BACKGROUND Minimal access surgery for gastrointestinal cancer has short-term benefits but is associated with a proficiency-gain curve. The aim of this study was to define national proficiency-gain curves for minimal access colorectal and oesophagogastric surgery, and to determine the impact on clinical outcomes. METHODS All adult patients undergoing minimal access oesophageal, colonic and rec...

It is widely believed that adults cannot learn a foreign language in the same way that children learn a first language. However, recent evidence suggests that adult learners of a foreign language can come to rely on native-like language brain mechanisms. Here, we show that the type of language training crucially impacts this outcome. We used an artificial language paradigm to examine longitudin...

Diffusion tensor imaging (DTI) and a longitudinal language learning approach were applied to investigate the relationship between the achieved second language (L2) proficiency during L2 learning and the reorganization of structural connectivity between core language areas. Language proficiency tests and DTI scans were obtained from German students before and after they completed an intensive 6-...

OBJECTIVES/HYPOTHESIS To determine the association of the electrophysiological activity of the pharyngoesophageal transition with tracheoesophageal speech proficiency in total laryngectomees. STUDY DESIGN An observational (nonexperimental) study of the correlation type with a descriptive approach. METHODS Thirty-four individuals (26 males), average age 62.5 years, total laryngectomees rehab...

Assisting in foreign language learning is one of the major areas in which natural language processing technology can contribute. This paper proposes a computerized method of measuring communicative skill in English as a foreign language. The proposed method consists of two parts. The first part involves a test sentence selection part to achieve precise measurement with a small test set. The sec...

With a number of students, the purpose of collaborative learning is to assign these students to the right teams so that the promotion of skills of each team member can be facilitated. Although some team formation solutions have been proposed, the problem of extracting more effective features to describe the skill proficiency of students for better collaborative learning is still open. To that e...

Not every phone, word, or sentence is equally good for assessing language proficiency. We investigated three phonetic factors that may affect automatic scoring of Mandarin proficiency – phoneme, phone boundary, and tone. Results showed that phone boundaries performed the best, and within-syllable boundaries were better than cross-syllable boundaries. The retroflex consonants as well as the vowe...

This study uses a moving windows self-paced reading task to assess text comprehension of beginning and intermediate-level simplified texts and authentic texts by L2 learners engaged in a text-retelling task. Linear mixed effects (LME) models revealed statistically significant main effects for reading proficiency and text level on the number of text-based propositions recalled: More proficient r...