Adjectival and verbal agreement in the oral production of early and late bilinguals

Extended oral production has seldom been used to explore adjectival and verbal agreement in L2 Spanish. This study examines oral narrations to compare the agreement behavior, speech rates, and patterns of errors of highly proficient Spanish heritage and L2 learners (early and late bilinguals, respectively), whose L1 is English, with those of native controls. Although both bilingual groups displayed high agreement accuracy scores, only the early bilinguals performed at or close to ceiling. In addition, the L2 learners spoke significantly more slowly than the heritage and native speakers, who displayed similar speech rates. Explanations accounting for the differences in speech rates and agreement accuracy include age of acquisition of Spanish, syntactic distance between a noun and its adjective, and task effects. All of these factors favored the early bilinguals, enhancing their advantages over L2 learners. Findings suggest that the integrated knowledge and automatic access needed for native-like attainment in agreement behavior in extended oral production is more easily achievable by early than by late bilinguals.

Differences in Dual Task Performance After Robotic Upper Extremity Rehabilitation in Hemiplegic Stroke Patients

Background: Cognitive–motor interference is a phenomenon in which the concomitant performance of cognitive and motor tasks results in poorer performance than the isolated performance of these tasks. We aimed to evaluate changes in dual-task performance after robotic upper extremity rehabilitation in patients with stroke-induced hemiplegia.Methods: This prospective study included patients with left upper limb weakness secondary to middle cerebral artery stroke who visited a rehabilitation hospital. Participants performed a total of 640 robot-assisted planar reaching movements during a therapist-supervised robotic intervention that was conducted five times a week for 4 weeks. Cognitive and motor performance was separately evaluated in single- and dual-task conditions. The digit span test and Controlled Oral Word Association Test (COWAT) were used to assess cognitive performance, whereas motor performance was evaluated through kinematic assessment of the motor task.Results: In single-task conditions, motor performance showed significant improvement after robotic rehabilitation, as did the scores of the COWAT subdomains of animal naming (p < 0.001), supermarket item naming (p < 0.06), and phonemes (p < 0.05). In dual-task conditions, all motor task performance variables except mean velocity showed improvement after robotic rehabilitation. The type of cognitive task did not affect the dual-task effect, and there were no significant differences in the dual-task effects of motor, cognitive, or the sum of motor and cognitive performance after robotic rehabilitation.Conclusion: Post-stroke robotic rehabilitation has different effects on motor and cognitive function, with more consistent effects on motor function than on cognitive function. Although motor and cognitive performance improved after robotic rehabilitation, there were no changes in the corresponding dual-task effects.

Monitoring Brain State and Behavioral Performance during Repetitive Visual Stimulation

We tested whether changes in prestimulus neural activity predict behavioral performance (decision time and errors) during a prolonged visual task. The task was to classify ambiguous stimuli—Necker cubes; manipulating the degree of ambiguity from low ambiguity (LA) to high ambiguity (HA) changed the task difficulty. First, we assumed that the observer’s state changes over time, which leads to a change in the prestimulus brain activity. Second, we supposed that the prestimulus state produces a different effect on behavioral performance depending on the task demands. Monitoring behavioral responses, we revealed that the observer’s decision time decreased for both LA and HA stimuli during the task performance. The number of perceptual errors lowered for HA, but not for LA stimuli. EEG analysis revealed an increase in the prestimulus 9–11 Hz EEG power with task time. Finally, we found associations between the behavioral and neural estimates. The prestimulus EEG power negatively correlated with the decision time for LA stimuli and the erroneous responses rate for HA stimuli. The obtained results confirm that monitoring prestimulus EEG power enables predicting perceptual performance on the behavioral level. The observed different time-on-task effects on the LA and HA stimuli processing may shed light on the features of ambiguous perception.

Association Between Dual-Task Gait and Cognitive Function in Older Adults

Community mobility involves walking with physical and cognitive challenges. In older adults (N=116; results here from initial analyses: N=29, Age=75±5 years, 51% females), we assessed gait speed and smoothness (harmonic-ratio) while walking on even and uneven surfaces, with or without an alternate alphabeting dual-task (ABC). ANOVA assessed surface and dual-task effects; Pearson correlations compared gait with global cognition and executive function composite z-scores. The four conditions (even, uneven, even-ABC and uneven-ABC) affected speed(m/s) (0.97±0.14 vs 0.90±0.15 vs 0.83±0.17 vs 0.79±0.16). Smoothness (2.19±0.48 vs 1.89±0.38 vs 1.92±0.53 vs 1.7±0.43) was affected by only surface (controlled for speed). Greater speed was associated with better global cognition(ρ=0.47 to 0.49, p<0.05) for all conditions and with better executive function for even-ABC(ρ=0.39, p=0.04) and uneven-ABC(ρ=0.40, p=0.03). Executive function was associated with smoothness during even(ρp=-0.42, p=0.03) and uneven(ρp=-0.39, p=0.04) walking. Type of walking challenge differentially affects gait quality and associations with cognitive function.

Expression of Emotions and Genes: Proinflammatory Gene Expression Rises With Spousal Distress

Marital quality shares ties to inflammation-related conditions like cardiovascular disease and diabetes. Lab-based studies implicate hostility during marital conflict as a mechanism via inflammatory reactivity. However, developmental theories suggest that conflict declines with age. Spousal distress is an important but overlooked context for aging couples as networks shrink and assistance needs increase. To examine the effects of spousal distress on changes in proinflammatory gene expression, 38 adults ages 40-81 witnessed their spouse relive an upsetting personal memory aloud, rated their mood before and after, and provided blood samples at baseline and twice post-task. Those whose negative mood increased more in response to spousal disclosure showed larger elevations in proinflammatory gene expression 40 (p=.022) and 80 minutes (p<.0001) after the task. Effects were robust to race, gender, age, alcohol, smoking, and body mass index. These novel findings identify spousal distress as a key marital context that may escalate inflammation-related health risks.

What can size tell us about abstract conceptual processing?

Embodied cognition theories propose that abstract concepts can be embodied via metaphorical extensions from experiences of the physical or the mental worlds. In three experiments, we explored how semantic size (e.g., the magnitude, dimension or extent of an object or a concept) of abstract concepts is mentally represented. We show that abstract size is metaphorically associated with the physical size of concrete objects (Experiment 1) and can produce a semantic-font size congruency effect comparable to that demonstrated in concrete words during online lexical processing (Experiment 2). Critically, this size congruency effect is large when a word is judged by its size but significantly smaller when it is judged by its emotionality (Experiment 3). Our results suggest that semantic size of abstract concepts can be represented in physical size and that such experiences are variably engaged under different task demands. The present findings advocate flexible embodiment of semantic representations, with an emphasis on the role of task effects on conceptual processing.