Effects of social factors on the COVID-19 cases and its evolution in Hubei, China.

Introduction: In order to study the impact of social factors on the evolution of the epidemic, this paper takes the COVID-19 in Hubei Province of China as an example to study the impact of social factors such as the permanent population, universities, hospitals, the distance between Wuhan seafood market and 17 cities in Hubei Province, and the distribution of medical supplies on the COVID-19. This is of great significance for helping to develop effective prevention and control measures and response strategies, ensuring public health and social stability. Methods: Time series regression analysis is used to study the impact of various factors on the epidemic situation, multidimensional scale analysis is used to assess the differences among provinces, and Almon polynomial is used to study the lag effect of the impact. Results: We found that these cities can be divided into three groups based on the number of confirmed cases and the time course data of the cases. The results verify that these factors have a great impact on the evolution of the COVID-19. Discussion: With the increase in the number of universities, the number of confirmed cases and new cases has significantly increased. With the increase in population density, the number of new cases has significantly increased. In addition, the farther away from the Wuhan seafood market, the fewer confirmed cases. It is worth noting that the insufficient increase in medical supplies in some cities still leads to a significant increase in new cases. This impact is regional, and their lag periods are also different. Through the comparison with Guangdong Province, it is concluded that social factors will affect COVID-19. Overall, promoting the construction of medical schools and ensuring the reasonable distribution of medical supplies is crucial as it can effectively assist decision-making.

Attention Modulates the Role of Speakers' Voice Identity and Linguistic Information in Spoken Word Processing: Evidence From Event-Related Potentials.

PURPOSE: The human voice usually contains two types of information: linguistic and identity information. However, whether and how linguistic information interacts with identity information remains controversial. This study aimed to explore the processing of identity and linguistic information during spoken word processing by considering the modulation of attention. METHOD: We conducted two event-related potentials (ERPs) experiments in the study. Different speakers (self, friend, and unfamiliar speakers) and emotional words (positive, negative, and neutral words) were used to manipulate the identity and linguistic information. With the manipulation, Experiment 1 explored the identity and linguistic information processing with a word decision task that requires participants' explicit attention to linguistic information. Experiment 2 further investigated the issue with a passive oddball paradigm that requires rare attention to either the identity or linguistic information. RESULTS: Experiment 1 revealed an interaction among speaker, word type, and hemisphere in N400 amplitudes but not in N100 and P200, which suggests that identity information interacted with linguistic information at the later stage of spoken word processing. The mismatch negativity results of Experiment 2 showed no significant interaction between speaker and word pair, which indicates that identity and linguistic information were processed independently. CONCLUSIONS: The identity information would interact with linguistic information during spoken word processing. However, the interaction was modulated by the task demands on attention involvement. We propose an attention-modulated explanation to explain the mechanism underlying identity and linguistic information processing. Implications of our findings are discussed in light of the integration and independence theories.

Distinct Neural Resource Involvements but Similar Hemispheric Lateralization Patterns in Pre-Attentive Processing of Speaker's Identity and Linguistic Information.

The speaker's identity (who the speaker is) and linguistic information (what the speaker is saying) are essential to daily communication. However, it is unclear whether and how listeners process the two types of information differently in speech perception. The present study adopted a passive oddball paradigm to compare the identity and linguistic information processing concerning neural resource involvements and hemispheric lateralization patterns. We used two female native Mandarin speakers' real and pseudo-Mandarin words to differentiate the identity from linguistic (phonological and lexical) information. The results showed that, in real words, the phonological-lexical variation elicited larger MMN amplitudes than the identity variation. In contrast, there were no significant MMN amplitude differences between the identity and phonological variation in pseudo words. Regardless of real or pseudo words, the identity and linguistic variation did not elicit MMN amplitudes differences between the left and right hemispheres. Taken together, findings from the present study indicated that the identity information recruited similar neural resources to the phonological information but different neural resources from the lexical information. However, the identity and linguistic information processing did not show a particular hemispheric lateralization pattern at an early pre-attentive speech perception stage. The findings revealed similarities and differences between linguistic and non-linguistic information processing, contributing to a better understanding of speech perception and spoken word recognition.

The roles of pitch type and lexicality in the hemispheric lateralization for lexical tone processing: An ERP study.

Previous studies proposed different views to explain the hemispheric lateralization of lexical tone processing. But how the acoustic and phonological information modulates it remains unclear. The acoustic information refers to the physical acoustic features of lexical tones, and the phonological information means the different word meanings differentiated by lexical tones. In the present study, we adopted the active oddball paradigm to explore the effects of pitch type and lexicality on native Cantonese speakers' lexical tone processing with the event-related potential (ERP) technique. We used Cantonese level and contour tones (pitch type) to examine the role of acoustic information and real words and pseudowords (lexicality) to detect the phonological information's effect. The results showed that the pitch type and lexicality affected the N2b amplitudes between the left and right hemispheres interactively, while they did not play roles in P3b amplitudes. The results indicated that the acoustic and phonological information modulated the hemispheric lateralization of lexical tone processing interactively only in the early stage (N2b time window) but not in the later stage (P3b time window). The findings suggested a two-stage model interprets the hemispheric lateralization in lexical tone processing.