Bi-alphabetism: A window on phonological processing

In Serbian, lexical decision latencies to words composed of letters that exist in both the Roman and Cyrillic alphabets (some of which have different phonemic interpretations in each) are slower than for the unique alphabet transcription of those same words. In this study, we use the effect of phonological ambiguity to explore the time course of semantic facilitation. Targets are either the phonologically ambiguous forms (e. g., PETAK meaning "Friday" when pronounced as a Roman string /petak/ but without meaning when pronounced in Cyrillic as /retak/) or the unique alphabet transcription of the same word (HETAK). We manipulate alphabet match and semantic relatedness of prime to target. In addition to replicating slowing due to phonological ambiguity, we show 1) greater alphabet switch cost for bivalent then for unambiguous targets as well as for unrelated then for related prime-target pairs and 2) greater semantic facilitation as the number of shared common letters between prime and target increases. Results reveal the interaction of phonological and semantic processes in Serbian. The findings are discussed in terms of a triangle model of language processing, which hypothesizes a division of labor between an orthography-to-semantics, and an orthography-to-phonology-to-semantics route and their simultaneous contribution to activation of meaning

Discrimination in lexical decision.

In this study we present a novel set of discrimination-based indicators of language processing derived from Naive Discriminative Learning (ndl) theory. We compare the effectiveness of these new measures with classical lexical-distributional measures-in particular, frequency counts and form similarity measures-to predict lexical decision latencies when a complete morphological segmentation of masked primes is or is not possible. Data derive from a re-analysis of a large subset of decision latencies from the English Lexicon Project, as well as from the results of two new masked priming studies. Results demonstrate the superiority of discrimination-based predictors over lexical-distributional predictors alone, across both the simple and primed lexical decision tasks. Comparable priming after masked corner and cornea type primes, across two experiments, fails to support early obligatory segmentation into morphemes as predicted by the morpho-orthographic account of reading. Results fit well with ndl theory, which, in conformity with Word and Paradigm theory, rejects the morpheme as a relevant unit of analysis. Furthermore, results indicate that readers with greater spelling proficiency and larger vocabularies make better use of orthographic priors and handle lexical competition more efficiently

Vaccine breakthrough hypoxemic COVID-19 pneumonia in patients with auto-Abs neutralizing type I IFNs

Life-threatening `breakthrough' cases of critical COVID-19 are attributed to poor or waning antibody response to the SARS- CoV-2 vaccine in individuals already at risk. Pre-existing autoantibodies (auto-Abs) neutralizing type I IFNs underlie at least 15% of critical COVID-19 pneumonia cases in unvaccinated individuals; however, their contribution to hypoxemic breakthrough cases in vaccinated people remains unknown. Here, we studied a cohort of 48 individuals ( age 20-86 years) who received 2 doses of an mRNA vaccine and developed a breakthrough infection with hypoxemic COVID-19 pneumonia 2 weeks to 4 months later. Antibody levels to the vaccine, neutralization of the virus, and auto- Abs to type I IFNs were measured in the plasma. Forty-two individuals had no known deficiency of B cell immunity and a normal antibody response to the vaccine. Among them, ten (24%) had auto-Abs neutralizing type I IFNs (aged 43-86 years). Eight of these ten patients had auto-Abs neutralizing both IFN-a2 and IFN-., while two neutralized IFN-omega only. No patient neutralized IFN-ss. Seven neutralized 10 ng/mL of type I IFNs, and three 100 pg/mL only. Seven patients neutralized SARS-CoV-2 D614G and the Delta variant (B.1.617.2) efficiently, while one patient neutralized Delta slightly less efficiently. Two of the three patients neutralizing only 100 pg/mL of type I IFNs neutralized both D61G and Delta less efficiently. Despite two mRNA vaccine inoculations and the presence of circulating antibodies capable of neutralizing SARS-CoV-2, auto-Abs neutralizing type I IFNs may underlie a significant proportion of hypoxemic COVID-19 pneumonia cases, highlighting the importance of this particularly vulnerable population

The effects of local and global alphabet context on code switching in word recognition

It is often observed that switching between languages induces a processing cost. We investigated whether switching between two alphabets engenders an analogous cost. We used Serbian as the. testbed language as it can be written in two alphabets – Cyrillic and Roman. We presented 271 participants with a mixed-alphabet visual lexical decision task (VLD). All letter stings could be pronounced in two ways (bivalent). Half were interpretable as words in Roman (PETAK /petak/ meaning Friday, but meaningless in Cyrillic /retak/), and half were interpretable as words in Cyrillic (CAJAM /sajam/ meaning fair but meaningless in Roman/tsajam/). Prior to the mixed alphabet VLD, participants encountered an alphabet induction phase with instructions printed in either Roman or Cyrillic alphabet and a single-alphabet VLD. The (global) phonological ambiguity effect (Feldman & Turvey, 1983), i.e. the processing disadvantage for phonologically bivalent stimuli was observed for both words and pseudowords. In addition, for words, we observed a significant effect of local alphabet context and it was marginally modulated by the global alphabet context. We conclude by drawing parallels between code switching in bilingualism and bialphabetism