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BackgroundLifespace is a multidimensional construct that describes the geographic area in which a person lives and conducts their activities, and reflects mobility, health, and well-being. Traditionally, it has been measured by asking older people to self-report the length and frequency of trips taken and assistance required. Global Positioning System (GPS) sensors on smartphones have been used to measure Lifespace of older people, but not with people with Parkinson’s disease (PD). ObjectiveThe objective of this study was to investigate whether GPS data collected via smartphones could be used to indicate the Lifespace of people with PD. MethodsThe dataset was supplied via the Michael J Fox Foundation Data Challenge and included 9 people with PD and 7 approximately matched controls. Participants carried smartphones with GPS sensors over two months. Data analysis compared the PD group and the control group. The impact of symptom severity on Lifespace was also investigated. ResultsVisualization methods for comparing Lifespace were developed including scatterplots and heatmaps. Lifespace metrics for comparison included average daily distance, percentage of time spent at home, and number of trips into the community. There were no significant differences between the PD and the control groups on Lifespace metrics. Visual representations of Lifespace were organized based on the self-reported severity of symptoms, suggesting a trend of decreasing Lifespace with increasing PD symptoms. ConclusionsLifespace measured by GPS-enabled smartphones may be a useful concept to measure the progression of PD and the impact of various therapies and rehabilitation programs. Directions for future use of GPS-based Lifespace are provided.

Lexical-semantic access and retrieval was examined in 15 adults diagnosed with schizophrenia and matched controls. This study extends the literature through the inclusion of multiple examinations of lexical-semantic production within the same patient group and through correlating performance on these tasks with various positive and negative clinical symptoms. On tasks of verbal fluency, meaning generation, sentence production using contextual information and confrontation naming, participants with schizophrenia made significantly more semantic errors on naming tasks; produced fewer meanings for homophones; produced fewer items on semantic, phonological, cued and switching fluency tasks; and produced more errors on sentence production tasks when compared to healthy controls. Significant correlations were also observed between ratings of psychomotor poverty and measures of semantic production and mental inflexibility. This study has provided additional evidence for deficits in lexical-semantic retrieval which are not due to underlying semantic store degradation, do not involve phonological based retrieval, and at the level of sentence generation appear to vary as a function of the contextual constraints provided.

This study aimed to investigate cognate/noncognate processing distinctions in young adult bilinguals and examined whether the previously reported cognate facilitation effect would also be demonstrated in older adult bilinguals. Two groups of Italian-English bilingual participants performed lexical decisions in repetition priming experiments. Results for the younger bilinguals corresponded to previous findings, and indicated the expected reaction time advantage for cognates over noncognates. The older bilinguals, however, only demonstrated a cognate advantage in the within-language condition, and in fact, showed faster reaction times for noncognates when repetition was across languages. These findings are interpreted in the context of the revised hierarchical model and the bilingual interactive activation model and in light of findings regarding the effect of aging on language processing.

A randomised, double-blind, placebo-controlled, between subjects study design (N=37) was used to investigate the effects of dexamphetamine on explicit new name learning. Participants ingested 10 mg of dexamphetamine or placebo daily over 5 consecutive mornings before learning new names for 50 familiar objects plus fillers. The dexamphetamine group recognised and recalled the new names more accurately than the placebo group over the 5 days and 1 month later. Word learning success was not associated with baseline neuropsychological performance, mood, cardiovascular arousal, or sustained attention. These results may have implications for the pharmacological treatment of acquired naming difficulties.

To investigate the stability of trace reactivation in healthy older adults, 22 older volunteers with no significant neurological history participated in a cross-modal priming task. Whilst both object relative center embedded (ORC) and object relative right branching (ORR) sentences were employed, working memory load was reduced by limiting the number of words separating the antecedent from the gap for both sentence types. Analysis of the results did not reveal any significant trace reactivation for the ORC or ORR sentences. The results did reveal, however, a positive correlation between age and semantic priming at the pre-gap position and a negative correlation between age and semantic priming at the gap position for ORC sentences. In contrast, there was no correlation between age and priming effects for the ORR sentences. These results indicated that trace reactivation may be sensitive to a variety of age related factors, including lexical activation and working memory. The implications of these results for sentence processing in the older population are discussed.

The lexical-semantic and syntactic abilities of a group of individuals with chronic nonthalamic subcortical (NS) lesions following stroke (n=6) were investigated using the Western Aphasia Battery (WAB) picture description task [Kertesz, A. (1982). "The Western aphasia battery." New York: Grune and Stratton] and compared with those of a group of subjects with Huntington's Disease (HD) (n=6) and a nonneurologically impaired control group (n=6) matched for age, sex, and educational level. The performance of the NS and HD subjects did not differ significantly from the well controls on measures of lexical-semantic abilities. NS and HD subjects provided as much information about the target picture as control subjects, but produced fewer action information units. Analysis of syntactic abilities revealed that the HD subjects produced significantly more grammatical errors than both the NS and control subjects and that the NS group performed in a similar manner to control subjects. These findings are considered in terms of current theories of subcortical language function. Learning outcomes: As a result of this activity, the reader will obtain information about the debate surrounding the role of subcortical language mechanisms and be provided with new information on the comparative picture description abilities of individuals with known vascular and degenerative subcortical pathologies and healthy control participants.

Used a cognitive neuropsychological approach to investigate a case of acquired dysgraphia in an adult who had sustained focal brain damage. The aims of the study were to investigate the usefulness of model-based assessment in identifying the mechanisms responsible for dysgraphia and for designing a treatment program informed by theories of normal language processing. (Author/VWL)

The respiratory abilities of a group of 12 speech disordered subjects with cerebellar disease were assessed using both spirometric and kinematic techniques and compared to those of a group of 12 non-neurologically impaired controls matched for age and gender. Results of the spirometric assessment kshowed that although all of the cerebellar-diseased subjects had normal total lung capacities, almost half had vital capacities below normal limits. All except 1 of the cerebellar-diseased subjects exhibited irregularities in their chest wall movements while performing sustained vowel and syllable repetition tasks. Over half of the cerebellar-diseased subjects also displayed similar irregularities when reading and conversing. The same irregularities were not present in the chest wall movements exhibited by the control subjects suggesting that their presence was caused by the cerebellar disease. Results are discussed in terms of the effects of cerebellar disease on neuromuscular function. KEY WORDS: cerebellar disease, respiration, kinematic assessment, spirometric assessment