Lexical Access of Mass and Count nouns: How word recognition reaction times correlate with lexical and morphosyntactic processing

Two psycholinguistic experiments were carried out in Italian to test the role played by the feature that distinguishes mass nouns from count nouns, as well as by the feature that distinguishes singular nouns from plural nouns. The first experiment, a simple lexical decision task, revealed a sensitivity of the lexical ac- cess system to the processing of the features Mass and Plural as shown by longer reaction times. In particular, nouns in the plural yielded longer reaction times than in the singular except when the plural form was irregular. Furthermore, the feature Mass also affected processing, yielding longer reaction times. In the second experiment, a sentence priming task, both the Plural and the Mass effects did not surface when a grammatical sentence fragment was the prime. These data show a direct correlation between the linguistic \u2018complexity\u2019 of plural/mass nouns and processing time. They also suggest that this complexity does not affect normal fluent spoken language where words are embedded in a semantic and syntactic context

COVID-19 lockdowns’ effects on the quality of life, perceived health and well-being of healthy elderly individuals: A longitudinal comparison of pre-lockdown and lockdown states of well-being

Purpose. The concept of lockdown in relation to COVID-19 is thought to have an indirect impact on the quality of life and well-being of the elderly due to its consequences on the physical, psychological, and cognitive health of individuals. However, previous published studies on this subject are limited in terms of methodological approach used, including the absence of pre-confinement status and the type of experimental design, which is often cross-sectional. The present study proposes a longitudinal design with pre-confinement measures. It assesses changes in quality of life, perceived health, and well-being by comparing the period before lockdown (T1 = December 2019), three months after the start of the first lockdown (T2 = June 2020), and during the second lockdown (T3 = January 2021) due to COVID-19. Materials and Methods. This study is conducted with a group of 72 healthy elderly persons. They completed an electronic (online) survey assessing personal factors, activities, and participation as well as responding to the EuroQol-5D and Warwick-Edinburgh Mental Well-being Scale. Results. A decrease in quality of life, perceived health and well-being was observed between T1 and T2 and between T1 and T3, but no difference was reported between the two lockdown periods. The variables associated with these changes included energy level, level of happiness, physical activity, change in medical condition, memory difficulties, level of perceived isolation and age. Conclusion. This study will help to target variables that may have a deleterious effect on older adults for consideration in future confinement settings and for preventive purposes

Action and object naming in schizophrenia

Patients with schizophrenia demonstrate impaired action verbal fluency, but no study has examined verb–noun differences using picture naming. The present study compared object and action naming in 20 adult patients diagnosed with schizophrenia (DSM–IV–TR, Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders–Fourth Edition, Text Revision; American Psychiatric Association, 2000) criteria, and 20 demographically matched healthy controls, using pictures. Overall, schizophrenic patients showed poorer naming than controls on all measures of object and action lexical semantic access and retrieval despite normal comprehension for action and object names. Results further indicated that action names were significantly more difficult to retrieve than object names in schizophrenic patients. The absence of dissociation in comprehension of action and object names but semantic errors in naming both classes suggests intact conceptual–semantic stores among middle-aged community-dwelling outpatients with schizophrenia but difficulties mapping semantics onto the lexicon. Action-naming impairments can arise from both semantic and postsemantic origins in schizophrenia. These results have implications for the neurobiology of language given the association between both schizophrenia and verb processing and frontal damage. Moreover, the issue being addressed is important for a cognitive characterization of schizophrenia and for an understanding of the representations of action and object names in the brain