Multiple sclerosis (MS) is a demyelinating chronic disease that has had increasing prevalence over the last years. We have investigated whether the perceived quality of life is reduced in multiple sclerosis patients compared to control participants with a cross-sectional approach, and how it relates to sociodemographic, clinical, and psychosocial variables in MS with multiple regression. To that end, a group of MS patients (n = 50) and a control group (n = 50) that was matched for age and education level filled in the WHOQOL-BREF (perceived quality of life across four domains) and a sociodemographic questionnaire. The participants in the MS group also filled in a clinical questionnaire and three instruments measuring psychosocial variables (the DASS-21 for depression, anxiety, and stress, the Brief-COPE for coping skills, and the Meaning in Life Scale). The results showed that the perceived quality of life was lower in the MS group than in the control group. Multiple regression models incorporating the variables that showed significant correlations with the quality of life indicated that age, professional status, recovery from relapses, depression, active coping, and meaning in life predicted at least one domain of the quality of life. Meaning in life predicted the quality of life in all four of the domains. Although the quality of life in MS is linked to multiple biopsychosocial variables, meaning in life seems crucial.

Dyslexics underperform controls in estimating and comparing time intervals defined by visual stimuli. Accuracy in vision-based duration perception requires efficient processing of visual events because these will define the onset and offset of time intervals. Since dyslexics have difficulties processing dimensions of visual stimuli like luminance contrasts and motion, we do not know the extent to which these visual deficits are responsible for their difficulties in judging time intervals. To address this gap, we asked adults with dyslexia and matched controls to perform an interval comparison task involving five different types of visual stimuli with different levels of challenge regarding luminance contrasts and motion. If the expected disadvantage of dyslexics in visual duration perception increased for stimuli requiring increased luminance or motion processing, this would indicate that visual processing plays a role. Results showed poorer time discrimination in dyslexics, but this disadvantage did not change according to stimulus type. Complementary analyses of oculomotor behavior during the task suggested that the poorer timing performance of dyslexics may relate instead to attention and/or engagement with the task. Our findings strengthen the evidence in favor of visual duration perception deficits in dyslexia, but not the hypothesis that these result from purely visual problems.

Prosodic phrasing is the segmentation of utterances into prosodic words, phonological phrases (smaller units) and intonational phrases (larger units) based on acoustic cues—pauses, pitch changes and pre-boundary lengthening. The perception of prosodic boundaries is characterized by a positive event-related potential (ERP) component, temporally aligned with phrase boundaries—the Closure Positive Shift (CPS). The role of pre-boundary lengthening in boundary perception is still a matter of debate: while studies on phonological phrase boundaries indicate that all three cues contribute equally, approaches to intonational phrase boundaries highlight the pause as the most powerful cue. Moreover, all studies used explicit boundary recognition tasks, and it is unknown how pre-boundary lengthening works in implicit prosodic processing tasks, characteristic of real-life contexts. In this study, we examined the effects of pre-boundary lengthening (original, short, and long) on the EEG responses to intonational phrase boundaries (CPS effect) in European Portuguese, using an implicit task. Both original and short versions showed equivalent CPS effects, while the long set did not elicit the effect. This suggests that pre-boundary lengthening does not contribute to improved perception of boundaries in intonational phrases (longer units), possibly due to memory and attention-related constraints.

Duration perception abilities seem to enhance reading skills, but the reason for this remains under debate. Some studies focused on the ability to perceive the length of sounds (speech-related duration perception), while others approached general time skills (using, e.g., beep stimuli), but a direct comparison between the two modalities has not been done so far. In the present study, we compared the relevance of domain-general (comparison of time intervals defined by beeps) vs. speech-specific duration perception (pre-attentive EEG responses to different consonants) as statistical predictors of reading in adults. Reading included word and pseudoword decoding, as well as reading comprehension. We made regression-based analyses with the two time-related predictors for each reading skill. Pseudoword decoding was the only reading skill that was significantly predicted by duration perception, and this happened for domain-general duration perception only. Our findings strengthen the idea that skilled duration perception enhances phonological coding and its impact on grapheme-to-phoneme conversion processes. They also suggest that the benefits to phonological encoding are not specifically related to better processing of speech sound durations. Instead, the impact of skilled duration perception may rely on its connection to entrainment-to-speech skills, and the enhanced encoding of speech units that comes with it.

Introduction: Osteoporosis is characterized by a loss of bone mass along with alterations in its structure, with subsequent increase in bone fragility and susceptibility to fractures, ultimately reinforcing the importance of its prevention by the reduction of the risk of falling.In this paper we propose to analyze the functional progression of a patient, integrated in a multidisciplinary program (TOMBO-Therapeutic Occupational Multidisciplinary approach to the Benefi t of Osteoporosis), after an osteoporotic fracture.Methods: Retrospective descriptive case-study of the fi rst patient included in the TOMBO program. Data were gathered for Time Up and Go Test (TUGT), Sit to Stand in 30 secs. (SS-30), 10m Walking Test (10m-WT), Barthel Index (BI) and Morse Scale (MS) in 3 different moments: baseline (ward, at discharge: M0), 2 and 6-months after surgery (multidisciplinary appointments: MD2, MD6).