The neural substrate of noun morphological inflection: A rapid event-related fMRI study in Italian.

The present research investigated the neural correlates of nominal inflection and aimed at disclosing their possible link with the frequency distribution of noun inflectional features: grammatical gender, inflectional suffixes and inflectional classes. The properties of the Italian nominal system were exploited since it allows to explore exhaustively fine-grained phenomena in the inflectional processing. An event-related functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) experiment was carried out where Italian masculine and feminine nouns were visually presented to 50 healthy participants in an overt inflectional task: the generation of the plural from the singular and vice versa.

Semantics-weighted lexical surprisal modeling of naturalistic functional MRI time-series during spoken narrative listening.

Probabilistic language models are increasingly used to provide neural representations of linguistic features under naturalistic settings. Word surprisal models can be applied to continuous fMRI recordings during task-free listening of narratives, to detect regions linked to language prediction and comprehension. Here, to this purpose, a novel semantics-weighted lexical surprisal is applied to naturalistic fMRI data.

The Role of Syntactic Variability and Literal Interpretation Plausibility in Idiom Comprehension.

Idioms have been traditionally described as fixed expressions, highly restricted in their realization. Corpus and experimental studies, however, have shown that they are more variable than previously thought. The issue of idiom syntax has received a renewed interest, since it also addresses the problem of how idioms are mentally stored.

Progesterone, estrogen and pregnancy do not decrease colon myoelectric activity in rats: an in vivo study.

Background: Progesterone, estrogen and the hormonal complex of pregnancy have been responsible for some degree of colon hypomotility in human pregnancy.

Objective: To find out if estrogen, progesterone and the hormonal complex of pregnancy decrease colon myoelectric activity.

Methods: The study was performed in 37 healthy female rats in which electrodes were implanted on the serosa of the proximal ascendent, distal ascendent, transverse, and descendent colon.

Lactase persistence/non-persistence variants, C/T_13910 and G/A_22018, as a diagnostic tool for lactose intolerance in IBS patients.

Background: Irritable bowel syndrome (IBS) is a symptom-based disorder characterized by abdominal pain related to altered bowel habit. We evaluated the predictive power of 2 genetic markers of hypolactasia, C/T_13910 and G/A_22018, in IBS patients with and without lactose intolerance in order to gain insight into the role of lactose intolerance in IBS.

Methods: Seventy five patients (59F/16M, mean age: 49.