Cristiano Chesi

Connected speech in neurodegenerative language disorders: A review

Language assessment has a crucial role in the clinical diagnosis of several neurodegenerative diseases. The analysis of extended speech production is a precious source of information encompassing the phonetic, phonological, lexico-semantic, morpho-syntactic, and pragmatic levels of language organization. The knowledge about the distinctive linguistic variables identifying language deficits associated to different neurodegenerative diseases has progressively improved in the last years. However, the heterogeneity of such variables and of the way they are measured and classified limits any generalization and makes the comparison among studies difficult. Here we present an exhaustive review of the studies focusing on the linguistic variables derived from the analysis of connected speech samples, with the aim of characterizing the language disorders of the most prevalent neurodegenerative diseases, including primary progressive aphasia, Alzheimers disease, movement disorders, and amyotrophic lateral sclerosis. A total of 61 studies have been included, considering only those reporting group analysis and comparisons with a group of healthy persons. This review first analyzes the differences in the tasks used to elicit connected speech, namely picture description, story narration, and interview, considering the possible different contributions to the assessment of different linguistic domains. This is followed by an analysis of the terminologies and of the methods of measurements of the variables, indicating the need for harmonization and standardization. The final section reviews the linguistic domains affected by each different neurodegenerative disease, indicating the variables most consistently impaired at each level and suggesting the key variables helping in the differential diagnosis among diseases. While a large amount of valuable information is already available, the review highlights the need of further work, including the development of automated methods, to take advantage of the richness of connected speech analysis for both research and clinical purposes.

Subject Islands, Reconstruction, and the Flow of the Computation

Recent research has highlighted a remarkable variability in subject island effects. Focusing on intransitive verbs and adjectives, we argue that islandhood is determined at the syntax-semantics interface: subjects qualify as islands when they are interpreted outside the predicative nucleus of the clause, in a categorical LF structure (Ladusaw 1994); they are transparent for extraction when they undergo total reconstruction into the predicative nucleus, giving rise to a thetic structure. The thetic/categorical interpretation depends on various factors (most notably the stage-level versus individual-level nature of the predicate), whose interaction accounts for the observed variability of island effects, as shown by our experimental evidence. The relevance of subject reconstruction need not be stipulated; rather, it follows from a top-down-oriented computation, in which movement dependencies are implemented by a storage-and-retrieval mechanism.

On Directionality of Phrase Structure Building

Minimalism in grammatical theorizing (Chomsky in The minimalist program. MIT Press, Cambridge, 1995) led to simpler linguistic devices and a better focalization of the core properties of the structure building engine: a lexicon and a free (recursive) phrase formation operation, dubbed Merge, are the basic components that serve in building syntactic structures. Here I suggest that by looking at the elementary restrictions that apply to Merge (i.e., selection and licensing of functional features), we could conclude that a re-orientation of the syntactic derivation (from bottom-up/right-left to top-down/left-right) is necessary to make the theory simpler, especially for long-distance (filler-gap) dependencies, and is also empirically more adequate. If the structure building operations would assemble lexical items in the order they are pronounced (Phillips in Order and structure. PhD thesis, MIT, 1996; Chesi in Phases and cartography in linguistic computation: Toward a cognitively motivated computational model of linguistic competence. PhD thesis, Università di Siena, 2004; Chesi in Competence and computation: Toward a processing friendly minimalist grammar. Unipress, Padova, 2012), on-line performance data could better fit the grammatical model, without resorting to external “performance factors.” The phase-based, top-down (and, as a consequence, left-right) Minimalist Grammar here discussed goes in this direction, ultimately showing how strong Islands (Huang in Logical relations in Chinese and the theory of grammar. PhD thesis, MIT, 1982) and intervention effects (Gordon et al. in J Exp Psychol Learn Mem Cogn 27:1411–1423, 2001, Gordon et al. in J Mem Lang 51:97–114, 2004) could be better explained in structural terms assuming this unconventional derivational direction.

Open Multimedia Environment to Retrieve and Organise Documents: An Adaptive Web-Based IR System in the Field of Textile and Clothing Industry

Computer based information repositories are becoming larger and more diverse. In this context the need for an effective information retrieval system is related not only to the efficiency of the retrieval process but also to its compatibility to support information seekers during a typical problem solving activity (Marchionini 1995). OMERO project (national research project, n. 41902) perspective considers information seeking as a problem solving activity (Rumiati 1990) that depends on communication acts.