Social Isolation of Older Adults Living in a Neighbourhood of Montreal: A Qualitative Descriptive Study of the Perspectives of Older Adults and Community Stakeholders.

The purpose of this study was to describe the social isolation of older adults in the Côte-des-Neiges neighbourhood (Montreal, Canada) from the perspectives of older adults and community stakeholders. To do so, a descriptive qualitative study was conducted, involving community-dwelling older adults and a variety of key stakeholders from the neighbourhood. Seven focus groups were held, with a total of 37 participants.

The Neuronal Correlates of Indeterminate Sentence Comprehension: An fMRI Study.

Sentences such as are indeterminate because they do not make explicit what the subject () started doing with the object (). In principle, indeterminate sentences allow for an infinite number of interpretations. One theory, however, assumes that these sentences are resolved by , a linguistic process that forces the noun to be interpreted as an (e.

The split between Gall and Spurzheim (1813-1818).

An acerbic footnote in Volume 3 (1818) of the five-volume great work of Franz Joseph Gall and Johann Gaspar Spurzheim, Anatomy and Physiology of the Nervous System in General and of the Brain in Particular with Observations on the Possibility of Understanding the Many Moral and Intellectual Dispositions of Man and Animals by the Configuration of Their Heads, marked the end of the collaboration between Gall, the founder of organologie, and Spurzheim, promoter of phrenology. We discuss the background of this note and the nature of the rift that marked the end of Gall and Spurzheim's collaboration.

Semantic and syntactic processing of mass and count nouns: data from dementia.

In the present research, we investigated the processing of Italian mass and count nouns and of their semantic and morphosyntactic attributes in people with neurodegenerative disease. The performance of a group of 26 Italian participants with Alzheimer's disease was studied in a semantic judgment task and a syntactic judgment task. Results were analyzed by means of mixed-effect models, revealing an interaction between task and stimulus category: The probability for correct responses to mass stimuli was significantly lower than that for count stimuli, but only in the semantic task.

Cognitive reserve in a cross-cultural population: the case of Italian emigrants in Montreal.

Background: Cognitive reserve could be defined as the accumulation of experiences, abilities, knowledge and changes that occur throughout the lifespan. One of the most difficult changes in life is the experience of emigrating to a foreign country.

Aims: The present investigation aimed to compare the cognitive reserve of two paired groups of elderly: Italians living in Italy and Italians who in adult age (around 20 years) emigrated to Montreal.

Lexical attrition in younger and older bilingual adults.

Healthy monolingual older adults experience changes in their lexical abilities. Bilingual individuals immersed in an environment in which their second language is dominant experience lexical changes, or attrition, in their first language. Changes in lexical skills in the first language of older individuals who are bilinguals, therefore, can be attributed to the typical processes accompanying older age, the typical processes accompanying first-language attrition in bilingual contexts, or both.

Lexical access in younger and older adults: the case of the mass/count distinction.

Although lexicosemantic deficits are not typically seen in older adults, some studies indicate that age-related changes in semantic processing may occur. We had groups of older and younger adults perform speeded lexical decision on mass (e.g.

Semantic and syntactic aspects of the mass/count distinction: a case study of semantic dementia.

Semantic and syntactic contributions to processing of mass and count nouns were assessed by examining the performance of a patient suffering from a pure semantic deficit. Semantic and syntactic processing was evaluated on grammaticality judgement and sentence-picture matching tasks, respectively, where each task involved mass and count readings of metonymic nouns. While the patient did not show impaired performance on the grammaticality judgment task, he manifested difficulties in making mass/count distinctions in the sentence-picture matching task.

Probability in the grammar of German and Dutch: interfixation in triconstituent compounds.

This study addresses the possibility that interfixes in multiconstituent nominal compounds in German and Dutch are functional as markers of immediate constituent structure. We report a lexical statistical survey of interfixation in the lexicons of German and Dutch which shows that all interfixes of German and one interfix of Dutch are significantly more likely to appear at the major constituent boundary than expected under chance conditions. A series of experiments provides evidence that speakers of German and Dutch are sensitive to the probabilistic cues to constituent structure provided by the interfixes.

Processing of mass/count information in Alzheimer's disease and mild cognitive impairment.

This study examines the processing of a specific linguistic distinction, the mass/count distinction, in patients suffering from Alzheimer's disease (AD) and mild cognitive impairment (MCI). Fourteen AD and 10 MCI subjects were tested using a sentence grammaticality judgement task where grammaticality violations were caused by determiner-noun mismatches, as well as a sentence-picture matching task to assess their ability to access mass and count readings of dual nouns. Considerable heterogeneity was observed within each subject group, and performance across groups was almost identical.

The role of configurational asymmetry in the lexical access of prefixed verbs: evidence from French.

In this paper we investigated the effects of configurational asymmetry in prefixed verbs in French. We used a simple lexical decision paradigm to compare prefixed verbs with external and internal prefixes as specified in linguistic theory (Di Sciullo, 1997) where external prefixes do not change the aktionsart and the verb argument structure of the verb, but internal prefixes do change the aktionsart and may change the verb argument structure of the verb. In Experiment 1 we tested the bi-valent prefix dé- where the configurational difference between external and internal properties of a prefix did not elicit differential response latencies.

Conceptions and questions concerning morphological processing.

The understanding of the nature and extent of morphological processing is critical to the overall investigation of how words are organized in the mind. In this overview article, we discuss the nature of morphological processing and the domain of morphological processing research. We claim that investigations crucially involve the understanding of relations among morphologically simple and morphologically complex words, and sketch how specific questions of morphological processing within the 2004 special issue on the mental lexicon fall under these categories.

Regularity re-revisited: modality matters.

The issue of regular-irregular past tense formation was examined in a cross-modal lexical decision task in Modern Greek, a language where the orthographic and phonological overlap between present and past tense stems is the same for both regular and irregular verbs. The experiment described here is a follow-up study of previous visual lexical decision experiments (Tsapkini, Kehayia, & Harema, 2002) that also addressed the regular-irregular distinction in Greek. In the present experiment, we investigated the effect of input modality in lexical processing and compared different types of regular and irregular verbs.

Verb reading in developmental language impairment.

This research addresses the issues of frequency and regularity in verb reading and their importance for the organization of the mental lexicon in DLI francophones. A reading task probes response latencies and response accuracy for DLI and control participants on frequent and infrequent inflected forms of verbs. DLI participants are slower at reading verbs even if their mean accuracy rates are higher than controls'.

The recognition of gender-marked nouns and verbs in Polish-speaking aphasic patients.

In the present study, we investigated the on-line recognition of gender-marked lexical items by three aphasic patients and eighteen matched control participants, all native speakers of Polish. Polish is unique in that it allows investigating grammatical gender across the major categories of nouns and verbs. Patients and their controls were tested using a simple visual lexical decision paradigm in which gender, number and grammatical category were manipulated.

The role of typological variation in the processing of interfixed compounds.

This study investigates the processing of interfixed compounds within a primed lexical decision paradigm. Results from an experiment on German are compared with those from a previous study on Greek and Polish, demonstrating that patterns of morphological priming in German differ from those obtained in the other two languages. In all experiments compounds were primed by initial morphemes with and without the interfix.

Interaction of morphological structure and prefix transparency in the processing of Bulgarian aspectual verb forms.

This study investigates the processing of polymorphemic words in a highly inflected language, Bulgarian. The roles of semantic transparency, aspect, and bound or free root status in the recognition of aspectual verb forms were probed in the visual modality in a simple lexical decision and a masked priming experiment at a short SOA. Results from the two experiments yielded effects of semantic transparency and morphological complexity, demonstrating that both factors influence the recognition of prefixed aspectual forms in Bulgarian and pointing toward different access procedures.

Why is "Red Cross" different from "Yellow Cross"?: a neuropsychological study of noun-adjective agreement within Italian compounds.

This study investigates the performance of two Italian nonfluent aphasic patients on noun-adjective agreement in compounds and in noun phrases. A completion, a reading, and a repetition task were administered. Results show that both patients were able to correctly inflect adjectives within compounds, but not in noun phrases.

Auditory verb recognition in developmental language impairment.

This research addresses the issues of frequency and regularity in auditory verb recognition and their importance for the organization of the mental lexicon in DLI francophones. A primed auditory lexical decision task probes reaction times and response accuracy in DLI and control participants on frequent and infrequent, and regular and irregular, inflected forms of verbs. Results show no priming for inflectionally related forms as well as strong frequency effects in DLI participants.

Regularity revisited: evidence from lexical access of verbs and nouns in Greek.

The present study investigates the relationship between morphological regularity and form during lexical processing using a visual priming paradigm varying the prime duration. We addressed the effect of regularity on morphological facilitation in nouns and verbs by exploiting particular characteristics of a highly inflected language, Greek, in which it is possible to manipulate morphological regularity while controlling the degree of orthographic overlap between morphological relatives. The effects of morphological regularity were found to crucially depend on the time course of lexical access.

Mental lexicon research in the new millennium.

This article presents an overview of current research on the mental lexicon, as it is represented by articles in the spring 2002 Special Issue of Brain and Language. We examine current findings in terms of language, task, and population effects associated with how words are presented and processed in the mind. We discuss how such mental representations may be linked to neurological instantiations and address the issue of ecological validity in the field.