An assessment of US and Canadian smoking reduction objectives for the year 2000

OBJECTIVES: This study assessed whether US and Canadian smoking reduction objectives for the year 2000 are attainable. The United States seeks to cut smoking in its population to 15%; the Canadian goal is 24%. METHODS: Smoking data were obtained for the United States (1974-1994) and Canada (1970-1995) for the overall populations and several age-sex subpopulations. Analyses estimated trends, future prevalences, and the likelihood of goal attainment. Structural time-series models were used because of their ability to fit a variety of trends. RESULTS: The findings indicate that smoking has been declining steadily since the 1970s, by approximately 0.7 percentage points a year, in both countries. Extrapolating these trends to the year 2000, the US prevalence will be 21% and the Canadian prevalence 24%. CONCLUSIONS: If the current trends continue, the Canadian goal seems attainable, but the US goal does not. The US goal is reachable only for 65-to 80-year-olds, who already have low smoking prevalences. It appears that both countries must increase their commitment to population-based tobacco control.     

Externality, internality, and (in)dispensability of grammatical features in speech production: Evidence from Czech declension and conjugation.

In 3 picture–word experiments, the authors explored the activation of 2 grammatical features in Czech during lexical access: declensional class of nouns and conjugational class of verbs. Experiments 1 and 2 demonstrated congruency effects of declensional and conjugational class, respectively. Picture naming times were reliably longer if the declensional or conjugational classes of the pictures' names and the distractors were incongruent. Experiment 3 explored the origin of the congruency effect in more detail. Congruency effects were obtained for declensional class regardless of whether the target name and the distractor differed in form, speaking for competition at the lemma level. These findings are discussed in comparison with gender congruency effects. The authors propose a differentiation between externally and internally specified features of lemmas, especially with respect to the time course of their activation. Internal features that become available only when the lemma is activated (e.g., gender, declensional or conjugational class of nouns and verbs) can be bypassed or not, depending on the grammatical specification of the earlier available external features (like case or number). Following this argument, supposedly inconsistent findings regarding grammatical gender and declensional or conjugational class can be explained straightforwardly. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Gender processing in first and second languages: The role of noun termination.

In 2 picture-naming and 2 grammaticality judgment experiments, the authors explored how the phonological form of a word, especially its termination, affects gender processing by monolinguals and unbalanced bilinguals speaking German. The results of the 2 experiments with native German speakers yielded no significant differences: The reaction times were statistically identical for items from gender typical, ambiguous, and gender atypical groups. The 2 experiments with English bilinguals who had learned German as a second language (L2), however, provided evidence that the L2 word's termination plays a role in L2 gender processing. Participants were fastest when producing gender-marked noun phrases containing a noun with a gender typical termination and slowest when the noun had a gender atypical termination. Analogous results were obtained in the grammaticality judgment experiment. These findings support the assumption that there is interaction between the levels of phonological encoding and grammatical encoding at least in bilingual processing. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Technetium-99m-sestamibi scintimammography for the detection of breast carcinoma: comparison between planar and SPECT imaging

The purpose of our study was to compare the results of planar and SPECT scintimammography for the detection of breast carcinoma. In addition, our goal was to determine whether SPECT reconstructed with filtered backprojection (FBP) or with iterative algorithms (ISA) can improve the sensitivity and specificity of planar scintimammography (SMM). METHODS: One hundred thirteen patients with suspicious physical examinations and/or mammography underwent planar lateral and anterior breast imaging as well as SPECT imaging after injection of 99mTc-sestamibi. We used a blind evaluation, both separately and combined, for planar SMM, ISA-SPECT and FBP-SPECT. Scintigraphic findings were correlated with the final histopathological diagnoses. RESULTS: The sensitivity of planar SMM was 80% with a specificity of 83%. All ISA-SPECT studies were of diagnostic quality, while FBP-SPECT was considered nondiagnostic in 14 that were excluded for statistical calculation. Sensitivity of ISA-SPECT and FBP-SPECT were 71% and 69%, respectively. Specificity was 70% for ISA-SPECT and 66% for FBP-SPECT. Combined planar SMM plus ISA-SPECT sensitivity was 85% (81% for planar SMM plus FBP-SPECT) with a specificity of 72%. Three carcinomas indeterminate on planar SMM were correctly identified by combined planar SMM plus ISA-SPECT. ISA-SPECT and FBP-SPECT provided additional information to planar SMM with respect to localization of sestamibi uptake, tumor extent, improved diagnostic certainty and detection of axillary nodes in 40 and 14 patients, respectively. CONCLUSION: ISA reconstruction is the preferable approach to SPECT data. Combined with planar SMM, ISA-SPECT can improve sensitivity. SPECT is useful in cases of indeterminate and positive planar SMM.     

Memory traces in EEG

The paper gives a brief overview of five experimental approaches in which memory processes were studied by means of event-related brain potentials (ERPs). Some of the results were already published in English (Study 1), while others are new and will be reported in greater length as full paper elsewhere (Studies 2, 3, 4, and 5). Study 1 revealed that retrieval of information from episodic long-term memory is accompanied by a systematic slow negative potential. The topography of this slow wave depends on the quality of the reactivated information (spatial vs. verbal), and its amplitude reflects the difficulty of the retrieval process. In experiment 2 ERPs were recorded while subjects acquired either explicit or implicit knowledge about a sequential stimulus-response pattern. The data suggest that explicit learners who posses verbalizable knowledge about sequential dependencies have formed both perceptual and motor representations, while implicit learners have formed motor representations only. In study 3 fact retrieval in mental arithmetic was activated by a verification task. Incongruent solutions evoked an arithmetic N400-effect whose amplitude varied with the associative distance between an expected and an actually perceived solution to a multiplication problem. In study 4 ERPs were recorded during mental rotation tasks. A set of experiments revealed that mental rotation is always accompanied by a systematic negative variation over the parietal cortex. The amplitude of this "rotation specific negativity" increases with an increasing angular disparity between a perceived sign and its normal upright template. It was shown that this negativity is functionally distinct from a P300-complex which is often superimposed on it within the same latency window. Finally, study 5 examined ERPs in a sentence reading task in which grammatically legal but infrequent sentence constructions had to be processed. A left-anterior negativity was observed whenever an explicit case marker (the definite article in German) signalled a nominal phrase at a noncanonical position. The LAN phenomenon appears to be a manifestation of a syntax processor which performes a first-pass formal analysis of a sentence and which possibly allocates working memory resources whenever a word cannot be assigned immediately to an expected propositional role.