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Despite promising experimental findings, few studies have addressed the potential long-term health benefits of frequent contact with different kinds of urban nature. We examine the cross-sectional relations between two kinds of urban nature (neighborhood vegetation visible from the home, use of public green spaces) and health outcomes (life satisfaction, perceived general health, 2-months hair cortisol levels) in a sample population from Berlin ( N = 32) using a mixed-method approach. Participants whose homes had views of high amounts of diverse kinds of vegetation had significantly lower cortisol levels. Moreover, participants who regularly used a vegetated trail along a canal had significantly lower cortisol levels and reported significantly higher life satisfaction than less frequent users. In addition, vegetated routes or paths played an important role in the restorative activities and daily commutes of participants. We discuss directions for future research and recommend more consideration of greenways in urban development.

AbstractSuccessful communication in everyday life crucially involves the processing of auditory and visual components of speech. Viewing our interlocutor and processing visual components of speech facilitates speech processing by triggering auditory processing. Auditory phoneme processing, analyzed by event‐related brain potentials (ERP), has been shown to be associated with impairments in reading and spelling (i.e. developmental dyslexia), but visual aspects of phoneme processing have not been investigated in individuals with such deficits. The present study analyzed the passive visual Mismatch Response (vMMR) in school children with and without developmental dyslexia in response to video‐recorded mouth movements pronouncing syllables silently. Our results reveal that both groups of children showed processing of visual speech stimuli, but with different scalp distribution. Children without developmental dyslexia showed a vMMR with typical posterior distribution. In contrast, children with developmental dyslexia showed a vMMR with anterior distribution, which was even more pronounced in children with severe phonological deficits and very low spelling abilities. As anterior scalp distributions are typically reported for auditory speech processing, the anterior vMMR of children with developmental dyslexia might suggest an attempt to anticipate potentially upcoming auditory speech information in order to support phonological processing, which has been shown to be deficient in children with developmental dyslexia.