Echoic Research Articles

Sonographic evaluation of solitary thyroid nodule with cytopathological correlation

Background: Nodular thyroid disease is a common health problem affecting women affected more frequently than men. Benign conditions like simple thyroid cyst, iodine deficiency disorder, chronic inflammatory disease of thyroid (like Hashimoto?s thyroiditis) as well as malignancy of different grades (ranging from well differentiated papillary carcinoma to high grade follicular neoplasm) can present with thyroid nodules. Differentiation between two entities based on clinical and biochemical ground alone is hardly possible and here comes the role of high resolution ultrasonography. Because of superficial location USG can identify normal thyroid anatomy and pathologic conditions with remarkable clarity. Based on sonologic features it is possible to predict whether a nodule is malignant or not and hence whether follow-up is sufficient or more invasive procedure is imperative. Materials & Methods: Fifty sequential adult patients of 15-60years of age presenting with nodular thyroid disease were studied over the period of one and half years (January 2016 to June 2017). Specific USG criteria were used to characterize the nodules so that a probable diagnosis could be made. Sonological diagnoses then compared with cytological results to conclude role of USG to analyse nodular thyroid disease. Result & Analysis: 50 patients were studied with a mean age of 37.4 years. Benign lesions constitute the majority (total 43 cases) four patients were diagnosed as having papillary carcinoma & three as case of follicular neoplasm. Most of the patients presented with long standing painless palpable thyroid swelling. Majority of malignant thyroid nodules presented as solitary hypoechoic solid nodules with intranodular vascularity. On contrary benign lesions were mainly iso or hyper echoic, multiple or solitary, well margined nodules with perinodular vascularity. Cervical lymphadenopathy & micro calcification were found almost exclusively in papillary carcinoma, whereas peripheral egg shell calcification &comet tail artifacts were seen only in hyperplastic nodules. Conclusion: Nodular thyroid disease was found to be of female predominance with benign causes outnumbered malignancy. USG assessment helped assess characteristics of thyroid nodules to reach a provisional diagnosis. We had taken into account parameters and among them taller than wide shape, intranodular vascularity with or with-out perinodular component and marked hypoechogenicity emerged as most useful.

STATUS OF SPOKEN ENGLISH IN GOVERNMENT SCHOOLS OF RAJASTHAN

A language is a systematic means of communication by the use of sounds or conventional symbols. It is system of communicating ideas and feelings using sounds, gesture, signs or marks. Rajasthan is basically a Hindi speaking state, in government offices and schools Hindi is main language, very few people use written and spoken form of English. Those who use English are not efficiently using it. Therefore it is an urgent requirement to study status of English pronunciation andalso to suggest strategies for improving English standard (Pronunciation) in government schools of Rajasthan, here people speaks many languages and dialects. So, the correct pronunciation of the words is a major problem in teaching second language because the pronunciation is greatly influenced by the regional language and dialect. The sounds of words which are not used in the mother tongue, is difficult to pronounce correctly. The teacher should provide appropriate situation and opportunities to the students by imitating the words, by using lingua phone and language laboratory, drill techniques in classroom the skill of correct pronunciation can be developed among the students. This paper reflectsthe prevailing condition and status of English pronunciation in government schools of Rajasthan.

Hearing Loss and Misunderstandings

Hearing health professionals have a key role in making old age less hazardous for patients who are ill and seeking medical help. Older people are more likely to have chronic diseases, physical or psychological decline, and regular contact with a range of health professionals in hospitals and medical facilities. They may also have hearing loss—a disability associated with older patients—that may contribute to suboptimal medical treatment. Unfortunately, older people also are at increased risk of medication errors, some so serious as to require casualty department evaluation or inpatient admission. Premature readmission of elderly patients is common and costly. One in five Medicare beneficiaries is readmitted within 30 days, costing more than $26 billion per year (JAMA Intern Med. 2014;174[7]:1095 http://bit.ly/2uD3L55). A 2014 study reported cognitive status to be an overriding factor that correlates with health literacy, physical health, and depression in older adults; however, participants with hearing impairment were excluded from this study (Health Serv Res. 2014;49[4]:1249 http://bit.ly/2uCNixy). Researchers working with the Vanderbilt Inpatient Cohort Study found that about half of the elderly patients in their study experienced discharge medication errors (BMC Health Serv Res. 2014;14:10 http://bit.ly/2uCORvq;Mayo Clin Proc. 2014;89[8]:1042 http://bit.ly/2uCEdVT). Hearing-impaired patients were also excluded from this study. To date, there remains a lack of well-developed research on hearing-impaired patients’ understanding of medical consultations, investigations, and treatments of health conditions unrelated to their hearing loss (Ann Fam Med. 2008;6[5]:441 http://bit.ly/2uD8XWz). Professionals may be unwise to assume that patients have an accurate understanding of their care. Patients (including practicing physicians) are reluctant to question their treating clinician. While written materials may adequately supplement a clinical interview, the quality of these materials has been questioned. Furthermore, one-third of older adults in England reported problems in reading and understanding written health information (BMJ. 2012;344:e1602http://bit.ly/2vNpqG5). As medical educators, we wondered if it was possible to train our students differently to reduce medication errors when managing elderly patients. To answer this, we had to disentangle hearing impairment from other possible factors like cognitive decline. We embarked on a study involving a large number of young, intelligent, assertive, and hearing-impaired adults. This may be the first qualitative investigation of words commonly misheard by hearing-impaired patients at clinical consultations in a primary care or hospital setting (J Patient Saf. 2017 http://bit.ly/2uCJ5u4). We also looked at contextual factors that contributed to miscommunication and medical errors. Fifty-nine percent of the respondents said they have misheard a physician/nurse in a hospital; 60 percent identified these in relation to consultation content; 33 percent misheard words; 21 percent misinterpreted statements like diagnosis and medication details; 22 percent indicated physician/nurse-patient communication failures; and 19 percent noted failures to initiate/maintain eye contact and wearing surgical masks while speaking, preventing patients from lip reading. Concerning common words that were misheard or misinterpreted, 23 percent identified phonological similarity such as similar sounding words and numbers, while seven percent noted discrimination of unvoiced consonants. Similar findings emerged in community clinics. Our findings underscore the need to identify hearing-impaired patients and augment communication with visual aids and other strategies like lip reading.Figure: Patrick Henn, MB, BCh, BAOFigure: Simon Smith, BSc, MScFigure: Colm O. Tuathaigh, PhD

The Influence of Arabic on the Kurdish Language Book (DOO Rashta) Model

This paper studies the influence of the Arabic language on the Kurdish language, to what extent the Kurdish language is influenced by the Arabic language and the forms of this linguistic influence. It is well-known that the non-Arabic speaking Islamic peoples were much influenced by the language of the Holy Quran. This is so because they need to understand the teachings of Islam. The aim of the present study is to reveal the forms in which the Kurdish language is influenced by the Arabic language and the forms in which Arabic words are used in the Kurdish language. This influence is manifested in three issues:
 
 The influence of Arabic on the Kurdish language by vocabularies which have retained their Arabic morphological and phonological structure.
 Its influence on the Kurdish language by vocabularies which obey the grammar of the Kurdish language, i.e. they are attached to Kurdish pronouns and used in the negative and interrogative according to the rules of the Kurdish language.
 Its influence on the Kurdish language by replacing some sounds in the Arabic words by other sounds consistent with the linguistic use of the Kurdish language. The reason behind that is the proximity or the sameness of the place of articulation.
 
 Its influence on the Kurdish language by replacing some sounds in the Arabic words by other sounds consistent with the linguistic use of the Kurdish language due to the features of the sound.

STRATEGIES FOR ENGLISH PRONUNCIATION

Rajasthan is basically a Hindi speaking state, in government offices and schools Hindi is main language, very few people use written and spoken form of English. Those who use English are not efficiently using it. Therefore it is an urgent requirement to study status of English pronunciation and also to suggest strategies for improving English standard (Pronunciation) in government schools of Rajasthan, here people speaks many languages and dialects. So, the correct pronunciation of the words is a major problem in teaching second language because the pronunciation is greatly influenced by the regional language and dialect. The sounds of words which are not used in the mother tongue, is difficult to pronounce correctly. The teacher should provide appropriate situation and opportunities to the students by imitating the words, by using lingua phone and language laboratory, drill technique in classroom the skill of correct pronunciation can be developed among the students. This paper will suggest various strategies for correct pronunciation of words in government schools of Rajasthan. Although the content given is of basic nature but should necessary be taken seriously by them. In order to improve correct pronunciation and their by help in upbringing the standard of English language in government schools of Rajasthan. The faculty of speech is a natural gift. Education plays an important role to polish and improve the speech in our schools. It provides various opportunities to its natural development. So the teacher is an ideal model before the students. Therefore an English teacher should be more careful to his own pronunciation for lying down the correct speech habits of his students.

On the dissociation between reaction time and response duration as a function of lexical and sublexical reading: An examination of phonetic decoding and computational models

ABSTRACTNeurobiological models of reading account for two ways in which orthography is converted to phonology: (1) familiar words, particularly those with exceptional spelling-sound mappings (e.g., shoe) access their whole-word lexical representations in the ventral visual stream, and (2) orthographically unfamiliar words, particularly those with regular spelling-sound mappings (i.e., pseudohomophones [PHs], which are orthographically novel but sound like real words; e.g., shue) are phonetically decoded via sublexical processing in the dorsal visual stream. The present study used a naming task in order to compare naming reaction time (RT) and response duration (RD) of exception and regular words to their PH counterparts. We replicated our earlier findings with words, and extended them to PH phonetic decoding by showing a similar effect on RT and RD of matched PHs. Given that the shorter RDs for exception words can be attributed to the benefit of whole-word processing in the orthographic word system, and the longer RTs for exception words to the conflict with phonetic decoding, our PH results demonstrate that phonetic decoding also involves top-down feedback from phonological lexical representations (e.g., activated by shue) to the orthographic representations of the corresponding correct word (e.g., shoe). Two computational models were tested for their ability to account for these effects: the DRC and the CDP+. The CDP+ fared best as it was capable of simulating both the regularity and stimulus type effect on RT for both word and PH identification, although not their over-additive interaction. Our results demonstrate that both lexical reading and phonetic decoding elicit a regularity dissociation between RT and RD that provides important constraints to all models of reading, and that phonetic decoding results in top-down feedback that bolsters the orthographic lexical reading process.

日本語母語大学生・大学院生における英単語音声の分節化 : 英単語の記憶スパンを手掛かりとして

日本語母語大学生・大学院生における英単語音声の分節化 : 英単語の記憶スパンを手掛かりとして

Using sublexical priming to enhance brand name phonetic symbolism effects in young children

We examine whether phonetic symbolism effects are conditional on the development of phonological awareness (an ability to recognize sounds in words). Further, we introduce sublexical priming as a means to enhance phonetic symbolism effects. Across four experiments, we demonstrate that product evaluations, consistent with phonetic symbolism theory, are more (less) likely when a child is older (younger). Specifically, older children who can recognize sounds in words perceive back vowel brand names (e.g., Vopoz) as slower, heavier, larger, smoother, creamier, chewier, and thicker than brand names with front vowel sounds (e.g., Vipiz). In addition, we show that phonetic symbolism effects manifest when younger children (low in phonological awareness) are primed to focus on parts of a word/s, which we term sublexical priming. We present embedded tasks and chunking of brand names as strategic communication techniques that can be implemented as sublexical primes to enhance phonetic symbolism effects in younger children.

CONSONANTAL ORGANIZATION IN ENGLISH POETIC DISCOURSE: TOPOLOGICAL PERSPECTIVE

The aesthetic reflection of the world in language finds its expression in the oldest, phonetic aspect of the word’s meaning. Phonetic timbre is the distinctive quality in the sounds of words. A marked consistency of texture in poetic discourse is achieved by alliteration. There is a growing interest in its aesthetic measure. The aim of this article is to suggest, following G. Mazzola, a conceptual framework for consonantal analysis of poems in terms of the category of topological spaces. The topological space of the line is viewed as made of phonetic toposes. They include a consonant sound and its morphism. A consonant sound carries substance and is called “denotator”. The conceptual form of denotator consists of Name, Type, and Coordinator. The name of the consonant represents the phonetic theme: the n phonetic theme embraces high timbre consonants, while the m phonetic theme includes low timbre consonants. Two types of consonance are singled out – complete consonance and incomplete consonance. The results of the analysis of poetic discourse show that complete consonance coordination has two forms: simple morphism and compound morphism. In case of incomplete consonance the morphism is intensified or lax. Phonetic topology may prove to be an effective mechanism in the study of “orchestration of voice” in poetic discourse as a socio-cultural phenomenon.

Clinical and Sonographic Features of Mammary Paget's Disease.

Objective To summarize the clinical and sonographic features of mammary Paget's disease (MPD). Methods Totally 34 female patients with pathologically confirmed MPD were retrospectively recruited. According to diagnosis,the clinical data and sonographic findings were reviewed and analyzed. Results Among these 34 patients,7 patients had single MPD; in the remaining 27 patients,16 were accompanied by invasive ductal carcinoma (IDC),7 by ductal carcinoma in situ (DCIS),3 by both IDC and DCIS,and 1 by other pathologic types of carcinoma. Twenty-four patients presented with typical clinical features of MPD,whereas 10 patients had no typical features of MPD. Among the 24 patients with typical clinical features,ultrasound examinations showed that 11 had echoic abnormality in nipple-areolar complex,14 had lesions of breast,and 14 had microcalcifications. Among the 10 patients without typical clinical features,ultrasound examinations revealed echoic abnormality in nipple-areolar complex in 3 cases,breast lesions in 9 cases,and microcalcifications in 6 cases. Among the 14 patients with echoic abnormality in nipple-areolar complex,all of them presented as rich blood flow in nipple detected by color Doppler ultrasonography. Conclusions The main clinical feature of MPD is abnormalities in nipple-areolar complex. Sonography can recognize the echoic abnormalities of nipple and lesions of breast. Sonographer should be careful of the nipple-areolar complex when mass is found in breast.

High-frequency ultrasound imaging-guided wedge resection for the treatment of paraurethral duct dilatation following gonococcal paraurethral duct infection in 11 male patients

Objective To evaluate therapeutic effects of wedge resection on male paraurethral duct dilatation following gonococcal paraurethral duct infection. Methods With the aid of high-frequency ultrasound images, 11 male patients with paraurethral duct dilatation following gonococcal paraurethral duct infection were treated with wedge resection. The data were collected, including the surgical duration, amount of bleeding during the surgery, period of wound healing and complications. If the ostium beside the external urethral orifice disappeared within 4 weeks after the surgery, there was no discharge from the ostium with pressure, and no tubular echoic area was observed by high-frequency ultrasound imaging, the patient was considered to be recovered. If none of the above three conditions could be met, the surgical treatment was considered to be ineffective. Results The average surgical duration was 19.19 ± 2.71 minutes (range, 14-23 minutes) , the average amount of bleeding during the surgery was 11.09 ± 2.07 ml (range, 8-14 ml) , and the average period of wound healing was 14.91 ± 1.45 days (range, 13-17 days) . Of the 11 patients, 10 were cured, and 1 showed no response. No complications were observed in any of the 11 patients, and no defects formed in the glans penis. Conclusion Wedge resection is a kind of effective therapy for paraurethral duct dilatation following gonococcal paraurethral duct infection in males. Key words: Neisseria gonorrhoeae; Male; Treatment outcome; Wedge resection; Paraurethral duct dilatation; High frequency ultrasound

Slanted beats, enchanted communities: Pavement's early phrase rhythm as indie narrative

AbstractPrevious studies of indie music from the 1980s and 1990s have noted that it uses a number of stylistic markers – involving production values, singing style instrumentation and lyrical themes – to convey difference from a perceived mainstream. However, the ideal of difference also influences other aspects of songwriting. As a case study, this article examines early songs by the highly regarded indie band Pavement in which irregularity in phrasing and hypermeter supports a narrative of differentiation. Recurring strategies for creating irregularity include thwarting expected closure at the ends of phrases, using the sounds of words to project conflicting cues for grouping boundaries and creating highly irregular hypermetric lengths. These metric and phrasing devices, when heard in the context of songs, often have vivid narrative or expressive implications.

Hearing Impairment and the Amelioration of Avoidable Medical Error: A Cross-Sectional Survey.

Hearing loss contributes to suboptimal medical treatment. We investigated the nature and magnitude of potential health-care harm of hearing loss alone on a patient's understanding of medical consultations, investigations, and treatments of health conditions unrelated to their hearing loss. A cross-sectional, questionnaire-based design of a convenience sample of students with hearing loss, registered with the institutional disability support service in 8 Irish and 15 UK third-level institutions. Content analysis of open-ended item responses identified and coded emergent themes. Closed-ended questionnaire items recorded demographic and clinically relevant characteristics. Ninety-five responses were received and analyzed. Fifty-six (58.9%) indicated "yes" to mishearing a physician/nurse in a hospital. Approximately 60.7% identified this in relation to consultation content; 33.9% mishearing; and 21.4% misinterpreting what was said, including diagnosis, guidelines and advice, and matters relating to medications. Approximately 22.3% indicated physician/nurse-patient communication failures; 19.6% identified failure to initiate/maintain eye contact, turning away from the patient, speaking while wearing surgical masks, excluding the possibility of lip reading. Approximately 7.1% identified speaking in too low a volume or too fast. Concerning common words misheard or misinterpreted, 23.2% identified phonological similarity such as similar sounding words and numbers, 7.4% discrimination of unvoiced consonants. Similar findings emerged in GP clinics. Most hearing-impaired students experienced difficulty in understanding health-care professionals in a hospital and general practice setting. This underscores the importance for health-care providers to identify hearing-impaired patients and to augment communication using visual aids, a quite environment and optimizing lip reading communication.

Novel Word Learning in Bilingual and Monolingual Infants: Evidence for a Bilingual Advantage.

Previous studies revealing that monolingual and bilingual infants learn similar sounding words with comparable success are largely based on prior investigations involving single-feature changes in the onset consonant of a word. There have been no investigations of bilingual infants' abilities to learn similar sounding words differentiated by vowels. In the current study, 18-month-old bilingual and monolingual infants (n=90) were compared on their sensitivity to a vowel change when learning the meanings of words. Bilingual infants learned similar sounding words differing by a vowel contrast, whereas monolingual English- and Mandarin-learning infants did not. Findings are discussed in terms of early constraints on novel word learning in bilingual and monolingual infants.

Синкретсемия и звукоподражательная номинация

Синкретсемия и звукоподражательная номинация

Visualizing Video Sounds With Sound Word Animation to Enrich User Experience

Sound information in videos plays an important role in shaping the user experience. When sound is not accessible in videos, text captions can provide sound information. However, conventional text captions are not very expressive for nonverbal sounds because they are designed to visualize speech sounds. Here, we present a framework to automatically transform nonverbal video sounds into animated sound words and position them near the sound source objects in the video for visualization. This provides natural visual representation of nonverbal sounds with rich information about the sound category and dynamics. To evaluate how the animated sound words generated by our framework affect the user experience, we implemented an experimental system and conducted a user study involving over 300 participants from an online crowdsourcing service. The results of the user study show that the animated sound words can effectively and naturally visualize the dynamics of sound while clarifying the position of the sound source as well as contribute to making video-watching more enjoyable and increasing the visual impact of videos.

Can a Word Sound Like a Shape Before You Have Seen It? Sound-Shape Mapping Prior to Conscious Awareness

Nonarbitrary mappings between sound and shape (i.e., the bouba-kiki effect) have been shown across different cultures and early in development; however, the level of processing at which this effect arises remains unclear. Here we show that the mapping occurs prior to conscious awareness of the visual stimuli. Under continuous flash suppression, congruent stimuli (e.g., “kiki” inside an angular shape) broke through to conscious awareness faster than incongruent stimuli. This was true even when we trained people to pair unfamiliar letters with auditory word forms, a result showing that the effect was driven by the phonology, not the visual features, of the letters. Furthermore, visibility thresholds of the shapes decreased when they were preceded by a congruent auditory word form in a masking paradigm. Taken together, our results suggest that sound-shape mapping can occur automatically prior to conscious awareness of visual shapes, and that sensory congruence facilitates conscious awareness of a stimulus being present.

Эффективность использования метода фоносемантического анализа при переводе японской звукоизобразительной лексики на русский язык (на материале японских поэтических текстов хайку)

The article is devoted to consideration of efficiency of the method of phonosematic analysis in the translation of sound descriptive vocabulary from Japanese into Russian in the most capacious genre of Japanese poetry - haiku. The relevance of the topic is dictated by the lack of clearly defined principles of translation of sound descriptive lexis in general and by the translators ignoring the ability of phonetic units and the sound organization of the text to act as a carrier of emotional content in particular. The article shows that the traditional principles of translating non-equivalent vocabulary, which includes sound descriptive words, are not effective in the case of the Japanese language, mostly because of the peculiarities of Oriental lyric poetry, rooted in the philosophy of Buddhism, Zen (chin. Chan ) and the national world view, which, in turn, is based on imagery and innuendo. On the material of poetic works by the famous Japanese poet Issa Kobayashi (1763-1828), full of onomatopoetical vocabulary, the features of the semantic structure of sound descriptive words are identified, phonetic means are determined, not only relevant for the adequate representation of this structure, but also for ensuring the unity of form and meaning of sound descriptive words.

Who is the victim? When the addresser of the echoed utterance and the target of the irony differ

AbstractThe goal of this contribution is to explore the relationship between the target of certain ironic instances and the source of their echoic mentions (Sperber and Wilson, “Irony and the use-mention distinction,” in Peter Cole’s

The education plans for onomatopoeia·mimic words by using combinative relationship - To the intermediate stage of Chinese students for the object -

The education plans for onomatopoeia·mimic words by using combinative relationship - To the intermediate stage of Chinese students for the object -