In this study, we aimed to examine different cognitive domains in a large sample of patients with post COVID-19 syndrome. Two hundred and fourteen patients, 85.04% women, ranged 26 to 64 years (mean = 47.48 years) took part in this investigation. Patients’ processing speed, attention, executive functions and various language modalities were examined online using a comprehensive task protocol designed for this research. Alteration in some of the tasks was observed in 85% of the participants, being the attention and executive functions tests the ones that show the highest percentage of patients with severe impairment. Positive correlations were observed between the age of the participants in almost all the tasks assessed, implying better performance and milder impairment with increasing age. In the comparisons of patients according to age, the oldest patients were found to maintain their cognitive functions relatively preserved, with only a mild impairment in attention and speed processing, while the youngest showed the most marked and heterogeneous cognitive impairment. These results confirm the subjective complaints in patients with post COVID-19 syndrome and, thanks to the large sample size, allow us to observe the effect of patient age on performance, an effect never reported before in patients with these characteristics.

Background:The expressiveness during reading is essential for a fluent reading. Reading prosody has been scarcely studied in an experimental manner, owing to the difficulties in taking objective and direct measures of this reading skill. However, new technologies development has made it possible to analyse reading prosody in an experimental way. Prosodic patterns may vary, not being the same at the beginning of the reading learning process as in adulthood. They may also be altered in disorders such as dyslexia, but little is known about the prosodic characteristics and reading fluency of people with neurodegenerative diseases that cause language impairment, such as Parkinson's disease (PD). Aims: The aim of this work was to study reading fluency in PD considering the prosodic characteristics of its reading. Methods & Procedures:The participants were 31 Spanish adults with PD and 31 healthy controls, aged 59-88 years. Two experimental texts were designed that included declarative, interrogative, and exclamatory sentences and experimental verbs and nouns. The manipulability level of the nouns and the motor content of the verbs were considered. The reading of the participants was recorded and analysed with Praat software. Outcomes & Results:A longer reading duration and a greater number of pauses, especially in verbs, were found in the PD group, which also showed less pitch variation than the control group in the experimental sentences. The control group showed a big initial rise in declarative and interrogative sentences, as well as a stronger final declination in declarative and exclamatory ones, when compared to the PD group. Conclusions & Implications:The use of experimental methodologies for the analysis of reading fluency allows learning more about the prosodic characteristics of people with different pathologies, such as PD. Scarce pitch variability found in the analysis, together with the great number of pauses and the longer reading duration, leads to poorly expressive reading, which compromises fluency in PD. The exhaustive evaluation of the reading fluency of PD patients will

When we read the same word several times, we end up forming an orthographic representation of it that allows us to read it in a fluid way. Several investigations were aimed at how healthy people, children or dyslexic adults learn new words, but little is known on how this process works on patients with neurodegenerative diseases, for example Alzheimer’s disease (AD) and mild cognitive impairment (MCI). Hence, the aim of this project was to analyze the formation of new orthographic representations in these people. For that purpose, eight words of a very low frequency were selected, half of them short and half of them long, and were presented six times to the participants, 4 of them in a narrative context. The learning process was measured according to the elimination of the length effect that indicates the crossing from a sublexical reading to a lexical one. The results showed the disappearance of the length effect in the control group, as well as a reduction in RTs in MCI participants and AD patients, without a disappearance of length effect in these groups. All this indicates that learning was consolidated in the control group, whereas in the MCI and the AD group it cannot be said that a new representation has formed.