Critical Words Research Articles

N-acetylcysteine: An Innovative Approach to Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder Treatment: A Narrative Review

Abstract Obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) is a chronic mental illness defined by recurrent, intrusive thoughts (called obsessions) and repetitive actions or ideas (called compulsions). Selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors and cognitive-behavioural therapy are currently the first-line treatments. Alternative therapeutic approaches must be developed because many patients still resist conventional medicines. There is increasing evidence that glutamate, rather than serotonin, is an essential factor in the pathophysiology of OCD. N-acetylcysteine (NAC) is a supplement that targets the glutamatergic system and is derived from the amino acids. Numerous preclinical and clinical trials suggest that NAC improves OCD sufferers. Numerous suggested processes, such as the control of various neurotransmitters, oxidative equilibrium and inflammatory mediators, have been brought up to explain the therapeutic benefits of NAC. This narrative review focuses on the effect of NAC, a glutamate-modulating agent, as an augmentation in the treatment of OCD. This article reviews the clinical trials, case reports and case series exploring using NAC for OCD. We thoroughly searched PubMed, Scopus and Google Search engines to identify the relevant trials published until December 2024. Critical words for searching included (‘N acetylcysteine’ OR NAC OR ‘Glutamatergic agents’) AND (‘Obsessive-compulsive disorder’ OR OCD). NAC’s clinical effectiveness has not been identified despite pre-clinical research suggesting that it improves the animal models of OCD. Although NAC is still a promising adjunct treatment option for OCD, more research with larger sample sizes is needed to confirm these results and develop conclusions about how effectively NAC works to improve the OCD symptoms.

Semiparametric Latent Topic Modeling on Consumer-Generated Corpora

Abstract Common methods used for topic modeling have generally suffered problems of overfitting, leading to diminished predictive performance, as well as a weakness towards reconstructing sparse topic structures that involve only a few critical words to aid in interpretation. Considering the text typically contained in customer feedback, this paper proposes a semiparametric topic model utilizing a two-step approach: (1) makes use of nonnegative matrix factorization to recover topic distributions based on word co-occurrences and; (2) use semiparametric regression to identify factors driving the expression of particular topics in the documents given additional auxiliary information such as location, time of writing, and other features of the author. This approach provides a generative model that can be useful for predicting topics in new documents based on these auxiliary variables, and is demonstrated to accurately identify topics even for documents limited in length or size of vocabulary. In an application to real customer feedback, the topics provided by our model are shown to be as interpretable and useful for downstream analysis tasks as with those produced by current legacy methods.

Social presence effect in language comprehension: evidence from event-related potential (ERP) research.

This study aimed to examine the impact of social presence on Chinese reading comprehension and associated neural responses. Participants tasked with reading Chinese sentences either alone or in the presence of others and subsequently assessing the accuracy of the sentences' meanings. Concurrently, we recorded the participants' electrical brain responses to critical word processing. Behavioral results indicated no significant effect of social presence on the judgment of sentence accuracy. Electroencephalogram (EEG) results, however, revealed that reading in the presence of others elicited more pronounced left anterior negativity (LAN) components in the left front of the scalp compared to reading alone. Additionally, incorrect meanings triggered larger N400 and P600 amplitudes in the mid-parietal region than correct meanings. Social presence intensifies early neural responses during the reading of Chinese sentences, although it does not influence semantic integration or conflict resolution. These findings support the notion that social context affects language processing.

A nurse should not be careless: processing presupposed meanings triggered by connectives

ABSTRACT Connectives are crucial in constructing coherent discourse by signalling relationships across sentences and triggering presuppositions. This event-related potential study investigated how the type and presence of connectives influence sentence processing. Participants read sentences with because, although, or no connective, where critical words were either congruent or incongruent with the clausal relation specified by connectives. Incongruent words elicited a larger N400 than congruent words, regardless of the connective type or its presence. In later processing stages, incongruency induced an extended N400 effect in concessive contexts but a P600 effect in causal and no-connective contexts. Additionally, a larger P600 was observed in concessive-congruent versus causal-congruent conditions, indicating a greater effort to reconcile the concessive-triggered presupposition with the proposition. These findings suggest that connective-triggered presuppositions constrain both the initial evaluation of language input against broad contextual knowledge and the subsequent integration into discourse representation, supporting an Evaluation and Integration model of presupposition processing.

The facilitatory effect of modifications (semantic richness) on subsequent retrieval during language comprehension is age-invariant, but depends on level of engagement with task.

Past research has shown that semantically richer (i.e., modified) words are retrieved more easily at a subsequent point during language comprehension relative to less rich (i.e., unmodified) words, presumably due to more robust encoding of modified words. We investigated if this modification effect is modulated by age and/or the level of engagement with the task. Young and older participants (total N = 120) read sentences containing unmodified and premodified words followed by a critical verb that triggered their retrieval. The results showed that the retrieval benefit was not modulated by age but depended on the accuracy rates on comprehension questions (a proxy for task engagement), with the retrieval benefit emerging only for participants with lower accuracy rates. We replicated this engagement effect in a reanalysis of an independent, large data set from younger adults (N = 333). Based on these results, it is possible that when engagement is high, the memory representations associated with critical words may remain in the focus of attention when retrieval is being triggered, obviating a retrieval operation and eliminating the modification effect. However, when engagement is low, the critical memory representations may fade to a degree that the modification effect can emerge. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved).

Neural mechanisms of dynamic syntactic and semantic processing in Chinese garden-path sentence comprehension: An ERP study

In this study, the neural mechanisms of dynamic syntactic and semantic processing in Chinese garden-path sentence comprehension were investigated using electrophysiological and behavioral measures. Two groups of garden-path sentences were designed, with the ambiguity of multiple word categories in Group 1 and classifier-noun agreements in Group 2. Besides the ambiguous condition, there were also control and semantic violation conditions. Participants made plausibility judgment of each sentence. The ERPs elicited by the last three critical word regions in each sentence were examined continuously to uncover the time course of the revision process clearly. Relative to the control sentence, the ambiguous sentences of both groups elicited the smallest N400 before and on the disambiguating region, but the largest P600 at the disambiguation position, indicating that the sentences were misparsed and/or misinterpreted initially, and revised efficiently when the input cannot be integrated into the syntactic structure constructed. No significant N400 difference was observed between the ambiguous and the control condition on the disambiguating regions, indicating that semantic processing proceeded even no appropriate syntactic structures were built for the incomplete sentences. Therefore, without morphosyntactic constraints in Chinese, semantic processing is generally prior to the syntactic one, which will be revised only when semantic integration fails.

The how and the when of semantic illusions in native and non-native languages

Abstract The nature and processing of semantic illusions (SI; when speakers fail to notice an anomalous word in a sentence that is contextually perfectly aligned with world knowledge) have been largely studied during first language comprehension. Although this issue is not free of controversy, findings sustain The Node Structure Theory, according to which SI is a phonological and/or semantic priming effect which occurs due to phonological and/or semantic links existing between the correct and the anomalous word. However, the question as to whether the same underlying mechanisms can be found in bilinguals and whether the effect is modulated by age of language acquisition (AoA) and language dominance remains unexplored. The aim of this study was to examine this issue on sequential European Portuguese-German bilinguals (and their respective control groups) using a self-paced reading paradigm. The sentences’ language, AoA (early vs. late), and type of target word used (correct vs. anomalous) were manipulated. Results showed the occurrence of SI, independently of language and AoA. Therefore, findings suggest that SI occur due to a semantic overlap between critical words and are similarly processed in L1 and L2.

Metformin: Beyond Type 2 Diabetes Mellitus.

Metformin was developed from an offshoot of Guanidine. It is known to be the first-line medication for type 2 diabetes mellitus, polycystic ovarian syndrome, and weight reduction. Metformin has also been shown to have effectiveness in the management of non-alcoholic fatty liver disease (NAFLD), liver cirrhosis, and various carcinomas like hepatocellular, colorectal, prostate, breast, urinary bladder, blood, melanoma, bone, skin, lung and so on. This narrative review focuses on the effect of metformin on non-alcoholic fatty liver disease, liver cirrhosis, and hepatocellular carcinoma. The search platforms for the topic were PubMed, Scopus, and Google search engine. Critical words for searching included 'Metformin,' AND 'Indications of Metformin,' AND 'Non-Alcoholic Fatty Liver Disease,' AND 'Metformin mechanism of action,' AND 'NAFLD management,' AND 'NAFLD and inflammation,' AND 'Metformin and insulin,' AND 'Metformin and inflammation,' AND 'Liver cirrhosis,' AND 'Hepatocellular carcinoma.' Lifestyle modification and the use of hypoglycemic agents can help improve liver conditions. Metformin has several mechanisms that enhance liver health, including reducing reactive oxygen species, nuclear factor kappa beta (NF-κB), liver enzymes, improving insulin sensitivity, and improving hepatic cell lipophagy. Long-term use of metformin may cause some adverse effects like lactic acidosis and gastrointestinal disturbance. Metformin long-term overdose may lead to a rise in hydrogen sulfide in liver cells, which calls for pharmacovigilance. Drug regulating authorities should provide approval for further research, and national and international guidelines need to be developed for liver diseases, perhaps with the inclusion of metformin as part of the management regime.

The differential illusion memory for high-associated abstract concepts (DIM-HA) effect

A vast body of evidence has shown that concrete concepts are processed faster and more accurately than abstract concepts in a variety of cognitive tasks. This phenomenon is widely known as the concreteness effect, and explanations for its occurrence seem to reflect differences in processing and organization for both types of representations. While there is considerable evidence to support this concreteness effect, the nature of these differences is still controversial. In developing an explanation, we have proposed a relatively different approach from a false memory perspective using the Deese–Roediger–McDermott paradigm. To explore the implications of the association in creating false memories, we explore behavioral and electrophysiologically the false memory effect, where targets were manipulated according to their association strength and their concreteness. Results showed that false recognition rates differed significantly between concrete and abstract critical words when they were associated strongly with their respective lists, which led to a higher proportion of abstract false alarms both in behavioral and electrophysiological experiments. The principal outcome, which was called the DIM-HA effect, was discussed in terms of theories of associative activation and qualitatively different representation.

DRM LISTS CREATED WITH CHATGPT: ANALYSING RECOGNITION MEMORY WITH CLIMATE-CHANGE THEMED LISTS

Machine learning and natural language processing have led to the development of powerful language models such as ChatGPT, which can generate consistent and human-like responses to a wide range of queries. In many domains, ChatGPT provides appropriate responses to given commands. One of the aims of this study is to investigate the use of these association lists, such as the Deese-Roediger-McDermott (DRM) lists popular in cognitive psychology studies, by ChatGPT by giving the necessary instructions. The same method was then used to create association lists around a specific topic (climate change). The results of the first study showed that participants gave more false answers when discriminating whether critical words were presented during the test phase than when related and unrelated words were presented. This finding shows that DRM lists generated by ChatGPT can be used to search for memory errors. In line with the literature, false answers for critical words were predominantly rated as ‘remember’. The results of the second study, which was applied to the lists created on the topic of climate change and compared the responses of the groups with the climate denial scores, show that there is no significant difference in the emergence of false memories between the two groups. The level of climate change denial did not significantly affect the participants’ responses to the critical words in the climate- related lists. The low level of climate denial in the sample is a limitation of this study. It is recommended that future studies compare memory performance across an appropriate sample.

Prior Context and Individual Alpha Frequency Influence Predictive Processing during Language Comprehension.

The extent to which the brain predicts upcoming information during language processing remains controversial. To shed light on this debate, the present study reanalyzed Nieuwland and colleagues' (2018) [Nieuwland, M. S., Politzer-Ahles, S., Heyselaar, E., Segaert, K., Darley, E., Kazanina, N., et al. Large-scale replication study reveals a limit on probabilistic prediction in language comprehension. eLife, 7, e33468, 2018] replication of DeLong and colleagues (2015) [DeLong, K. A., Urbach, T. P., & Kutas, M. Probabilistic word pre-activation during language comprehension inferred from electrical brain activity. Nature Neuroscience, 8, 1117-1121, 2005]. Participants (n = 356) viewed sentences containing articles and nouns of varying predictability, while their EEG was recorded. We measured ERPs preceding the critical words (namely, the semantic prediction potential), in conjunction with postword N400 patterns and individual neural metrics. ERP activity was compared with two measures of word predictability: cloze probability and lexical surprisal. In contrast to prior literature, semantic prediction potential amplitudes did not increase as cloze probability increased, suggesting that the component may not reflect prediction during natural language processing. Initial N400 results at the article provided evidence against phonological prediction in language, in line with Nieuwland and colleagues' findings. Strikingly, however, when the surprisal of the prior words in the sentence was included in the analysis, increases in article surprisal were associated with increased N400 amplitudes, consistent with prediction accounts. This relationship between surprisal and N400 amplitude was not observed when the surprisal of the two prior words was low, suggesting that expectation violations at the article may be overlooked under highly predictable conditions. Individual alpha frequency also modulated the relationship between article surprisal and the N400, emphasizing the importance of individual neural factors for prediction. The present study extends upon existing neurocognitive models of language and prediction more generally, by illuminating the flexible and subject-specific nature of predictive processing.

Lexical cues and discourse integration: An ERP study of the N400 and P600 components

In a sentence reading ERP study in Swedish we investigated the roles of the N400 and P600 components. By manipulating ease of lexical retrieval and discourse integration of the critical words in four conditions (contextually primed/non-primed and degree of contextual fit), we explored these components from a sentence processing perspective. The results indicate that the N400 indexes lexical retrieval and access of stored conceptual knowledge, whereas the P600 component indexes pragmatic processes, such as integration of a word into the discourse context, or the information structural status of the word. The results support single-stream models of sentence processing where lexical retrieval and integration do not take place in parallel, as in multi-stream models.

Parafoveal Processing of Orthography, Phonology, and Semantics during Chinese Reading: Effects of Foveal Load.

The foveal load hypothesis assumes that the ease (or difficulty) of processing the currently fixated word in a sentence can influence processing of the upcoming word(s), such that parafoveal preview is reduced when foveal load is high. Recent investigations using pseudo-character previews reported an absence of foveal load effects in Chinese reading. Substantial Chinese studies to date provide some evidence to show that parafoveal words may be processed orthographically, phonologically, or semantically. However, it has not yet been established whether parafoveal processing is equivalent in terms of the type of parafoveal information extracted (orthographic, phonological, semantic) under different foveal load conditions. Accordingly, the present study investigated this issue with two experiments. Participants' eye movements were recorded as they read sentences in which foveal load was manipulated by placing a low- or high-frequency word N preceding a critical word. The preview validity of the upcoming word N + 1 was manipulated in Experiment 1, and word N + 2 in Experiment 2. The parafoveal preview was either identical to word N + 1(or word N + 2); orthographically related; phonologically related; semantically related; or an unrelated pseudo-character. The results showed robust main effects of frequency and preview type on both N + 1 and N + 2. Crucially, however, interactions between foveal load and preview type were absent, indicating that foveal load does not modulate the types of parafoveal information processed during Chinese reading.

Attentional Orienting and Disfluency-Related Memory Boost Are Intact in Adults With Moderate-Severe Traumatic Brain Injury.

Traumatic brain injury (TBI) is associated with a range of cognitive-communicative deficits that interfere with everyday communication and social interaction. Considerable effort has been directed at characterizing the nature and scope of cognitive-communication disorders in TBI, yet the underlying mechanisms of impairment are largely unspecified. The present research examines sensitivity to a common communicative cue, disfluency, and its impact on memory for spoken language in TBI. Fifty-three participants with moderate-severe TBI and 53 noninjured comparison participants listened to a series of sentences, some of which contained disfluencies. A subsequent memory test probed memory for critical words in the sentences. Participants with TBI successfully remembered the spoken words (b = 1.57, p < .0001) at a similar level to noninjured comparison participants. Critically, participants with TBI also exhibited better recognition memory for words preceded by disfluency compared to words from fluent sentences (b = 0.57, p = .02). These findings advance mechanistic accounts of cognitive-communication disorder by revealing that, when isolated for experimental study, individuals with moderate-severe TBI are sensitive to attentional orienting cues in speech and exhibit enhanced recognition of individual words preceded by disfluency. These results suggest that some aspects of cognitive-communication disorders may not emerge from an inability to perceive and use individual communication cues, but rather from disruptions in managing (i.e., attending, weighting, integrating) multiple cognitive, communicative, and social cues in complex and dynamic interactions. This hypothesis warrants further investigation.

The Self-reference Effect Can Modulate Language Syntactic Processing Even Without Explicit Awareness: An Electroencephalography Study.

Although it is well established that self-related information can rapidly capture our attention and bias cognitive functioning, whether this self-bias can affect language processing remains largely unknown. In addition, there is an ongoing debate as to the functional independence of language processes, notably regarding the syntactic domain. Hence, this study investigated the influence of self-related content on syntactic speech processing. Participants listened to sentences that could contain morphosyntactic anomalies while the masked face identity (self, friend, or unknown faces) was presented for 16 msec preceding the critical word. The language-related ERP components (left anterior negativity [LAN] and P600) appeared for all identity conditions. However, the largest LAN effect followed by a reduced P600 effect was observed for self-faces, whereas a larger LAN with no reduction of the P600 was found for friend faces compared with unknown faces. These data suggest that both early and late syntactic processes can be modulated by self-related content. In addition, alpha power was more suppressed over the left inferior frontal gyrus only when self-faces appeared before the critical word. This may reflect higher semantic demands concomitant to early syntactic operations (around 150-550 msec). Our data also provide further evidence of self-specific response, as reflected by the N250 component. Collectively, our results suggest that identity-related information is rapidly decoded from facial stimuli and may impact core linguistic processes, supporting an interactive view of syntactic processing. This study provides evidence that the self-reference effect can be extended to syntactic processing.

Norms for gender stereotypically congruent, stereotypically incongruent, semantically correct, and semantically incorrect sentences in Polish and English.

The present contribution provides ratings for a database of gender stereotypically congruent, stereotypically incongruent, semantically correct, and semantically incorrect sentences in Polish and English. A total of 942 volunteers rated 480 sentences (120 per condition) in each language in terms of their meaningfulness, probability of use, and stereotypicality. The stimuli were highly controlled for their length and critical words, which were shared across the conditions. The results of the ratings revealed that stereotypically incongruent sentences were consciously evaluated as both less meaningful and probable to use relative to sentences that adhere to stereotype-driven expectations regarding males and females, indicating that stereotype violations communicated through language exert influence on language perception. Furthermore, the results yielded a stronger internalization of gender stereotypes among sex-typed individuals, thus pointing to the crucial role of gender schema in the sensitivity to gender stereotypical attributes. The ratings reported in the present article aim to broaden researchers' stimulus choices and allow for consistency across different laboratories and research projects on gender stereotype processing. The adaptation of this database to other languages or cultures could also enable a cross-cultural comparison of empirical findings on stereotype processing.

A novel frequency-range analysis (FRA) method for determining critical words among English high-stakes tests

Within the new era of artificial intelligence (AI), education industry should develop in the direction of intelligence and digitalization. For evaluating learners’ academic performances, English high-stakes test is not only a mere means for measuring what English as a Foreign Language (EFL) stakeholders know or do not know but also likely to bring life-changing consequences. Hence, effective test preparation for English high-stakes test is crucial for those who futures depend on attaining a particular score. However, traditional corpus-based approaches cannot simultaneously take words’ frequency and range variables into consideration when evaluating their importance level, which makes the word sorting results inaccurate. Thus, to effectively and accurately extract critical words among English high-stakes test for enhancing EFL stakeholders’ test performance, this paper integrates a corpus-based approach and a revised Importance-Performance Analysis (IPA) method to develop a novel frequency-range analysis (FRA) method. Taiwan College Entrance Exam of English Subject (TCEEES) from the year of 2001 to 2022 are adopted as an empirical case of English high stake test and the target corpus for verification. Results indicate that the critical words evaluated by FRA method are concentrated on Quadrant I including 1,576 word types that account for over 60% running words of TCEEES corpus. After compared with the three traditional corpus-based approaches and the Term Frequency-Inverse Document Frequency (TF-IDF) method, the significant contributions include: (1) the FRA method can use a machine-based function words elimination technique to enhance the efficiency; (2) the FRA method can simultaneously take words’ frequency and range variables into consideration; (3) the FRA method can effectively conduct cluster analysis by categorizing the words into the four quadrants that based on their relative importance level. The results will give EFL stakeholders a clearer picture of how to allocate their learning time and education resources into critical words acquisition.

Sensory Emotion in Words: Evidence From an Event-related Potential (ERP) Study in Light of the Emotioncy Model.

Delving into the prominent role of emotions and senses in language is not something new in the field. Thereupon, the newly developed notion of emotioncy has been introduced to foreign language education to underscore the role of sense-induced emotions in the language learning and teaching process. The present study implemented event-related potentials (ERPs) to provide evidence of the significance of employing emosensory instructional strategies in teaching vocabulary items. Hence, 18 female participants were randomly instructed on six English nouns toward which they had no prior knowledge and received no instruction for the other three words. Then, while the participants' electroencephalogram (EEG) was being recorded, they took a sentence comprehension task. Behavioral results demonstrated significant differences among the avolved, the exvolved, and the involved nouns. However, ERP analyses of target words indicated the modulations of N100 and N480 components while no significant effect was observed at P200. Further, the analysis of sensory N100 for the critical words revealed no significant effect. In conclusion, emotioncy-based language instruction can affect neural correlates of emotional word comprehension from the early stages of EEG recording. The results of this study can clarify the importance of including senses and emotions in language teaching, learning, and testing, along with materials development. Direct emosensory involvement can affect word semantic processing.Indirect emosensory involvement can affect sensorial comprehension of the word.Direct sensory involvement may enhance the accuracy of the responses.Direct sensory involvement may reduce the response time. Nowadays, learning a foreign language is considered one of the challenges in our lives. It is believed that including senses and emotions in education can foster learning new words in a foreign language. One concept that focuses on the use of sensory emotions is called emotioncy. This study employed brain imaging to analyze the effects of teaching through emotioncy on related neural modulations. Based on the results of the study, higher levels of employing senses and emotions can affect the processing and comprehension of words.

Conditionals in context: Brain signatures of prediction in discourse processing

Comprehenders are known to generate expectations about upcoming linguistic input at the sentence and discourse level. However, most previous studies on prediction focused mainly on word-induced brain activity rather than examining neural activity preceding a critical stimulus in discourse processing, where prediction actually takes place. In this EEG study, participants were presented with multiple sentences resembling a discourse including conditional sentences with either only if or if, which are characterized by different semantics, triggering stronger or weaker predictions about the possible continuation of the presented discourses, respectively. Results revealed that discourses including only if, as compared to discourses with bare if, triggered an increased predictive neural activity before the expected critical word, resembling the readiness potential. Moreover, word-induced P300 brain responses were found to be enhanced by unpredictable discourse continuations and reduced in predictable discourse continuations. Intriguingly, brain responses preceding and following the critical word were found to be correlated, which yields evidence for predictive activity modulating word-induced processing on the discourse level. These findings shed light on the predictive nature of neural processes at the discourse level, critically advancing our understanding of the functional interconnection between discourse understanding and prediction processes in brain and mind.

Discourse coherence modulates use of predictive processing during sentence comprehension

Context has been shown to be vitally important for comprehension. Lexical processing is facilitated when words are highly predictable given their local sentence context, suggesting that people pre-activate likely upcoming words to aid comprehension. However, this facilitation is affected by knowledge about the global context in which comprehension takes place: people predict less when in an environment where expectations are frequently violated. The current study investigated whether discourse coherence is an additional cue that comprehenders use to modulate lexical prediction. In a series of online, self-paced reading experiments, participants read target sentences preceded by short contextual preambles. Local facilitation effects were manipulated through the cloze probability of a critical word within the target sentence and discourse coherence was manipulated by varying the degree to which the target sentence was consistent with the information presented in the preamble. In the first two experiments, target sentences were read more slowly when they occurred in less coherent discourses, but no local facilitation effects were observed. In the third experiment, we strengthened the predictability manipulation by using semantically anomalous critical words. In this experiment, predictable words were processed more quickly and anomalous words more slowly when they occurred in highly coherent discourse. Our results suggest that comprehenders are sensitive to shifts in the topic of discourse and that they downregulate predictive processing when they encounter incoherence in the discourse. This is consistent with recent theoretical accounts suggesting that comprehenders flexibly engage in predictive processing, pre-activating semantic and lexical information less when their expectations are less likely to be reliable.