Background and Purpose There is an increasing interest in the effect of nonpharmacological interventions on the course of patients with Alzheimer's disease (AD). The objective of the present study is to determine the benefits of a structured, multidomain, mostly computer-based, cognitive training (MCT) οn the cognitive performance of patients with early-stage AD. Method Fifty patients with early-stage AD participated in the study. Patients were randomly allocated either to the training program group (n = 25) or to a wait list control group (n = 25). The training program group received computer-assisted MCT and linguistic exercises utilizing pen and paper supplemented by cognitive-linguistic exercises for homework. The duration of the MCT intervention program was 15 weeks, and it was administered twice a week. Each session lasted for approximately one hour. Objective measures of episodic memory, delayed memory, word recognition, attention, executive function, processing speed, semantic fluency, and naming were assessed at baseline and after the completion of the program in both groups. Results Analysis showed that in controls, delayed memory and executive function had deteriorated over the observation period of 15 weeks, while the training group improved their performance in word recognition, Boston Naming Test (BNT), semantic fluency (SF), clock-drawing test (CDT), digit span forward (DSF), digit span backward (DSB), trail-making test A (TMT A), and trail-making test B (TMT B). Comparison between the training group and the controls showed that MCT had a significant beneficial effect in delayed memory, naming, semantic fluency, visuospatial ability, executive functions, attention, and processing speed. Conclusions The study provides evidence of a beneficial effect of MCT with an emphasis on cognitive-language performance of patients with early-stage AD. Considering the limited efficacy of current pharmacological therapies in AD, concurrent computer-based MCT may represent an additional enhancing treatment option in early-stage AD patients.

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Objective:The objective of this study was to investigate the pattern and severity of cognitive and language impairment in Greek patients with Relapsing-remitting (RRMS) and Secondary Progressive Multiple Sclerosis (SPMS), relative to control participants.Method:A prospective study was conducted in 27 patients with multiple sclerosis (PwMS), (N= 15) with RRMS, (N= 12) with SPMS, and (N= 12) healthy controls. All participants were assessed with a flexible comprehensive neuropsychological – language battery of tests that have been standardized in Greece and validated in Greek MS patients. They were also assessed on measures of disability (Expanded Disability Status Scale; EDSS), fatigue (Fatigue Severity Scale; FSS) and depression (Beck Depression Inventory - fast screen; BDI-FS).Results:Our results revealed that groups were well matched on baseline demographic and clinical characteristics. The two clinical groups (RRMS; SPMS) did not differ on overall global cognitive impairment but differed in the initial encoding of verbal material, mental processing speed, response inhibition and set-shifting. RRMS patients differed from controls in the initial encoding of verbal material, learning curve, delayed recall of verbal information, processing speed, and response inhibition. SPMS patients differed in all utilized measures compared to controls. Moreover, we noted increased impairment frequency on individualized measures in the progressive SPMS group.Conclusion:We conclude that MS patients, irrespective of clinical subtype, have cognitive deficits compared to healthy participants, which become increasingly worse when they convert from RRMS to SPMS.On the contrary,the pattern of impairment remains relatively stable.

Down syndrome (DS) is the most common developmental disorder characterized by mild to moderate intellectual disability. Several studies have reported poor language and prosodic skills and contradictory results regarding individuals' with DS sociocognitive skills, whereas most of them have focused on children with DS. The present study attempts to explore adults' with DS language, socio-cognitive and prosodic abilities via the use of story-retellings. Twenty adults with DS and two groups of TD children, one matched to their expressive vocabulary (TD-EVT) and the other matched to their non-verbal mental age (TD-RCPM), took part in the present study. Participants listened to a story while viewing a wordless picture PowerPoint presentation on a computer screen, and then, they were instructed to retell the story while viewing the pictures for a second time. Each participant listened to two stories, one with "lively" and one with "flat" prosody. Results revealed that adults' with DS performance was comparable with the one presented by the TD-RCPM group, whereas the TD-EVT group performed significantly better in almost all variables. Individuals' with DS renarrations, however, contained significantly less complement clauses and internal state terms (related or not related to Theory of Mind-ToM) compared to the re-narrations of both control groups. In contrast, the group with DS performed similarly to both control groups in comprehension questions related to main characters' internal state terms and significantly better compared to the TD-RCPM group in questions related to ToM. In terms of prosody, all three groups performed significantly better on story structure and comprehension questions when prosody was "lively" compared "flat" prosody. DS group's re-narrations did not contain enough internal state terms, not due to their inability in recognizing them, but due to their poor morphosyntactic abilities, which did not allow them to find the proper means to express the main characters' internal states. Prosody facilitated participants with DS in the comprehension and re-narration. This suggests that intervention programs based on prosody could support the language skills of adults with DS.

Background Cognitive dysfunction is one of the most prevalent non-motor aspects of Parkinson’s disease (PD). The present review focuses on published studies investigating the effect of computer-based cognitive training (CT) on neuropsychological performance in PD. Methods A systematic search of the PubMed database and Google Scholar was carried out. Randomized controlled studies published before September 2019, investigating the effect of computer-based CT (regardless of the comparator, active or placebo) on PD patients were included. Literature search, data extraction, and Risk of Bias (RoB) evaluation (based on the RoB Cochrane tool for Randomized Trials) were performed by two authors (A.N. and M.M), independently. Results Among 31 full-texts assessed for eligibility, eight articles fulfilled the inclusion criteria and were involved in the qualitative analysis. The main outcomes of the retrieved studies (all studies used similar cognitive rehabilitation methodologies) were indicative of cognitive improvement in most cognitive domains, particularly memory, executive function, processing speed, and attention, that is, the domains primarily impaired in the disease. Conclusion Multidomain CT, which is exclusively based on computer software, leads to measurable improvements in most cognitive domains affected in patients with PD. The present review is the first to include studies assessing the effect of computer-based CT techniques without deploying CT with paper-pencil techniques. Limitations originate mainly due to the heterogeneity among included studies (differences in CT softwares, PD stages, number, and duration of training sessions.

This study reports results from four experiments investigating the perfective past tense of Greek in adult second language (L2) learners. The data come from L2 learners of Greek with intermediate to advanced L2 proficiency and different native language (L1) backgrounds, and L1 speakers of Greek. All participants were tested in both oral and written elicited production and acceptability judgment tasks on both existing and novel verb stimuli. The results showed that the L2 learners did not achieve native-like performance on the perfective past tense in Greek, even at an advanced level of proficiency. The L2 learners often chose verb forms that did not encode the perfective past tense. Differences to native speakers were found particularly for non-sigmatic verb forms, which contain morphological irregularities in the target language. The results of the four experiments will be discussed in the light of previous findings and accounts of inflectional morphology in adult L2 learners. Taken together, the results suggest that L2 learners rely more on stored inflected word forms and on associative generalizations than native speakers.

Melodic intonation therapy (MIT) is one of the most well-known treatment methods which is based on pitch and rhythm and was developed to increase verbal output in adults with non-fluent aphasia. Although MIT has been adapted to several languages, in Greece it is almost unknown. The aim of the proposed study is twofold: (1) to translate and adapt the MIT to the Greek language, and (2) to conduct an experimental study in order to examine the effect of MIT on Greek patients with Broca’s aphasia. To this aim, a 64-year-old, right-handed male who had a 6-year primary school education level, no musical abilities and poor performance on the recognition of prosody attended the MIT intervention program almost two and a half years after the event of suffering an ischemic stroke. The MIT intervention was administered three times per week for a 12-week period, in which each session lasted from 30 to 40 min. The patient underwent three assessments all using both the Boston Diagnostic Aphasia Examination–Short Form (BDAE-SF) and brain perfusion single-photon emission computed tomography (SPECT); (1) before the MIT, (2) immediately after, and (3) 3 months after the completion of MIT. The results from the BDAE-SF revealed an impressive improvement on both trained and prepositional speech production, immediately after the completion of the MIT, and a stable improved performance 3 months after MIT. The SPECT scan revealed reactivation of the perilesional areas of the left hemisphere, and considerably improved perfusion of the frontal lobe, the anterior temporal lobe, and the upper part of the parietal lobe of the right hemisphere. The improvement persisted and even expanded 3 months after MIT. Therefore, MIT is a promising intervention program and its positive effects last for at least 3 months after the completion of the intervention.

The present study investigates the comprehension of syntactic and affective prosody in adults with autism spectrum disorder without accompanying cognitive deficits (ASD w/o cognitive deficits) as well as age-, education- and gender-matched unimpaired adults, while processing orally presented sentences. Two experiments were conducted: (a) an on-line sentence completion task containing local subject/object ambiguities and (b) an affective prosody task exploring the comprehension of six emotions. The syntactic prosody task revealed that the experimental group performed similar to the control group on the fillers and the object condition. On the other hand, the ASD w/o cognitive deficits group manifested lower accuracy compared to the unimpaired controls in the subject reading condition, as well as slower reaction times in all conditions. In the affective prosody task, the experimental group performed significantly worse than the controls in the recognition of the emotion of surprise, whereas no differences between the experimental and the control group were attested in the recognition of all other emotions. A positive correlation was found between the two tasks in the ASD w/o cognitive deficits group. Thus, individuals with ASD w/o cognitive deficits face slight difficulties with the decoding of prosody, both the syntactic and the affective one. More specifically, these difficulties are attested in the most difficult conditions, i.e. the subject reading and the emotion of surprise.