Revisiting Aspect in Mild Cognitive Impairment and Alzheimer's Disease: Evidence From Greek

The study investigates the ability of Greek-speaking individuals diagnosed with mild Alzheimer's Disease (mAD) and Mild Cognitive Impairment (MCI) to produce verbs that vary with respect to their grammatical and lexical aspect. While grammatical aspect has been examined in aphasia, there are only a few studies dealing with this in neurodegenerative conditions and their findings are contradictory. Motivated by this, we further investigate aspect by examining not only grammatical but lexical aspect as well and how their semantic and temporal features affect mAD and MCI individuals' performance. Thus, the major innovation of the study is that it examines aspect not only as a functional feature but also as a lexical variable, something addressed for the first time in the literature. We also address whether grammatical aspect interacts with lexical aspect and with time reference. Finally, by looking at Greek, we further contribute to cross-linguistic perspective of aspect investigation. 11 MCI and 11 mAD individuals participated in a picture naming task, targeting the investigation of lexical aspect, and a sentence completion task, targeting the investigation of grammatical aspect and its interaction with lexical aspect and time reference. Both groups of participants were found to be impaired in both tasks when compared to healthy controls. In the naming task, both group and lexical aspect were significant predictors for participants' performance. Specifically, more impaired performance was found in states (believe), achievements (break), and semelfactives (hit) compared to activities (run) and accomplishments (build) for both AD and MCI participants. In the sentence completion task, apart from group, neither grammatical or lexical aspect nor tense were significant predictors for participants' performance. While results indicate that both grammatical and lexical aspect are impaired in AD and MCI, a closer look suggests a dissociation regarding the temporal feature of duration. Specifically, as grammatical feature, duration does not appear to affect participants' choice between perfective and imperfective aspect. As a lexical variable, on the other hand, and as part of the lexical representation of a verb, duration (together with internal structure) appears to play a role in verb naming. Finally, the lack of interaction between lexical and grammatical aspect also indicates that these two subsystems can be affected differentially.

Supper or dinner?

The English words for daily meals constitute a complex lexical variable conditioned by social and linguistic factors. Comparative sociolinguistic analysis of 884 speakers from more than a dozen locations in Ontario, Canada reveals a synchronic system with social correlates that are reflexes of the British and American founder populations of the province. Toronto and Loyalist settlements in southern Ontario use the highest rates of dinner while northerners with European and Scots-Irish roots use supper. Dinner is taking over as the dominant form among younger speakers, exposing a cascade pattern (Trudgill 1972; Labov 2007) that is consistent with sociolinguistic typology (Trudgill 2011).

Intelligent analysis in construction management

The article is devoted to analysis of data mining techniques in a model of construction management. In the construction industry, as a rule, in most cases is incomplete and/or unclear information, so the classical methods of model-building control don't work. In this case, it is advisable to apply some well developed methods of fuzzy sets and fuzzy logic. The original construction is described by the words of the spoken language, where the sentences are predicates of the first kind. Identifies the parameters that influence the management process in the form of a lexical variable, which is analyzed by methods of the theory of many-valued logic. The results of the analysis are used in building the model administration of construction.

The Phonological Process with Two Patterns of Simplified Chinese Characters

This paper analyzed word recognition in two patterns of Chinese characters, cross referenced with word frequency. The patterns were defined as uni-part (semantic radical/component only) and bi-part (including the phonetic radical/component and the semantic radical/component) characters. The interactions of semantic and phonological access in both patterns were inspected. It was observed that in the naming task and the pronunciation-matching task, the subject performance involving the uni-part characters showed longer RT than the bi-part characters. However, with the lexical decision and meaning-matching tasks the uni-part characters showed shorter RT than the bi-part characters. It was also observed that the frequency, which is regarded as a lexical variable, displayed a strong influence. This suggests that Chinese characters require lexical access in all tasks. This study also suggested that the phonological process is primary in visual word recognition; as there is a significant phonological effect in processing the Chinese bi-part characters, resulting in either the facilitation or inhibition of phonology due to the differing demands of the two tasks