Versions Of Words Research Articles

Assessment of Factors Associated with Adherence to Antiretroviral Therapy among HIV Patients at Kampala International University Teaching Hospital in Ishaka, Uganda

HIV has increasingly become a chronic, manageable disease due to the introduction of antiretroviral therapies (ARTs). For the effectiveness of antiretroviral therapy, a high level of adherence is required. This study therefore seeks to assess the adherence level and the influence of its determinants in HIV patients on antiretroviral therapy at the Kampala International University Teaching Hospital (KIUTH) HIV clinic in Ishaka, Uganda. Quantitative cross-section study approach was conducted to assess the factors associated with adherence to a-ntiretroviral therapy among HIV patients at KIUTH in Ishaka, Uganda. Data was collected using an interviewer-administered questionnaire in 150 respondents in this study. The qualitative data collected was statistically analysed and documented using Microsoft Excel and Word version 2019, which were then analyzed. The analysed data was presented in the form of tables and graphs, which formed the basis for discussion and conclusion. Of a total of 150 clients interviewed, equal proportions of 26% were in the age groups of 40–49 and 50–59 years, with a mean age of 46 years. The majority (65%) were female, with most (45%) being Anglicans, followed by Catholics (32%), Muslims (14%), and other religions (9%). Nearly half (45.1%) of the respondents were married. About 7% had tertiary education, while 37% had completed the ordinary level of high school. Nearly half (47%) knew the name of the ART they were taking, while 17% did not. Less than a third (26.7%) did not know the name of the ART drug they were taking. A large proportion (93%) stated that ART prevents mother-to-child transmission of infection, while 7% reported that they did not know. Nearly all (96%) respondents knew HIV could be controlled by ART. The majority (87%) stated that taking ART prevents disease progression, and 63% opined that missing ART drugs can lead to transmission of the disease. Overall, adherence to ART was 39% while non-adherence was 61%. In conclusion, the study discovered a high degree of awareness but a low level of adherence to ART among patients living with HIV. Forgetfulness, financial level, employment status, and knowledge of the benefits of the intervention are all important factors in nonadherence among some HIV patients. As a result, ART clinics should increase the level of education provided to customers to encourage patients to take complete responsibility for their health status. Keywords: Adherence, Antiretroviral Therapy, HIV, AIDS

Pengaruh Viral Marketing Terhadap Keputusan Pembelian Poco Smartphone

Viral Marketing is the digital version of Word of Mouth marketing, involving the creation of videos, advertisements and other marketing content that is so contagious that customers will search for it or share it with friends. Poco Smartphone is a product that implements viral marketing activities by launching a product that is different from the others. The purpose of this research is to determine viral marketing, purchasing decisions, and the magnitude of the influence of viral marketing on Poco Smartphone purchasing decisions. The theories used in this research are marketing communication theory, viral marketing theory, social media theory, and Purchasing Decision theory. This research is quantitative research with a survey method and the data collection technique used was using a questionnaire. The population in this study was 2464 members of the Poco X3|X3 PRO|X3 GT Indonesia Facebook group and the sample used was 96 respondents who were calculated using the Taro Yamane formula. The sample data collection technique in this study used simple random sampling. This research uses simple linear regression data analysis techniques. The results of this research show that there is an influence between 1) viral marketing providing good results from statements in each dimension of messengers, messages and environment with an average gain of 4.19. 2) purchasing decisions provide good results from statements for each dimension such as Problem Recognition, Information Search, Alternative Evaluation, Purchase Decision, and Post-Purchase Behavior with an average of 4.26. 3) The influence of viral marketing on Poco smartphone purchasing decisions has a high level of influence, as can be seen from the large correlation value (r) of 0.866 and the R Square value of 0.749, which means that variable X (Viral Marketing) is influenced by variable Y (Purchasing Decision) of 74 .9%, while the remaining 25.1% is influenced by other factors outside of this research.

SOME QUESTIONS ABOUT THE USE OF TERMS AND PHRASES

Since our country entered the twenty-first century, new words related to the accelerated development of the economy, politics, finance, science, technology and other industries have entered and become widely used in our daily life. In addition, thanks to independence, the Republic of Kazakhstan has established close ties with advanced states through the conclusion of contracts, agreements, contracts, and the progressive step towards a market economy has introduced many innovations. Thanks to this, hundreds of terms and phrases have also undergone significant changes. World civilization and scientific progress are developing very rapidly and have a significant impact on language and culture, art and literature, and other spheres of the state. In this regard, the article focuses on some topical issues, mainly related to the language, especially the quality of the translation language. Many legislative acts state that obsolete words and phrases are used along with new ones, although terms that have been used in different ways, or, depending on the passage of time, fall out of everyday use. The point is that the relevant state bodies face urgent and large-scale tasks, in particular, it is necessary to take a bold step towards the development and discussion of draft legislative acts in the state language, as well as to improve the quality of translation of legal texts. The most effective ways to achieve this are suggested. The article notes that when amendments and additions are made to legislative acts, the translation of new versions of terms and words has become differentiated and gradually adjusted, and this trend will continue. The author lists them, noting that there are all prerequisites for this, which should be paid close attention to by the relevant authorities and responsible persons and get down to business.

Modality-Specific Perceptual Learning of Vocoded Auditory versus Lipread Speech: Different Effects of Prior Information.

Traditionally, speech perception training paradigms have not adequately taken into account the possibility that there may be modality-specific requirements for perceptual learning with auditory-only (AO) versus visual-only (VO) speech stimuli. The study reported here investigated the hypothesis that there are modality-specific differences in how prior information is used by normal-hearing participants during vocoded versus VO speech training. Two different experiments, one with vocoded AO speech (Experiment 1) and one with VO, lipread, speech (Experiment 2), investigated the effects of giving different types of prior information to trainees on each trial during training. The training was for four ~20 min sessions, during which participants learned to label novel visual images using novel spoken words. Participants were assigned to different types of prior information during training: Word Group trainees saw a printed version of each training word (e.g., "tethon"), and Consonant Group trainees saw only its consonants (e.g., "t_th_n"). Additional groups received no prior information (i.e., Experiment 1, AO Group; Experiment 2, VO Group) or a spoken version of the stimulus in a different modality from the training stimuli (Experiment 1, Lipread Group; Experiment 2, Vocoder Group). That is, in each experiment, there was a group that received prior information in the modality of the training stimuli from the other experiment. In both experiments, the Word Groups had difficulty retaining the novel words they attempted to learn during training. However, when the training stimuli were vocoded, the Word Group improved their phoneme identification. When the training stimuli were visual speech, the Consonant Group improved their phoneme identification and their open-set sentence lipreading. The results are considered in light of theoretical accounts of perceptual learning in relationship to perceptual modality.

TRANSLINGUALISM ACROSS LANGUAGES: A TEXTUAL ANALYSIS OF LANGUAGES INTERACTION

The myth of a pure form of language is so deep-rooted in many people that, even though they accept the existence of different languages, they cannot accept the reality that there is no language that is fully independent of other languages. People believe that there is language contamination across languages and most of the time it is their own language contaminated by others. This confirms the colonial principle of compartmentalization or distribution of languages. Even in the post-colonial era, language isolation remains a serious challenge, especially in bi/multilingual classroom settings, where learners are discouraged to translanguage or code-mesh languages. It is against this background that this paper examines adaptation of several vocabularies and concepts from other languages in developing a language, usually through merging of cultures or colonization. This study looks at examples in Southern Africa and the Philippines of existing fusion that has taken place between those languages and other surrounding languages. Therefore, this study argues that boundaries between languages are fluid - not fixed. The boundaries do not exist. They are therefore uncalled for because they destabilize the fluidity between languages, yet there is autonomous fusion between languages. We further argue that indigenization of languages can work well in translanguaged classrooms where learners are allowed to utilize indigenized versions of loan words to express ideas and concepts. This can encourage a more liberal use of language and self-expression in formal classroom settings.

Phonological processes used by Cebuano children at free play

This study aimed to identify the phonological processes used by Cebuano children at free play. There were 15 children from different age groups who were studied: first age group (1.0 - 1.6 years old); second age group (1.7 - 4.0 years old); and third age group (4.1 - 7.0 years old). The participants were grouped according to the phonological stages of Ingram and David (1989). The first age group is the first 50-word phonology stage; the second age group is the phonology of single morphemes stage; and the third age group is the completion of the phonemic inventory stage. The child-adult interactions were recorded during the child’s free play at home. The children’s utterances were then transcribed. The result showed different phonological processes that dominated in the utterances of children in each age group. The final consonant deletion was the most occurring process in the first age group; stopping came out to be the dominant process in the second age group; gliding of liquids was prevalent in the third age group. This study concluded that children’s versions of adult language words are indeed phonologically simpler. In the process of developing speech, children often use phonological deviations in their speech production.

Metamodal Coupling of Vibrotactile and Auditory Speech Processing Systems through Matched Stimulus Representations.

It has been postulated that the brain is organized by "metamodal," sensory-independent cortical modules capable of performing tasks (e.g., word recognition) in both "standard" and novel sensory modalities. Still, this theory has primarily been tested in sensory-deprived individuals, with mixed evidence in neurotypical subjects, thereby limiting its support as a general principle of brain organization. Critically, current theories of metamodal processing do not specify requirements for successful metamodal processing at the level of neural representations. Specification at this level may be particularly important in neurotypical individuals, where novel sensory modalities must interface with existing representations for the standard sense. Here we hypothesized that effective metamodal engagement of a cortical area requires congruence between stimulus representations in the standard and novel sensory modalities in that region. To test this, we first used fMRI to identify bilateral auditory speech representations. We then trained 20 human participants (12 female) to recognize vibrotactile versions of auditory words using one of two auditory-to-vibrotactile algorithms. The vocoded algorithm attempted to match the encoding scheme of auditory speech while the token-based algorithm did not. Crucially, using fMRI, we found that only in the vocoded group did trained-vibrotactile stimuli recruit speech representations in the superior temporal gyrus and lead to increased coupling between them and somatosensory areas. Our results advance our understanding of brain organization by providing new insight into unlocking the metamodal potential of the brain, thereby benefitting the design of novel sensory substitution devices that aim to tap into existing processing streams in the brain.SIGNIFICANCE STATEMENT It has been proposed that the brain is organized by "metamodal," sensory-independent modules specialized for performing certain tasks. This idea has inspired therapeutic applications, such as sensory substitution devices, for example, enabling blind individuals "to see" by transforming visual input into soundscapes. Yet, other studies have failed to demonstrate metamodal engagement. Here, we tested the hypothesis that metamodal engagement in neurotypical individuals requires matching the encoding schemes between stimuli from the novel and standard sensory modalities. We trained two groups of subjects to recognize words generated by one of two auditory-to-vibrotactile transformations. Critically, only vibrotactile stimuli that were matched to the neural encoding of auditory speech engaged auditory speech areas after training. This suggests that matching encoding schemes is critical to unlocking the brain's metamodal potential.

ON THE EFFECTIVENESS OF PARAGRAPH VECTOR MODELS IN DOCUMENT SIMILARITY ESTIMATION FOR TURKISH NEWS CATEGORIZATION

News categorization, which is a common application area of text classification, is the task of automatic annotation of news articles with predefined categories. In parallel with the rise of deep learning techniques in the field of machine learning, neural embedding models have been widely utilized to capture hidden relationships and similarities among textual representations of news articles. In this study, we approach the Turkish news categorization problem as an ad-hoc retrieval task and investigate the effectiveness of paragraph vector models to compute and utilize document-wise similarities of Turkish news articles. We propose an ensemble categorization approach that consists of three main stages, namely, document processing, paragraph vector learning, and document similarity estimation. Extensive experiments conducted on the TTC-3600 dataset reveal that the proposed system can reach up to 93.5% classification accuracy, which is a remarkable performance when compared to the baseline and state-of-the-art methods. Moreover, it is also shown that the Distributed Bag of Words version of Paragraph Vectors performs better than the Distributed Memory Model of Paragraph Vectors in terms of both accuracy and computational performance.

Baseline Conceptual-Semantic Impairment Predicts Longitudinal Treatment Effects for Anomia in Primary Progressive Aphasia and Alzheimer’s Disease

ABSTRACT Background An individual’s diagnostic subtype may fail to predict the efficacy of a given type of treatment for anomia. Classification by conceptual-semantic impairment may be more informative. Aims This study examined the effects of conceptual-semantic impairment and diagnostic subtype on anomia treatment effects in primary progressive aphasia (PPA) and Alzheimer’s disease (AD). Methods & Procedures At baseline, the picture and word versions of the Pyramids and Palm Trees and Kissing and Dancing tests were used to measure conceptual-semantic processing. Based on norming that was conducted with unimpaired older adults, participants were classified as being impaired on both the picture and word versions (i.e., modality-general conceptual-semantic impairment), the picture version (Objects or Actions) only (i.e., visual-conceptual impairment), the word version (Nouns or Verbs) only (i.e., lexical-semantic impairment), or neither the picture nor the word version (i.e., no impairment). Following baseline testing, a lexical treatment and a semantic treatment were administered to all participants. The treatment stimuli consisted of nouns and verbs that were consistently named correctly at baseline (Prophylaxis items) and/or nouns and verbs that were consistently named incorrectly at baseline (Remediation items). Naming accuracy was measured at baseline, and it was measured at three, seven, eleven, fourteen, eighteen, and twenty-one months. Outcomes & Results Compared to baseline naming performance, lexical and semantic treatments both improved naming accuracy for treated Remediation nouns and verbs. For Prophylaxis items, lexical treatment was effective for both nouns and verbs, and semantic treatment was effective for verbs, but the pattern of results was different for nouns – the effect of semantic treatment was initially nonsignificant or marginally significant, but it was significant beginning at 11 Months, suggesting that the effects of prophylactic semantic treatment may become more apparent as the disorder progresses. Furthermore, the interaction between baseline Conceptual-Semantic Impairment and the Treatment Condition (Lexical vs. Semantic) was significant for verb Prophylaxis items at 3 and 18 Months, and it was significant for noun Prophylaxis items at 14 and 18 Months. Conclusions The pattern of results suggested that individuals who have modality-general conceptual-semantic impairment at baseline are more likely to benefit from lexical treatment, while individuals who have unimpaired conceptual-semantic processing at baseline are more likely to benefit from semantic treatment as the disorder progresses. In contrast to conceptual-semantic impairment, diagnostic subtype did not typically predict the treatment effects.

Interference effect of food and emotional stimuli in Stroop-like tasks for children and adults with Prader-Willi Syndrome

ABSTRACT Interference effect of food and emotional stimuli in Stroop-like tasks for children and adults with Prader-Willi Syndrome. The aim of this work was to study the way items related to food or emotion are processed by a population known to have difficulties with dietary restriction, namely individuals with Prader-Willi Syndrome (PWS). Given the presence of intellectual disability (ID) in PWS, our experiments were designed to examine whether these difficulties were specific to PWS or linked with their ID. Two modified Stroop tasks (i.e., a food version and an emotional version) were administered to seventy-four children (aged between 6 and 16 years old) divided into three groups (one with PWS, one with ID matched on age and Intellectual Quotient (IQ), and one healthy group matched on age) and to eighty-four adults (aged between 18 and 48 years old) distributed in the same three groups. For both tasks, a picture version was used for the children and a word version for the adults. For the food Stroop task, (Experiment 1), materials were composed of low or high-caloric food items and stimuli not related to food. The results show a food Stroop effect for children and adults with PWS that was absent in the group of healthy participants. Moreover, a food Stroop effect was also significant for adults with ID. For the emotional Stroop task (Experiment 2), materials were composed of negative, positive and neutral stimuli. The emotional Stroop effect was also obtained for children and adults with PWS as well as for the healthy group, but not for the age- and IQ-matched group. For the PWS groups, results show a preservation to process positive pictures for children and difficulties to process negative stimuli for both age-groups. These results suggest that people with PWS have difficulties in disengaging their attention when food stimuli are present in their environment and poorer abilities to process negative ones. These difficulties endure in adulthood.

Tradução da ferramenta Involvement Matrix para o português brasileiro

Abstract Introduction Patient and public involvement has numerous benefits for research; however, there are challenges to its implementation, such as the lack of tools to guide participant engagement in research. The Involvement Matrix (IM) is a tool that facilitates discussion about the role that participants play in research projects, promoting more active public involvement. Objective To translate IM materials into Brazilian Portuguese in order to facilitate their use and guide researchers. Methods Authorization to translate the original material into Brazilian Portuguese was obtained from the authors. Next, the translated material underwent backtranslation. The resulting version was verified by the original IM authors, ensuring semantic and content accuracy. Results The Involvement Matrix (IM) was translated into Portuguese and then backtranslated into English. The researchers discussed the translated version with the IM authors, with minimal adjustments needed in the backtranslation, and no changes made to the Portuguese version. After the approval of the final Brazilian Portuguese version, the translated tools were made available, including a Practical Guide, a Word Version, a Checklist, a Fact Sheet, an Overview with Examples, and an Animated Video with Brazilian Portuguese subtitles. Conclusion The various IM materials are adequately translated and freely available for use in Brazil. It is a valuable tool to guide public and patient involvement in research.

The sound of swearing: Are there universal patterns in profanity?

Why do swear words sound the way they do? Swear words are often thought to have sounds that render them especially fit for purpose, facilitating the expression of emotion and attitude. To date, however, there has been no systematic cross-linguistic investigation of phonetic patterns in profanity. In an initial, pilot study we explored statistical regularities in the sounds of swear words across a range of typologically distant languages. The best candidate for a cross-linguistic phonemic pattern in profanity was the absence of approximants (sonorous sounds like l, r, w and y). In Study 1, native speakers of various languages (Arabic, Chinese, Finnish, French, German, Spanish; N = 215) judged foreign words less likely to be swear words if they contained an approximant. In Study 2 we found that sanitized versions of English swear words – like darn instead of damn – contain significantly more approximants than the original swear words. Our findings reveal that not all sounds are equally suitable for profanity, and demonstrate that sound symbolism – wherein certain sounds are intrinsically associated with certain meanings – is more pervasive than has previously been appreciated, extending beyond denoting single concepts to serving pragmatic functions.

Symptom Perception in Pathological Illness Anxiety: Tactile Sensitivity and Bias.

Symptom perception in pathological illness anxiety (PIA) might be biased so that somatic signals are overreported. In the somatic signal detection task (SSDT), performance in detecting weak tactile stimuli gives information on overreporting or underreporting of stimuli. This task has not yet been applied in PIA. Participants with PIA (n = 44) and healthy controls (n = 40) underwent two versions of the SSDT in randomized order. In the original version, tactile and auxiliary light-emitting diode (LED) stimuli were each presented in half of the trials. In the adapted version, illness or neutral words were presented alongside tactile stimuli. Participants also conducted a heartbeat mental tracking task. We found significantly higher sensitivity and a more liberal response bias in LED versus no-LED trials, but no significant differences between word types. An interaction effect showed a more pronounced increase of sensitivity from no LED to LED trials in participants with PIA when compared with the adapted SSDT and control group (F(1,76) = 5.34, p = .024, η2 = 0.066). Heartbeat perception scores did not differ between groups (BF01 of 3.63). The increase in sensitivity from no LED to LED trials in participants with PIA suggests stronger multisensory integration. Low sensitivity in the adapted SSDT indicates that attentional resources were exhausted by processing word stimuli. Word effects on response bias might have carried over to the original SSDT when the word version was presented first, compromising group effects regarding bias. The study was preregistered on OSF (https://osf.io/sna5v/).

The Role of Orthography and Phonology in Written Word Recognition: Evidence From Eye-Tracking in the Visual World Paradigm.

There is a long-standing debate about how written words are recognized. Central to this debate is the role of phonology. The objective of this study is to contribute to our collective understanding regarding the role of phonology in written word recognition. A total of 30 monolingual adults were tested using a novel written word version of the visual world paradigm (VWP). We compared activation of phonological anadromes (words that are matched for sounds but not letters, e.g., JAB-BADGE) and orthographic anadromes (words that are matched for letters but not sounds, e.g., LEG-GEL) to determine the relative role of phonology and orthography in familiar single-word reading. We found that activation for phonological anadromes is earlier, more robust, and sustained longer than orthographic anadromes. These results are most consistent with strong phonological theories of single-word reading that posit an early and robust role of phonology. This study has broad implications for larger debates regarding reading instruction.

The attentional boost effect facilitates the encoding of contextual details: New evidence with verbal materials and a modified recognition task.

In the attentional boost effect (ABE), words or images encoded with to-be-responded targets are later recalled better than words or images encoded with to-be-ignored distractors. The ABE has been repeatedly demonstrated to improve item memory, whereas evidence concerning contextual memory is mixed, with studies showing both significant and null results. The present three experiments investigated whether the ABE could enhance contextual memory when using a recognition task that allowed participants to reinstate the original study context, by simultaneously manipulating the nature of the instructions provided at encoding. Participants studied a sequence of colored words paired with target (gray circles) or distractor (gray squares) stimuli, under the instructions to remember either the words and their colors (Exps. 1–2) or only the words (Exp. 3) and simultaneously press the space bar whenever a gray circle appeared on the screen. Then, after a brief interval, they were administered a modified recognition task involving two successive stages. First, participants were presented with two different words and had to decide which word was originally encoded; second, they were presented with five colored versions of the (correct) old words and had to remember the color in which they were studied. Results converged in showing that the ABE enhanced contextual memory, although the effect was more robust with intentional encoding instructions.Supplementary InformationThe online version contains supplementary material available at 10.3758/s13414-022-02509-z.

Testing the Lingua Franca Core: The intelligibility of flaps

Over twenty years ago, Jenkins (2000) put forth the Lingua Franca Core (LFC), a pronunciation syllabus for international intelligibility among non-native speakers (NNSs) of English. Although insufficient empirical research has been directed to validating the LFC proposals, the few studies that have tested this syllabus have produced mixed findings. One of the core features of the LFC is the use of British-based /t/, rather than General American (GA) flap [ɾ], which allegedly has a negative impact on English as lingua franca (ELF) intelligibility. There are, however, three additional types of flap in accents such as GA. In the current study, the intelligibility of the four types of flap typical of GA were tested experimentally, in the context of learners at an intermediate level with four European language backgrounds ( n = 78). Using a matched-guise technique, learners were presented with the flapped and non-flapped versions of words including the four types of flap. The results of two experiments indicate that three of the four types of flap proved detrimental for ELF intelligibility to a large extent. More expectedly, word frequency and experience with GA were moderately associated with flap intelligibility.

Shannon Pratt's Valuing a Business - Preserving a Legacy

Shannon Pratt's <i>Valuing a Business</i> - Preserving a Legacy

The contribution of semantics to the sentence superiority effect

When a sequence of written words is presented briefly and participants are asked to report the identity of one of the words, identification accuracy is higher when the words form a correct sentence. Here we examined the extent to which this sentence superiority effect can be modulated by semantic content. The central hypothesis guiding this study is that the sentence superiority effect is primarily a syntactic effect. We therefore predicted little or no modulation of the effect by semantics. The influence of semantic content was measured by comparing the sentence superiority effect obtained with semantically regular sentences (e.g., son amie danse bien [her friend dances well]) and semantically anomalous but syntactically correct sentences (e.g., votre sac boit gros [your bag drinks big]), with effects being measured against ungrammatical scrambled versions of the same words in both cases. We found sentence superiority effects with both types of sentences, and a significant interaction, such that the effects were greater with semantically regular sentences compared with semantically anomalous sentences. We conclude that sentence-level semantic information can constrain word identities under parallel word processing, albeit with less impact than that exerted by syntax.

Bacteriological Profile and Antimicrobial Resistance Pattern in Surgical Site Infection in a Tertiary Care Hospital, Central Nepal

Introduction: Surgical site wound infections (SSI) are the third most commonly reported nosocomial infection and they account for approximately a quarter of all nosocomial infections. Apart from bacterial contamination of wound, various patient and environment related factors play a role in development and outcome of SSI. The present study is undertaken to study the frequency of SSI and the antimicrobial resistance pattern of the causative organisms isolated. &#x0D; Methods: This cross-sectional prospective study was carried out over a period of one year. A total of 245 pus samples from suspected cases of surgical site infections were processed for gram staining, culture, biochemical identification tests and antimicrobial susceptibility testing using standard microbiological protocol. Data was analysed using software word version SPSS 19. &#x0D; Results: The overall frequency of SSI was 13.87%. Most common isolates were staphylococcus aureus and Escherichia coli. All four staph aureus strains were resistant to penicillin and cefixime but were 100% sensitive to vancomycin and cloxacillin. Two out of four stains were methicillin resistant Staph. aureus (MRSA). Another concern in recent time is the isolation of acinetobacter from surgical wounds. &#x0D; Conclusions: Preoperative antibiotics, reduced hospital stay and proper control of co-morbidities decrease the incidence of post-operative infections. Marked resistance of isolates to commonly used antibiotics signifies the need for judicious and rational use of these drugs to prevent the emergence of antibiotic resistant strains.

Cambridge Psycholinguistic Inventory of Christian Beliefs: A registered report of construct validity, internal consistency and test\u2013retest reliability

While religious beliefs are typically studied using questionnaires, there are no standardized tools available for cognitive psychology and neuroscience studies of religious cognition. Here we present the first such tool—the Cambridge Psycholinguistic Inventory of Christian Beliefs (CPICB)—which consists of audio-recorded items of religious beliefs as well as items of three control conditions: moral beliefs, abstract scientific knowledge and empirical everyday life knowledge. The CPICB is designed in such a way that the ultimate meaning of each sentence is revealed only by its final critical word, which enables the precise measurement of reaction times and/or latencies of neurophysiological responses. Each statement comes in a pair of Agree/Disagree versions of critical words, which allows for experimental contrasting between belief and disbelief conditions. Psycholinguistic and psychoacoustic matching between Agree/Disagree versions of sentences, as well as across different categories of the CPICB items (Religious, Moral, Scientific, Everyday), enables rigorous control of low-level psycholinguistic and psychoacoustic features while testing higher-level beliefs. In the exploratory Study 1 (N = 20), we developed and tested a preliminary version of the CPICB that had 480 items. After selecting 400 items that yielded the most consistent responses, we carried out a confirmatory test–retest Study 2 (N = 40). Preregistered data analyses confirmed excellent construct validity, internal consistency and test–retest reliability of the CPICB religious belief statements. We conclude that the CPICB is suitable for studying Christian beliefs in an experimental setting involving behavioural and neuroimaging paradigms, and provide Open Access to the inventory items, fostering further development of the experimental research of religiosity.