Young normal-hearing listeners and young-elderly listeners between 55 and 65 years of age, ranging from near-normal hearing to moderate hearing loss, were compared using different speech recognition tasks (consonant recognition in quiet and in noise, and time-compressed sentences) and working memory tasks (serial word recall and digit ordering). The results showed that the group of young-elderly listeners performed worse on both the speech recognition and working memory tasks than the young listeners. However, when pure-tone audiometric thresholds were used as a covariate variable, the significant differences between groups disappeared. These results support the hypothesis that sensory decline in young-elderly listeners seems to be an important factor in explaining the decrease in speech processing and working memory capacity observed at these ages.

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Context: Severe sepsis is associated with high mortality and increased costs. The 'Surviving Sepsis Campaign' (SSC) protocol was developed as an international initiative to reduce mortality. However, its cost-effectiveness is unknown. Objective: To determine the costeffectiveness of the SSC protocol for the treatment of severe sepsis in Spain after the implementation of an educational program compared with the conventional care of severe sepsis. Design: Observational prospective before-and-after study. Setting: 59 medical-surgical intensive care units located throughout Spain. Patients: A total of 854 patients were enrolled in the pre-educational program cohort (usual or standard care of severe sepsis) and 1,465 patients in the posteducational program cohort (SSC protocol care of severe sepsis). Interventions: The educational program aimed to increase adherence to the SSC protocol. The SSC protocol included pharmacological and medical interventions. Main outcome measures: Clinical (hospital mortality) and economic (health-care resource and treatment costs) outcomes were recorded. A health-care system perspective was used for costs. The primary outcome was incremental cost-effectiveness ratio (ICER). Results: Patients in the SSC protocol care cohort had a lower risk of hospital mortality (44.0% vs. 39.7%, P = 0.04). However, mean costs per patient were 1,736 euros higher in the SSC protocol care cohort (95% CI 114-3,358 euros), largely as a result of increased length of stay. Mean life years gained (LYG) were higher in the SSC protocol care cohort: 0.54 years (95% CI 0.02-1.05 years). The adjusted ICER of the SSC protocol was 4,435 euros per LYG. Nearly all (96.5%) the bootstrap replications were below the threshold of 30,000 euros per LYG. Conclusion: The SSC protocol seems to be a cost-effective option for treating severe sepsis in Spain.

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This paper presents the University of Valencia's computerized word pool. This is a database that includes 16,109 Spanish words, together with 11 psychological variables for limited groups of items. The purpose behind the creation of this database was to have available a large quantity of verbal stimuli in a well-controlled system, ready for automatic selection. The description includes a summary of statistics on each of the 11 psychological variables, together with a correlational and factor analysis of them. This statistical analysis produces results close to those obtained for equivalent English material.The purpose of the present paper is twofold. First, a description of the University of Valencia's word pool is provided. This is the first computerized word pool available to researchers who need to select Spanish verbal material. Spanish is a language of widespread use as a first or second language in many English-speaking countries, particularly the United States. This fact, together with the relevance of variables associated with verbal material (Rubin, 1980;Rubin & Friendly, 1986), justified the development of the database. Second, the present paper includes a statistical analysis of the variables in the word pool to make the database comparable to similar databases available in the English language.

In this article, normative data on the familiarity and difficulty of 196 single-solution Spanish word fragments are presented. The database includes the following indices: difficulty, familiarity, frequency, number of meanings, number of letters given in the fragment, first and/or last letters given, and ratio of letters to blanks. A factor analysis was performed on difficulty, and two factors were obtained. Frequency, familiarity, and number of meanings loaded highly on the first factor, which we consider to measure lexical processes, whereas number of letters in the fragment, first and/or last letters given, and ratio of letters to blanks loaded highly on the second factor, which we judge to be determined by perceptual information. Regression analyses using factor scores as predictors showed that both factors accounted for a significant part of the completion probability scores. The full set of these norms may be downloaded from the Psychonomic Society Web archive at www.psychonomic.org/archive/.

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