In alphabetic writing systems (such as English), the spaces between words mark the word boundaries, and the basic unit of reading is distinguished during visual-level processing. The visual-level information of word boundaries facilitates reading. Chinese is an ideographic language whose text contains no intrinsic inter-word spaces as the marker of word boundaries. Previous studies have shown that the basic processing unit of Chinese reading is also a word. However, findings remain inconsistent regarding whether inserting spaces between words in Chinese text (...) promotes reading performance. Researchers have proposed that there may be a trade-off between format familiarity and the facilitation effect of inter-word spaces. In order to verify this, this study manipulated the format familiarity via reversing the Chinese reading direction from right to left to investigate this issue in Experiment 1 and Experiment 2. The purpose of Experiment 1 was to examine whether inter-word spaces facilitated Chinese reading in an unfamiliar format. Experiment 1 was conducted that 40 native Chinese undergraduates read Chinese sentences from right to left on four format conditions. The results showed faster reading speed and shorter total reading time for the inter-word spaced format. Based on this finding, Experiment 2 examined whether the facilitation effect of inter-word spaces would reduce or disappear after improving the format familiarity; this experiment was conducted that 40 native Chinese undergraduates who did not participate in Experiment 1 read Chinese sentences from right to left on four format conditions after ten-day reading training. There was no significant difference between the total reading time and reading speed in the inter-word spaced format and unspaced format, which suggests that the facilitation effect of inter-word spaces in Chinese reading changed smaller. The combined results of the two experiments suggest that there is indeed a trade-off between format familiarity and the facilitation of word segmentation, which supports the assumption of previous studies. (shrink)

Patients with chronic obstructive pulmonary disease are characterized by attenuated pulmonary function and are frequently reported with cognitive impairments, especially memory impairments. The mechanism underlying the memory impairments still remains unclear. We applied resting-state functional magnetic resonance imaging to compare the brain local activities with static and dynamic amplitude of low-frequency fluctuations among patients with COPD and healthy controls. Compared with HC, COPD patients exhibited decreased sALFF in the right basal ganglia and increased dALFF in the bilateral parahippocampal/hippocampal gyrus. The (...) reduced the left basal ganglia was associated with lower oxygen partial pressure. Besides, the increased dALFF in the left hippocampal/parahippocampal cortex was associated with poor semantic-memory performance and the increased dALFF in the left hippocampal/parahippocampal cortex was associated the forced vital capacity. The present study revealed the abnormal static and dynamic local-neural activities in the basal ganglia and parahippocampal/hippocampal cortex in COPD patient and its relationship with poor lung function and semantic-memory impairments. (shrink)