Probing the adult initial state of non-native Greek: a case study*

This is a case study on the initial state of Greek as a second language within the Universal Grammar framework. We administered three oral and four written tasks to an adult Italian-English bilingual with little exposure to Greek. The results showed above chance-level performance on subject-verb agreement and on articles across tasks, indicating the presence of the functional categories Inflection and Determiner. These results support Schwartz and Sprouse’s (1994) ‘Full Transfer/Full Access’ hypothesis and disprove theories which suggest that that the mental grammar of the L2 initial state contains lexical categories only (Vainikka Young‑Scholten 1994). However, the findings revealed low scores in nominal agreement, suggesting that this a problematic area in L2 Greek

Prosodic effects in the production of structural ambiguities: Do they exist?

The aim of the present study is to explore whether Greek adults, who are non-trained speakers and naïve to the purpose of the task, use distinguishable prosodic cues, while producing ambiguous sentences. We report on the findings from a production task conducted with 30 participants (15 females), which contained subject/object ambiguities. Results revealed that participants use prosodic cues to denote the subject or the object reading, but not consistently so in order to distinguish the two meanings. We argue that our findings are in line with the Syntax-Phonology mapping, according to which prosodic phrasing goes in tandem with syntactic segmentation, though prosodic phrasing was not consistently employed by our speakers to differentiate the two meanings of the ambiguous sentences

Neuropharmacogenetics of Major Depression: Has the Time Come to Take both Sexes into Account?

Pollution & threats to the environmen

What do corpus data reveal about anaphora resolution? Spanish vs. Greek and the Type of Topic Hypothesis

This research was funded by the following agencies/institutions: CEDEL2 corpus (ANACOREX R&D project no. PID2020-113818GB-I00 and ANACOR R&D project no. FFI2016-75106-P granted to the first author) funded by MINECO (Ministerio de Economía y competitividad), AEI (Agencia Estatal de Investigación), 10.13039/501100011033, Spain and ERDF (European Regional Development Fund, A way of making Europe). GLC corpus (LAL2A project no. 3161) funded by the Hellenic Foundation for Research & Innovation, Greece, granted to Alexandros Tantos, the fourth author being a member of the research project.Anaphora Resolution (AR) is a pervasive phenomenon in natural languages. AR relates to how referring expressions (REs) (e.g., null/overt subject pronouns, and NPs) corefer with their antecedents in discourse. We use corpus methods to simultaneously compare AR in two null-subject languages (Spanish vs. Greek). We analyse a Spanish-native sample (CEDEL2 corpus, N=341 REs analysed) and an equally-designed Greek-native sample (GLC corpus, N=400 REs analysed), while keeping constant the text type (Chaplin narrative task), the annotation scheme (tagset), the tagging procedure, and the profile of the natives. Our corpus results reveal similarities in the way Spanish and Greek natives construct their narratives regarding the distribution of the information status of the REs (topic continuity/shift) and the distribution of characters (main/secondary) in discourse. Crucially, our two languages differ in relation to topicality (Greek capitalises on discourse topic whereas Spanish relies more on sentential topic), which leads to a different distribution in the realization of REs in discourse. These similarities and differences are accounted for by a new theoretical proposal, the Type of Topic Hypothesis (TTH), which postulates that there is a tension between discourse-topic vs. sentential-topic oriented languages. The TTH captures the idea that, while narratives are constructed in the same way in both languages, RE realization varies as a result of the discourse-topic orientation of Greek vs. the sentential-topic orientation of Spanish.Agencia Estatal de Investigación 10.13039/501100011033European Regional Development FundHellenic Foundation for Research and Innovation LAL2A project no. 3161Ministerio de Economía y Competitividad ANACOREX R&D PID2020-113818GB-I00, ANACOR R&D FFI2016-75106-

Forced swim test induces divergent global transcriptomic alterations in the hippocampus of high versus low novelty-seeker rats

BACKGROUND: Many neuropsychiatric disorders, including stress-related mood disorders, are complex multi-parametric syndromes. Susceptibility to stress and depression is individually different. The best animal model of individual differences that can be used to study the neurobiology of affect regards spontaneous reactions to novelty. Experimentally, when naive rats are exposed to the stress of a novel environment, they display a highly variable exploratory activity and are classified as high or low responders (HR or LR, respectively). Importantly, HR and LR rats do not seem to exhibit a substantial differentiation in relation to their ‘depressive-like’ status in the forced swim test (FST), a widely used animal model of ‘behavioral despair’. In the present study, we investigated whether FST exposure would be accompanied by phenotype-dependent differences in hippocampal gene expression in HR and LR rats. RESULTS: HR and LR rats present a distinct behavioral pattern in the pre-test session but develop comparable depressive-like status in the second FST session. At 24 h following the second FST session, HR and LR rats (stressed and unstressed controls) were sacrificed and hippocampal samples were independently analyzed on whole rat genome Illumina arrays. Functional analysis into pathways and networks was performed using Ingenuity Pathway Analysis (IPA) software. Notably, hippocampal gene expression signatures between HR and LR rats were markedly divergent, despite their comparable depressive-like status in the FST. These molecular differences are reflected in both the extent of transcriptional remodeling (number of significantly changed genes) and the types of molecular pathways affected following FST exposure. A markedly higher number of genes (i.e., 2.28-fold) were statistically significantly changed following FST in LR rats, as compared to their HR counterparts. Notably, genes associated with neurogenesis and synaptic plasticity were induced in the hippocampus of LR rats in response to FST, whereas in HR rats, FST induced pathways directly or indirectly associated with induction of apoptotic mechanisms. CONCLUSIONS: The markedly divergent gene expression signatures exposed herein support the notion that the hippocampus of HR and LR rats undergoes distinct transcriptional remodeling in response to the same stress regimen, thus yielding a different FST-related ‘endophenotype’, despite the seemingly similar depressive-like phenotype

Motion verbs in Greek and German: Evidence from typically developing and SLI children

In this paper we report on the findings from a Greek and German production task which investigated the expression of constructions involving manner-of-motion verbs with Greek and German adults as well as typically developing and SLI children at the age of 5-6 years. The results showed that the typically developing children, when describing motion events, differed from the adults in the integration of grammatical information into motion predicates. The SLI children on the other hand displayed problems with the use of grammatical aspect (Greek) and case marking (German) as well as with ambiguous constructions (Greek)

The Crocus sativus Compounds trans-Crocin 4 and trans-Crocetin Modulate the Amyloidogenic Pathway and Tau Misprocessing in Alzheimer Disease Neuronal Cell Culture Models

Crocus sativus L. natural compounds have been extensively used in traditional medicine for thousands of years. Recent research evidence is now emerging in support of its therapeutic potential for different pathologies including neurodegenerative diseases. Herein, the C. sativus L. natural compounds trans-crocin 4 and trans-crocetin were selected for in depth molecular characterization of their potentially protective effects against Alzheimer’s Disease (AD), utilizing two AD neuronal cell culture models (SH-SY5Y overexpressing APP and PC12 expressing hyperphosphorylated tau). Biologically relevant concentrations, ranging from 0.1 μM to 1 mM, applied for 24 h or 72 h, were well tolerated by differentiated wild type SH-SY5Y and PC12 cells. When tested on neuronally differentiated SH-SY5Y-APP both trans-crocin 4 and trans-crocetin had significant effects against amyloidogenic pathways. Trans-crocin 4 significantly decreased of β-secretase, a key enzyme of the amyloidogenic pathway, and APP-C99, while it decreased γ-secretases that generate toxic beta-amyloid peptides. Similarly, trans-crocetin treatment led to a reduction in β- and γ-secretases, as well as to accumulation of cellular AβPP. When tested on the neuronally differentiated PC12-htau cells, both compounds proved effective in suppressing the active forms of GSK3β and ERK1/2 kinases, as well as significantly reducing total tau and tau phosphorylation. Collectively, our data demonstrate a potent effect of trans-crocin 4 and trans-crocetin in suppressing key molecular pathways of AD pathogenesis, rendering them a promising tool in the prevention and potentially the treatment of AD

Genetic testing of Behçet’s disease using next-generation sequencing to identify monogenic mimics and HLA-B*51

Objective: Several monogenic autoinflammatory disorders and primary immunodeficiencies can present early in life with features that may be mistaken for Behçet's disease (BD). We aimed to develop a genetic analysis workflow to identify rare monogenic BD-like diseases and establish the contribution of HLA haplotype in a cohort of patients from the UK. // Methods: Patients with clinically suspected BD were recruited from four BD specialist care centres in the UK. All participants underwent whole exome sequencing (WES), and genetic analysis thereafter by 1. examining genes known to cause monogenic immunodeficiency, autoinflammation or vasculitis by virtual panel application; 2. scrutiny of variants prioritised by Exomiser using Human Phenotype Ontology (HPO); 3. identification of copy number variants using ExomeDepth; and 4. HLA-typing using OptiType. // Results: Thirty-one patients were recruited: median age 15 (4-52), and median disease onset age 5 (0-20). Nine/31 (29%) patients had monogenic disease mimicking BD: 5 cases of Haploinsufficiency of A20 with novel TNFAIP3 variants (p.T76I, p.M112Tfs*8, p.S548Dfs*128, p.C657Vfs*14, p.E661Nfs*36); 1 case of ISG15 deficiency with a novel nonsense variant (ISG15:p.Q16X) and 1p36.33 microdeletion; 1 case of Common variable immune deficiency (TNFRSF13B:p.A181E); and 2 cases of TNF receptor associated periodic syndrome (TNFRSF1A:p.R92Q). Of the remaining 22 patients, 8 (36%) were HLA-B*51 positive. // Conclusion: We describe a novel genetic workflow for BD, which can efficiently detect known and potentially novel monogenic forms of BD, whilst additionally providing HLA-typing. Our results highlight the importance of genetic testing before BD diagnosis, since this has impact on choice of therapy, prognosis, and genetic counselling