Priming Sentence Production in Older Adults: Evidence for Preserved Implicit Learning.

Purpose: Structural priming- speakers' unconscious tendency to echo previously encountered message-structure mappings - is thought to reflect the processes of implicit language learning that occur throughout the lifespan. Recently, structural priming has also been used as a means to facilitate language re-learning in age-related language disorders such as aphasia. However, little evidence is available on whether structural priming remains effective in healthy aging, limiting clinical translation of the structural priming paradigm.

Associations between blood metal/ metalloid concentration and human semen quality and sperm function: A cross-sectional study in Hong Kong.

Background: The association between metal/metalloid exposure on human sperm quality is still inconclusive. There is a lack of data on the effect of metal/metalloid on sperm function.

Methods: The aim of this study was to clarify the association between blood metal/metalloid concentration and traditional and functional sperm parameters, the blood concentration of Pb, Hg, Cd, As, Ni, Mo, Zn, Cu, Se, Fe, Mg, Cr and Ca of 288 men in Hong Kong were assessed by inductively coupled plasma-mass spectrometry, and sperm parameters including sperm concentration, motility, morphology, vitality, total sperm count, total motile sperm count, sperm DNA fragmentation and sperm acrosome reaction were measured.

Aligning sentence structures in dialogue: evidence from aphasia.

Syntactic alignment in dialogue is pervasive and enduring in unimpaired speakers, facilitating language processing and learning. Recent work suggests that syntactic alignment extends to the level of event-semantic properties (). Two experiments examined whether syntactic entrainment can ameliorate impaired message-structure mapping in persons with aphasia (PWA).

Effects of Verb Overlap on Structural Priming in Dialogue: Implications for Syntactic Learning in Aphasia.

Purpose Although there is increasing interest in using structural priming as a means to ameliorate grammatical encoding deficits in persons with aphasia (PWAs), little is known about the precise mechanisms of structural priming that are associated with robust and enduring effects in PWAs. Two dialogue-like comprehension-to-production priming experiments investigated whether lexically independent (abstract structural) priming and/or lexically (verb) specific priming yields immediate and longer, lasting facilitation of syntactic production in PWAs. Method Seventeen PWAs and 20 healthy older adults participated in a collaborative picture-matching task where participant and experimenter took turns describing picture cards using transitive and dative sentences.

Sentence production in Parkinson's disease.

While growing evidence reports changes in language use in non-demented individuals with Parkinson's disease (PD), the presence and nature of the deficits remain largely unclear. Researchers have proposed that dysfunctioning fronto-basal ganglia circuit results in impaired grammatical processes, predicting qualitatively similar language impairments between individuals with PD and agrammatic Broca's aphasia, whereas others suggest that PD is not associated with language-specific grammatical impairment. In addition, there is a paucity of research examining syntactic production in PD at the sentence-level.