Assessing the Linguistic Capacity Across Alzheimer's Disease and Its Preclinical Stages: Evidence from Narrative Macrostructure in Elderly Speakers of Greek.

Background: The assessment of language deficits can be valuable in the early clinical diagnosis of neurodegenerative disorders, including Alzheimer's disease (AD).

Objective: The present study aims to explore whether language markers at the macrostructural level could assist with the placement of an individual across the dementia continuum employing production data from structured narratives.

Methods: We administered a Picture Sequence Narrative Discourse Task to 170 speakers of Greek: young healthy controls (yHC), cognitively intact healthy elders (eHC), elder participants with subjective cognitive impairment (SCI), with mild cognitive impairment (MCI), and with AD dementia at the mild/moderate stages.

Language Markers of Dementia and Their Role in Early Diagnosis of Alzheimer's Disease: Exploring Grammatical and Syntactic Competence via Sentence Repetition.

Background: Earlier research focuses primarily on the cognitive changes due to Alzheimer's disease (AD); however, little is known with regard to changes in language competence across the lifespan.

Objective: The present study aims to investigate the decline of language skills at the grammatical and syntactic levels due to changes in cognitive function.

Methods: We administered the Litmus Sentence Repetition Task (SRT) to 150 native speakers of Greek who fall into five groups: 1) young healthy speakers, 2) cognitively intact elder healthy speakers, 3) speakers with subjective cognitive impairment (SCI), 4) speakers with mild cognitive impairment (MCI); and 5) speakers with AD dementia at the mild/moderate stages.

The Processing of Lexical Ambiguity: Evidence from Child and Adult Greek.

The aim of the study is to examine the effect of sentential context on lexical ambiguity resolution in Greek adults and typically developing children. Context and word frequency are factors that can affect lexical processing, however, the role of them has not been thoroughly examined in Greek. To this aim, we assessed sentence context effects in homonym meaning activation in monolingual speakers of Greek, children and adults, using a cross-modal priming paradigm.

Aging and the Perception of Affective and Linguistic Prosody.

Investigations of affective prosodic processing have demonstrated a decline with aging. It is unclear, however, whether this decline affects all or specific emotions. Also, little is known about the ability of syntactic resolution ambiguity with the use of prosody in aging.

Bilingualism effects in pronoun comprehension: Evidence from children with autism.

The prevalence of autism worldwide has risen steadily in the last two decades, while bilingualism is also becoming increasingly prevalent in today's rapidly globalizing world. The current study aimed to investigate bilingualism effects in the pronoun resolution skills of children with autism in comparison to age-matched monolingual children with autism, as well as monolingual and bilingual children of typical development (Ν = 20 participants per group). Results showed that autistic children had general difficulty anchoring ambiguous pronouns to entities that were linguistically expressed in discourse, yet, the bilingual children with autism were more sensitive to the topicality of the entities in syntactic subject position and more prone to identify them as suitable referents of ambiguous null pronouns as compared to their monolingual peers.

Getting inside on virgin olive oil (VOO) photooxidation kinetics through combined generalized 2D correlation analysis and moving window 2D correlation analysis of ATR-FTIR spectra.

The generalized two-dimensional correlation spectroscopy (g2D-COR spectroscopy) analysis combined with its extended version moving-window 2D-COR (MW-2D-COR) was performed on a set of kinetic ATR-FTIR spectral data. The former is a mathematical method that is applied to a set of spectra collected for a sample exposed to an external perturbation (e.g.

The Comprehension of Syntactic and Affective Prosody by Adults with Autism Spectrum Disorder Without Accompanying Cognitive Deficits.

The present study investigates the comprehension of syntactic and affective prosody in adults with autism spectrum disorder without accompanying cognitive deficits (ASD w/o cognitive deficits) as well as age-, education- and gender-matched unimpaired adults, while processing orally presented sentences. Two experiments were conducted: (a) an on-line sentence completion task containing local subject/object ambiguities and (b) an affective prosody task exploring the comprehension of six emotions. The syntactic prosody task revealed that the experimental group performed similar to the control group on the fillers and the object condition.

Comprehension asymmetries in language acquisition: a test for Relativized Minimality.

Cross-linguistic studies have shown that typically developing children have difficulties comprehending non-canonical structures. These findings have been interpreted within the Relativized Minimality (RM) approach, according to which local relations cannot be established between two terms of a dependency if an intervening element possesses similar morphosyntactic features. In an extension of RM, Friedmann, Belletti, and Rizzi (2009) suggested that lexical NP restriction is the source of minimality effects in non-canonical sentences.

Estimation of children's radiation dose from cardiac catheterisations, performed for the diagnosis or the treatment of a congenital heart disease using TLD dosimetry and Monte Carlo simulation.

Entrance surface radiation doses were measured with thermoluminescent dosimeters for 98 children who were referred to a cardiology department for the diagnosis or the treatment of a congenital heart disease. Additionally, all the radiographic parameters were recorded and Monte Carlo simulations were performed for the estimation of entrance surface dose to effective dose conversion factors, in order to further calculate the effective dose for each child. For diagnostic catheterisations the values ranged from 0.

Differences in effective dose and energy imparted estimation from PA-AP, RLAT-LLAT projections in pediatric full spine x-ray examination using the Monte Carlo technique.

Effective dose (E) and energy imparted (epsilon) can be used to quantify the risk of radiation-induced carcinogenesis or hereditary effects arising from radiographic exposures. When the children are examined or treated for idiopathic scoliokyphosis it is important to estimate E and epsilon in the patients due to full spine x-ray examination. The aim of this study is to calculate E and epsilon in the case of children of 5 and 10 years old who undergo full spine x-ray examination using the Monte Carlo approach.

Assessment of patient radiation doses during transcatheter closure of ventricular and atrial septal defects with Amplatzer devices.

The purpose of this study was to estimate the radiation dose to which children are exposed during cardiac catheterizations for the treatment of ventricular and atrial septal defects. Radiation doses were estimated for 46 children aged 1-18 years. These children were treated for secundum atrial septal defects (ASD group) for perimembranous ventricular septal defects (VSD group) or underwent a routine diagnostic catheterization (diagnostic group).

Barriers in implementing research findings in cancer care: the Greek registered nurses perceptions.

This study explored Greek nurses' perceptions of the barriers to research utilization faced in every day practice. The barriers between nurses working in cancer and general hospitals, as well as between those employed at central and provincial hospitals were compared. The study used a cross-sectional design and data were collected using the "Barriers Scale" (Funk et al.

Polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbon contamination and LUMIStox solvent extract toxicity of marine sediments in the North Aegean Sea, Greece.

Organic extracts of surface marine sediment collected from six sites within the bay of Kavala (north Aegean Sea, Greece) were used for determining priority pollutant polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs) and doing toxicity testing. PAH analyses and LUMIStox acute toxicity measurements were conducted in two sediment grain-size fractions: silt/clay (< 63 microm) and sand (63-2000 microm). Sixteen PAH concentrations were found at low- to moderate levels, ranging from 44 to 166 ng/g dry weight in the fine fraction and from 45 to 148 ng/g dry weight in the coarse fraction.