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Most readers have had the experience of initially failing to notice an omission or repetition of a function word, or a transposition of two adjacent words. In the present article, we review recent research investigating this phenomenon. We emphasize that failure to notice such errors is of substantial theoretical interest, given what we have learned about how systematically and incrementally readers inspect and process text. We endorse the idea that a process of rational inference may play a critical role, while we cast doubt on the idea that failure to notice errors arises from parallel processing of multiple words. We review a number of recent studies from our own laboratory that have investigated the relationship between eye movements during reading and noticing, or failing to notice, an error. While the conclusions from these studies are broadly consistent with a rational inference account, we find that when readers fail to notice an error, their eye movements generally show no indication that the error was registered at all. On its surface, this finding may be viewed as inconsistent with the idea that the rational inference process that enables readers to overlook errors is genuinely post‐perceptual. We suggest a mechanism by which eye movement control models could account for this finding.

Prediction has been proposed as an overarching principle that explains human information processing in language and beyond. To what degree can processing difficulty in syntactically complex sentences - one of the major concerns of psycholinguistics - be explained by predictability, as estimated using computational language models? A precise, quantitative test of this question requires a much larger scale data collection effort than has been done in the past. We present the Syntactic Ambiguity Processing Benchmark, a dataset of self-paced reading times from 2000 participants, who read a diverse set of complex English sentences. This dataset makes it possible to measure processing difficulty associated with individual syntactic constructions, and even individual sentences, precisely enough to rigorously test the predictions of computational models of language comprehension. We find that the predictions of language models with two different architectures sharply diverge from the reading time data, dramatically underpredicting processing difficulty, failing to predict relative difficulty among different syntactic ambiguous constructions, and only partially explaining item-wise variability. These findings suggest that prediction is most likely insufficient on its own to explain human syntactic processing.

Aims: With language characteristics shown to be a factor mediating bilinguals’ metalinguistic awareness, the present study attempts to give a clearer picture of the impact of language characteristics, avoiding confounds such as exposure opportunities and language experiences, which previous studies with comparisons made between monolinguals and bilinguals were subject to. Design: Two groups of bilinguals speaking the same first language (L1) but different second languages (L2s) were tested for their performance on a morphosyntactic awareness task. Other confounds (L1 proficiency and nonverbal intelligence) were statistically controlled. Data and Analysis: After five outliers were deleted, data from 22 Chinese–English bilinguals and 20 Chinese–Southern Min bilinguals were analyzed, by mainly using analyses of covariance. Findings: The results showed that, with nonverbal intelligence and Chinese proficiency controlled for, Chinese–English bilinguals scored significantly higher than their counterparts only on the past tense suffix task, one tested feature in which Chinese and English differ but which both Chinese and Southern Min lack. They did not, however, differ on the other contrasting feature, present suffix, probably due to its inconsistent presence in English. The two groups showed no difference on subject–object–verb and inflectional negation features that both their L1s and L2s lack. Originality: Unlike the metalinguistic awareness measure (grammatical error detection and correction) commonly used in previous studies, our task was adapted into a version using an unlearned third language (L3) (Japanese), which could reflect children’s cross-language transfer of metalinguistic knowledge. Besides, our metamorphological awareness measure was focused on inflectional morphology, whose influence on the bilingual advantage should be important but has yet received scant attention in the earlier literature. Significance: The overall results cross-validated the important role of language characteristics in bilinguals’ development of metalinguistic awareness and suggested that the metamorphological awareness is likely to facilitate bilinguals’ learning of an L3.

CDK4/6 inhibitors (CDK4/6i) is well established as the current standard of care for hormone positive (HR(+)) metastatic breast cancer (mBC), in combination with endocrine therapy. CDK4/6i extend a chemotherapy-free, progression free survival (PFS) that preserves quality of life in patients. The most common side effect of CDK4/6i is myelosuppression, with neutropenia the most prevalent adverse effect, especially for palbociclib and ribociclib. In PALOMA-2 and MONALEESA-2, where neutropenia was prevalent (any grade neutropenia 79.5%, grade 3/4 neutropenia 66.5% in PALOMA-2, and any grade neutropenia: 74.3%, grade 3/4 55.3% in MONALEESA-2), although febrile neutropenia seldom occurred (1.8%). Several studies have proposed different genetic factors predisposing to CDK4/6 inhibitor induced neutropenia, including Duffy antigen polymorphisms, ABCB1 and ERCC1 polymorphisms (ABCB1_rs1128503, ABCB1_rs1045642, ERCC1_rs11615, ERCC1_rs3212986), CDK6 polymorphisms, and others. Subgroup studies from the PALOMA trials have suggested that Asian patients receiving palbociclib have higher rates of neutropenia, although the exact explanation is unknown. We conducted a retrospective analysis of 102 Taiwanese patients who received palbociclib for HR(+) mBC at the Taipei Veterans General Hospital for the clinical features, incidence and time course of neutropenia were analyzed. Significant neutropenia incidence was observed (> 95% of all grade neutropenia, 74.5% grade 3/4 neutropenia). In addition, in our clinical cohort, one of the patients was a long term peritoneal dialysis patient newly diagnosed of HR(+) mBC and started on Palbociclib, initially 125mg, later decreased dosage to 100mg after neutropenia occurrence. By Liquid chromatography–mass spectrometry (LC–MS), we quantified the levels of palbociclib in her serum and peritoneal fluid at various time points, while on different dosage use. To our knowledge, this is the first pharmacokinetics analysis on a peritoneal dialysis patient receiving CDK4/6i. To investigate a possible genetic association for the high prevalence of neutropenia, we queried the Taiwan biobank, a nationwide biospecimen repository with 129,586 healthy individual genome wide DNA sequencing data deposited. We investigated the prevalence of the 4 SNPs previously reported to be related to neutropenia in the PALOMA studies. By comparing the Taiwan biobank data to SNP databases from different ethnicities, we observed interesting findings on ethnicity differences of SNP distribution and higher prevalence of neutropenia SNPs. Collectively, in this study we report real world data, biobank genome wide analysis, and a novel report of pharmacokinetic study in a peritoneal dialysis patient, providing novel insights into the real world use of palbociclib and CDKi. Table 1. Median TTF of each subsequent therapy after PAL+ET Characteristics of the clinical cohort treated with palbociclib at TVGH Citation Format: Kuan-Jung Huang, Ting-Hao Kuo, Ta-Chung Chao, Chun-Yu Liu, Yi-Fang Tsai, Chi-Cheng Huang, Ling-Ming Tseng, Cheng-Chih Richard Hsu, Jiun-I Lai. High Incidence of Palbociclib Related Neutropenia in Asian Patients Associated with Genetic Polymorphisms [abstract]. In: Proceedings of the 2022 San Antonio Breast Cancer Symposium; 2022 Dec 6-10; San Antonio, TX. Philadelphia (PA): AACR; Cancer Res 2023;83(5 Suppl):Abstract nr P4-01-31.

Salmonella typhimurium causes symptoms resembling typhoid fever and gastroenteritis in humans. Its toxicity is due to an outer membrane consisting largely of lipopolysaccharides (LPS) which is responsible for the host immune response. The aim of this study is to evaluate the antimicrobial, anti-apoptotic ability of Lactobacillus plantarum and reduce Salmonella-induced pro-inflammatory cytokine IL-8 secretion. Adhesive tests were performed using lactobacilli co-cultured with the colon cancer cell line HCT-116 for 2 hours. The strains displaying the highest adhesion were selected for downstream 3- (4, 5- Dimethylthiazol -2-yl) -2, 5- diphenyltetrazolium bromide (MTT) tests to assess cytotoxicity. The supernatants of Lactobacillus cultured with HCT-116 cells for 24 and 48 h to evaluate the inhibitory effect. To determine Interleukin 8 (IL-8) secretion in colon cancer induced by S. typhimurium, we stimulated HCT-116 cells with S. typhimurium and co-cultured with lactobacilli for 24 h. Lactobacilli had the most significant inhibitory effects on cell growth, and their inhibitory effects were time-dependent. Strain No. 03-03-026 caused cancer cell deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA) fragmentation, and the anti-apoptosis protein (B-cell lymphoma 2) was reduced in the HCT-116 cells as determined. IL-8 production in colon cancer cells was significantly reduced by these lactobacilli. Our results suggested that lactobacilli maybe effectively reduce the numbers of S. typhimurium, IL-8 levels and the anti-apoptotic phosphorylated-p38 mitogen-activated protein kinase and B-cell lymphoma 2 proteins. Lactobacillus can be added to the diet as a food additive to prevent colorectal cancer and used to be the prophylactic agent against S. typhimurium.

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