Comparison of two mechanical insufflation-exsufflation devices in patients with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis: a preliminary study.

Background: Amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) is an incurable neurodegenerative disease affecting upper and lower motor neurons and resulting in progressive skeletal muscle weakness. Weak cough and difficulty in clearing secretions are often the cause of pulmonary infections and acute respiratory failure. Cough assistance is commonly used to provide support in coughing for patients with ALS.

Effectiveness of expiratory flow acceleration in patients with Parkinson's disease and swallowing deficiency: A preliminary study.

Objectives: Parkinson's disease (PD) causes dysfunction both to swallowing and to the cough mechanism. Oropharyngeal dysphagia is the main cause of pneumonia, due to silent aspiration of food and saliva. Pneumonia is the leading cause of death in PD.

The priming of basic combinatory responses in MEG.

Priming has been a powerful tool for the study of human memory and especially the memory representations relevant for language. However, although it is well established that lexical access can be primed, we do not know exactly what types of computations can be primed above the word level. This work took a neurobiological approach and assessed the ways in which the complex representation of a minimal combinatory phrase, such as red boat, can be primed, as evidenced by the spatiotemporal profiles of magnetoencephalography (MEG) signals.

Lexical Retrieval is not by Competition: Evidence from the Blocked Naming Paradigm.

A central issue in research on speech production is whether or not the retrieval of words from the mental lexicon is a competitive process. An important experimental paradigm to study the dynamics of lexical retrieval is the blocked naming paradigm, in which participants name pictures of objects that are grouped by semantic category ('homogenous' or 'related' blocks) or not grouped by semantic category ('heterogeneous' or 'unrelated' blocks). Typically, pictures are repeated multiple times (or cycles) within both related and unrelated blocks.

MEG evidence for conceptual combination but not numeral quantification in the left anterior temporal lobe during language production.

The left anterior temporal lobe (LATL) has risen as a leading candidate for a brain locus of composition in language; yet the computational details of its function are unknown. Although most literature discusses it as a combinatory region in very general terms, it has also been proposed to reflect the more specific function of conceptual combination, which in the classic use of this term mainly pertains to the combination of open class words with obvious conceptual contributions. We aimed to distinguish between these two possibilities by contrasting plural nouns in contexts where they were either preceded by a color modifier ("red cups"), eliciting conceptual combination, or by a number word ("two cups"), eliciting numeral quantification but no conceptual combination.