The neurotoxic and proinflammatory actions of the Alzheimer peptide amyloid-beta (Abeta) are dependent on its aggregation and beta-sheet conformation. Chronic use of non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs (NSAIDs) such as aspirin for arthritis decreases the risk of developing Alzheimer's disease (AD) by unknown mechanisms. We report that these drugs inhibit human Abeta aggregation in vitro and reverse the beta-sheet conformation of preformed fibrils at clinically relevant doses. Aspirin prevented enhanced Abeta aggregation by aluminum, an environmental risk factor for AD. This anti-aggregatory effect was restricted to NSAIDs and was not exhibited by other drugs used in AD therapy. NSAIDS may have a role in the prevention and treatment of AD, in addition to a number of age-related disorders such as arthritis, cardiovascular disease and cancer.

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This study introduces an approach to providing corrective feedback to L2 learners termed analogy‐based corrective feedback that is motivated by analogical learning theories and syntactic alignment in dialogue. Learners are presented with a structurally similar synonymous version of their output where the erroneous form is corrected, and they must decode the analogy‐based feedback to understand the correction. A quasi‐experimental classroom‐based study was conducted with upper secondary Swedish EFL learners (N = 49) to investigate the effectiveness of corrective feedback varying in mode (inductive exemplar‐based or deductive rule‐based) on English subject–verb agreement. Explicit correction, metalinguistic, and analogy‐based corrective feedback, all explicitly providing evidence of error and including reformulation prompts, were assessed by timed and untimed grammaticality judgment and sentence completion tasks in a between‐groups pretest, posttest, delayed posttest design with a control group. Results indicate significant delayed gains for all feedback types on the untimed grammaticality judgment task for ungrammatical items. No clear advantage was seen for rule‐based or exemplar‐based CF. Descriptive statistics indicate different trends over successive testing times, where analogy‐based feedback often led to lowest performance on the immediate posttest but showed improvement on the delayed posttest, unlike the other two CF types.

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This paper describes exploratory research into automatically describing geo-referenced information to blind people. The goal is to produce texts giving an overview of the spatial layout, and a central concern of such texts is that they employ an appropriate linguistic reference frame which enables blind hearers to ground the information. The research presented in this paper was based on two hypotheses: (1) directly perceivable reference frames are easier to ground, and (2) spatial descriptions drawn from composite reference frame systems composed of more than one reference frame are easier to ground. An experiment exploring text comprehension on a range of texts employing different reference frame systems is presented. The main results indicate that the second hypothesis is supported. A prototype of a natural language generation system which generates texts describing geo-referenced information from data is described.Keywords blind users · geo-referenced spatial information · natural language generation· reference frame preference 1