The communicative effectiveness of different types of communication strategy

This study examines compensation strategies (techniques for dealing with knowledge gaps between learner and interlocutor), relates them to synoptic and ectenic learning (Ehrman and Leaver, 2002, 2003), and suggests reasons for the fact that ectenic learners, who need conscious control of what they are learning, seemed to communicate meanings of words to judges better than the synoptics, who feel freer to rely on their intuition and pre-conscious processing, but also tend to use more novel and therefore less readily comprehensible figures of speech. The subjects were French learners of English

Requirements Engineering for Pervasive Services

Developing pervasive mobile services for a mass market of end customers entails large up-front investments and therefore a good understanding of customer requirements is of paramount importance. This paper presents an approach for developing requirements engineering method that takes distinguishing features of pervasive services into account and that is based on fundamental insights in design methodology

Language comprehension in healthy ageing and mild cognitive impairment

Despite structural decline in language relevant brain regions, language comprehension appears to be relatively preserved with age. This raises the question: “How does the ageing brain maintain the cognitive system?” In this context, this thesis investigates the behavioural and functional underpinnings of sentence comprehension in healthy ageing and Mild Cognitive Impairment (MCI). Using a minimal phrase paradigm designed to focus on the process of syntactic binding, Chapter 1 reports a behavioural experiment demonstrating age-related decline in syntactic comprehension that increases in the absence of semantic-contextual information. Extending on these findings, Chapter 2 reports an electroencephalography (EEG) experiment on the oscillatory mechanisms involved in syntactic processing in older adults, which gives evidence for qualitative differences in the neural signature associated with syntactic binding in older compared to younger adults. Chapter 3 reports an EEG experiment on oscillatory activity associated with lexical retrieval and semantic processing in MCI. The results indicate subtle, yet clear alterations in the neural signatures associated with these processes in individuals with MCI relative to healthy controls. Collectively, the studies reported in this thesis add to our understanding of the robustness and changeability of the language comprehension system in the face of the wide array of changes that occur with ageing, further constraining neurocognitive theories on this subject

Evidence against preserved syntactic comprehension in healthy aging

acceptedVersio

Detecting impaired language processing in patients with mild cognitive impairment using around-the-ear cEEgrid electrodes

Mild cognitive impairment (MCI) is the term used to identify those individuals with subjective and objective cognitive decline but with preserved activities of daily living and an absence of dementia. Although MCI can impact functioning in different cognitive domains, most notably episodic memory, relatively little is known about the comprehension of language in MCI. In this study, we used around-the-ear electrodes (cEEGrids) to identify impairments during language comprehension in patients with MCI. In a group of 23 patients with MCI and 23 age-matched controls, language comprehension was tested in a two-word phrase paradigm. We examined the oscillatory changes following word onset as a function of lexico-semantic single-word retrieval (e.g., swrfeq vs. swift) and multiword binding processes (e.g., horse preceded by swift vs. preceded by swrfeq). Electrophysiological signatures (as measured by the cEEGrids) were significantly different between patients with MCI and controls. In controls, lexical retrieval was associated with a rebound in the alpha/beta range, and binding was associated with a post-word alpha/beta suppression. In contrast, both the single-word retrieval and multiword binding signatures were absent in the MCI group. The signatures observed using cEEGrids in controls were comparable with those signatures obtained with a full-cap EEG setup. Importantly, our findings suggest that patients with MCI have impaired electrophysiological signatures for comprehending single words and multiword phrases. Moreover, cEEGrid setups provide a noninvasive and sensitive clinical tool for detecting early impairments in language comprehension in MCI