The objective of this study was to evaluate the economic and humanistic burden of chronic sleep maintenance insomnia characterized by nighttime awakenings (CINA). A database analysis of National Health and Wellness Survey, an annual cross-sectional study of health status and outcomes of US adults, was performed. CINA was defined as experiencing nighttime awakenings at least twice per week for m...

The purpose of the present study was to determine whether individuals with Asperger's disorder exhibit difficulty in switching attention from a local level to a global level. Eleven participants with Asperger's disorder and 11 age- and gender-matched healthy controls performed a level-repetition switching task using Navon-type hierarchical stimuli. In both groups, level-repetition was beneficia...

Introduction. To select the best group, and to make a good decision, are of the most important worries of the health and medical education ministry and also all entrants in the residency test. Having and performing a reliable and good exam will reduce doubts to a great deal. Considering different scientific methods consist of (precisely review of curriculum by the designer committee, sampling o...

equating test scores is an important issue in large scale testing. almost all standardized tests have several forms which vary in difficulty. new forms are written and added every year. when the items in different forms of a test vary in difficulty, direct comparison of test-takers who have taken different forms and are at the same ability level is not possible; hence, the issue of test fairnes...

STUDY OBJECTIVES This study aimed to investigate the role of social factors, especially social support for sleep, among victims living at home around 1-2 years after the Great East Japan Earthquake and tsunami. DESIGN A cross-sectional household survey was conducted between May and December 2012 (14-21 months after the disaster) in the Ishinomaki area, Japan. Univariate and multivariate logis...

The present study investigates the best factor for controlling the item difficulty of multiple-choice English vocabulary questions generated by an automatic question generation system. Three factors are considered for controlling item difficulty: (1) reading passage difficulty, (2) semantic similarity between the correct answer and distractors, and (3) the distractor word difficulty level. An e...

This paper presents a method to introduce the notion of a student selected difficulty level for the task of pronunciation learning of a second language. Three difficulty levels, novice, acceptable and native, are constructed using a tri-/biand unigram language model each using a specific set of broad phonetic groups determined using underspecification. The evaluation of the experiment is based ...

Listening difficulty ratings, using words with high word familiarity, are proposed as a new subjective measure for the evaluation of speech transmission in public spaces to provide realistic and objective results. Two listening tests were performed to examine their validity, compared with intelligibility scores. The tests included a reverberant signal and noise as detrimental sounds. The subjec...