Prosody Processing of Korean Language in Stroke Patients: A Preliminary Study

OBJECTIVE: To investigate the hemispheric contributions to prosody recognitions and interference effects of semantic processing on prosody for stroke patients by using the Korean language. METHODS: Ten right hemisphere damaged patients (RHD), nine left hemisphere damaged patients (LHD), and eleven healthy controls (HC) participated. In pure prosody recognition task, four semantically neutral sentences were selected and presented in both sad and happy prosodies. In interference task, participants listened to emotionally intoned sentences in which the semantic contents were congruent or incongruent with prosody. Participants were asked to rate the valence of prosody while ignoring the semantic contents, and thus, reaction time and accuracy were estimated. RESULTS: In pure prosody recognition task, RHD showed low accuracy as compared to HC (p=0.013), and the tendency of group response showed that RHD performed worse than HC and LHD with regards to accuracy and reaction time. In interference task, analysis of accuracy revealed a significant main effect of groups (p=0.04), and the tendency implied that RHD is less accurate as compared to LHD and HC. The RHD took longer reaction times than HC in congruent and incongruent items (p<0.001). CONCLUSION: Right hemispheric laterality to prosody processing of Korean language in stroke patients was observed. Interference effects of semantic contents to prosody processing were not observed, which suggested unique characteristics of prosody for Korean language. These results could be referred as preliminary data for future researches on Korean languages.

A radiological study on the morphology of labial alveolar bone in the mandibular incisor area of mandibular prognathism patients / 대한치과교정학회지

This study was concerned with comparing the measured values of labial alveolar bone through the lateral cephalometric radiography and mandibular incisor cross-secional tomogram between two groups, one group of mandibular prognathism patients who needed an orthognathic surgery as an experimental group and the other group who had normal relationships as a control group. The purpose of the study was to find out the predisposing factors of bone resorption and gingival recession before orthodontic treatment. The results were as follows: 1. The cross-sectional area of labial alveolar bony plate in mandibular prognathism was significantly smaller than that of control group. 2. In mandibular prognathism, the distance between cementoenamel junction and aveolar crest was significantly greater than control group. 3. There were negative correlations between area of labial alveolar bony plate and distance from cementoenamel junction to alveolar crest, and positive correlations between area of labial alveolar bony plate and distance from alveolar crest to root apex. 4. In mandibular prognathism, there were positive correlations between IMPA and thickness of symphysis, and negative correlations between IMPA and the alveolar bony height. The results of the present study suggest the mandibular prognathism patients are prone to the gingival recession due to the small amount of labial alveolar bone around lower incisors.