit was larger at 6-band than 2-band noise-vocoding, where listeners can benefit from both phonological cues from visible speech and semantic cues from iconic gestures to disambiguate speech.

http://ift.tt/2hwmM0B

Propositional Density in Spoken and Written Language of Czech-Speaking Patients With Mild Cognitive Impairment

Purpose

Propositional density (PD) is a measure of content richness in language production that declines in normal aging and more profoundly in dementia. The present study aimed to develop a PD scoring system for Czech and use it to compare PD in language productions of older people with amnestic mild cognitive impairment (aMCI) and control participants matched on age, gender, and education.

Method

Groups of patients with aMCI and cognitively healthy control participants (N = 20 each) provided short spoken and written language samples. Two samples were elicited for each modality, 1 describing recent events and 1 describing childhood memories. Series of neuropsychological tests were administered. The groups were compared using t-tests and the relations between measures using correlation coefficients.

Results

PD was lower in spoken productions of patients with aMCI, compared with control participants, but only in language samples using remote memories. PD in these samples was related to verbal fluency and education but not to working memory. PD in written samples did not differ between participants with aMCI and control participants.

Conclusions

PD in spoken language reflects the cognitive decline in people with aMCI, but the effect is relatively mild. The results support the existing findings that PD is related to verbal fluency.

http://ift.tt/2huk7qP