ABSTRACT
Thematic-role assignment is influenced by several classes of cues during sentence comprehension, ranging from morphological exponents of syntactic relation such as case and agreement to probabilistic cues such as prosody. The effect of these cues cross-linguistically varies, presumably reflecting their language-specific robustness in signaling thematic roles. However, language-specific frequencies are not mapped onto the cue strength in a one-to-one fashion. The present article reports two eye-tracking studies on Hungarian examining the interaction of case and prosody during the processing of case-unambiguous (Experiment 1) and case-ambiguous (Experiment 2) clauses. Eye fixations reveal that case is a strong cue for thematic role assignment, but stress only enhances the effect of case in case-unambiguous clauses. This result differs from findings reported for Italian and German in which case initial stress reduces the expectation for subject-first clauses. Furthermore, the sentence comprehension facts are not explained by corpus frequencies in Hungarian. After considering an array of hypotheses about the roots of cross-linguistic variation, we conclude that the crucial difference lies in the high reliability/availability of case cues in Hungarian in contrast to the further languages examined within this experimental paradigm.
Subject(s)
Language , Speech Perception , Comprehension , Eye-Tracking Technology , Humans , Hungary , Reproducibility of Results , SemanticsABSTRACT
INTRODUCTION AND AIM: By using the database of the National Registry of Myocardial Infarction, the authors examine the prognosis of patients treated with acute myocardial infarction, in case of whom there was new or presumably new left bundle branch block (nLBBB) on the ECG recorded at hospitalization. METHOD: We recorded the details of 18 091 patients treated with acute myocardial infarction (AMI) between 1 January 2014 and 30 June 2015 in the National Registry of Myocardial Infarction. In case of 8334 patients, the clinical diagnosis was ST-elevation myocardial infarction (STEMI), whereas in 9757 cases it was non-ST elevation myocardial infarction (NSTEMI). In the STEMI population we examined the clinical characteristics and prognosis of patients with ST-elevation (n = 7937) and nLBBB (n = 397). We used the proportional hazards regression model (Cox-regression) to examine mortality. RESULTS: In the AMI patient population, we found LBBB in 1274 cases (7%). In case of STEMI clinical diagnosis, the patients belonging to the nLBBB subpopulation (n = 397) were older, and the proportion of men and the occurrence of co-morbidities was higher than in case of those who had ST-elevation on their ECG recorded at hospitalization. The mortality rate of the LBBB population was higher than that of the ST-elevation patient population in both the 30-day (25.4% versus 12.4%) and the 1-year period (47.3 versus 19.9%). Percutaneous coronary intervention (PCI) had significantly lower mortality in both populations. In the course of a multifactorial analysis we verified the independent prognostic significance of LBBB: the hazard ratio compared to ST-elevation was 1.33 (95% confidence interval: 1.10-1.62), checked for gender, age, occurrence of PCI, systolic blood pressure, cardiac frequency, serum creatinine difference, and the details of five anamneses/co-morbidities. CONCLUSION: The admission ECG has prognostic significance. Patients with LBBB have poorer prognosis compared to patients with ST-elevation on admission ECG. Orv Hetil. 2018; 159(17): 677-681.