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Purpose. This proof-of-concept study investigated whether feedback-mediated exercise (FME) of the affected arm of hemiplegic patients increases patient motivation and promotes greater improvement of motor function, compared to no-feedback exercise (NFE). Method. We developed a feedback-mediated treatment that uses gaming scenarios and allows online and offline monitoring of both temporal and spatial characteristics of planar movements. Twenty poststroke hemiplegic inpatients, randomly assigned to the FME and NFE group, received therapy five days a week for three weeks. The outcome measures were evaluated from the following: (1) the modified drawing test (mDT), (2) received therapy time—RTT, and (3) intrinsic motivation inventory—IMI. Results. The FME group patients showed significantly higher improvement in the speed metric (P < 0.01), and smoothness metric (P < 0.01), as well as higher RTT (P < 0.01). Significantly higher patient motivation is observed in the FME group (interest/enjoyment subscale (P < 0.01) and perceived competence subscale (P < 0.01)). Conclusion. Prolonged endurance in training and greater improvement in certain areas of motor function, as well as very high patient motivation and strong positive impressions about the treatment, suggest the positive effects of feedback-mediated treatment and its high level of acceptance by patients.

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The comprehension of constituent questions is an important topic for language acquisition research and for applications in the diagnosis of language impairment. This article presents the results of a study investigating the comprehension of different types of questions by 5-year-old, typically developing children across 19 European countries, 18 different languages, and 7 language (sub-)families. The study investigated the effects of two factors on question formation: (a) whether the question contains a simple interrogative word like 'who' or a complex one like 'which princess', and (b) whether the question word was related to the sentential subject or object position of the verb. The findings show that there is considerable variation among languages, but the two factors mentioned consistently affect children's performance. The cross-linguistic variation shows that three linguistic factors facilitate children's understanding of questions: having overt case morphology, having a single lexical item for both 'who' and 'which', and the use of synthetic verbal forms.