Gregory Wayne Yelland

The Metalinguistic Benefits of Limited Contact with a Second Language.

This study examined whether the often-reported metalinguistic benefits of childhood bilingualism extend to children whose experience with a second language is considerably more limited, and if so, whether this metalinguistic advantage flows on to reading acquisition. Its purpose was to provide direct evidence of a causal role for metalinguistic awareness in reading acquisition. The study focused on the developing word awareness skills of two groups of preparatory and grade 1 children: one group was strictly monolingual in English; the other, the “marginal bilingual” group, consisted of English monolingual who were participating in a second language program that provided I hour of Italian instruction each week.After only 6 months of instruction in Italian, the marginal bilingual children showed a significantly higher level word awareness than their monolingual counterparts. This advantage weakened across grade 1, as both groups approached ceiling levels of performance. Nonetheless, the initial advantage flows through to the first major step in reading acquisition, with the grade 1 marginal bilinguals showing significantly greater word recognition skill than the monolinguals, thus strengthening the argument for a causal role in reading acquisition for word awareness.

Randomised clinical trial: Gluten may cause depression in subjects with non-coeliac gluten sensitivity - An exploratory clinical study

Current evidence suggests that many patients with self‐reported non‐coeliac gluten sensitivity (NCGS) retain gastrointestinal symptoms on a gluten‐free diet (GFD) but continue to restrict gluten as they report ‘feeling better’.

Randomised clinical trial: the efficacy of gut‐directed hypnotherapy is similar to that of the low FODMAP diet for the treatment of irritable bowel syndrome

A low fermentable oligosaccharides, disaccharides, monosaccharides and polyols (FODMAP) diet is effective in treating irritable bowel syndrome (IBS).

Impaired perceptual judgment at low blood alcohol concentrations

Males and females show different patterns of cognitive impairment when blood alcohol concentrations (BACs) are high. To investigate whether gender differences persist at low BACs, cognitive impairment was tested in 21 participants (11 female, 10 male) using a brief computerized perceptual judgment task that provides error rate and response time data. Participants consumed a measured dose of alcohol (average peak BAC: females: 0.052 g/100 mL, males: 0.055 g/100 mL), and were tested at four time points spanning both the rising and falling limbs of the BAC curve, in addition to a prealcohol time point. Comparisons were made against performance of these same participants at equivalent time points in an alcohol-free control condition. Males and females displayed a trend toward slower responses and more errors, even when mildly intoxicated. These data indicate that cognitive function can be impaired at BACs that are below the legal limit for driving in most countries.

Cognitive impairment in coeliac disease improves on a gluten‐free diet and correlates with histological and serological indices of disease severity

Mild impairments of cognition or ‘Brain fog’ are often reported by patients with coeliac disease but the nature of these impairments has not been systematically investigated.

Chronic partial sleep loss increases the facilitatory role of a masked prime in a word recognition task

Neurobehavioural performance deficits associated with sleep loss have been extensively studied, in particular, the effects on psychomotor performance. However, there is no consensus as to which, if any, cognitive functions are impaired by sleep loss. To examine how sleep loss might affect cognition, the automatic processes supporting word recognition were examined using the masked priming paradigm in participants who had been exposed to two consecutive days of sleep restriction. Twelve healthy volunteers (mean age 24.5 years) were recruited. Nocturnal sleep duration was restricted to 60% of each participants habitual sleep duration for two consecutive nights by delaying scheduled time of sleep onset and advancing time of awakening. In controlled laboratory conditions, participants completed the Psychomotor Vigilance Task and Karolinska Sleepiness Scale and a masked priming word recognition task. As expected, significant increases in subjective sleepiness and impaired psychomotor performance were observed after sleep loss. In contrast, response times and error rate on the masked priming task were not significantly affected. However, the magnitude of the masked priming effect, which can be taken as an index of automaticity of lexical processing, increased following sleep loss. These findings suggest that while no evidence of impairment to lexical access was observed after sleep loss, an increase in automatic processing may occur as a consequence of compensatory mechanisms.

Recovery of cognitive function after coronary artery bypass graft operations

BACKGROUND The effect of coronary artery bypass grafting (CABG) operations on cognition was examined after controlling for the operation, emotional state, preexisting cognitive impairment, and repeated experience with cognitive tests. METHODS On-pump CABG patients (n=16), thoracic surgical patients (n=15), and a nonsurgical control group (n=15) were tested preoperatively, and at 1 and 8 weeks postoperatively, using a battery of cognitive tests and an emotional state assessment. Patient groups were similar in age, sex, level of education, and premorbid intelligence quotient score. Surgical group data were normalized against data from the nonsurgical control group before statistical analysis. RESULTS CABG patients performed worse on every subtest before the operation, and this disadvantage persisted after the operation. Anxiety, depression, and stress were associated with impaired cognitive performance in the surgical groups 1 week after the operation: 44% of CABG patients and 33% of surgical control patients were significantly impaired; yet, by 8 weeks, nearly all patients had recovered to preoperative levels, with 25% of CABG and 13% of surgical control patients improving beyond their preoperative performance. CONCLUSIONS Stress, anxiety, and depression impair cognitive performance in association with CABG and thoracic operations. Most patients recover to, or exceed, preoperative levels of cognition within 8 weeks. Thus, after controlling for nonsurgical factors, the prospects of a tangible improvement in cognition after CABG are high.

Morphological and syntactic skills in language samples of pre school aged children with autism: Atypical development?

Abstract This study investigated whether children with autism have atypical development of morphological and syntactic skills, including whether they use rote learning to compensate for impaired morphological processing and acquire grammatical morphemes in an atypical order. Participants were children aged from 3–6 years who had autism (n = 17), developmental delay without autism (n = 7), and typically-developing children (n = 19). Language samples were taken from participants during the administration of the Autism Diagnostic Observation Schedule, and transcripts were coded using the Index of Productive Syntax, and for usage of Browns grammatical morphemes. Participants were also administered an elicitation task requiring the application of inflections to non-words; the Wugs Task. The main finding of this study was that children with autism have unevenly developed morphological and syntactic sub-skills; they have skills which are a combination of intact, delayed, and atypical. It was also found that children with autism and children with developmental delays can acquire and use morphological rules. The implications of these findings are that, in order to maximize language acquisition for these children, clinicians need to utilize comprehensive language assessment tools and design interventions that are tailored to the childs strengths and weaknesses.

Subtle cognitive impairment in elders with Mini-Mental State Examination scores within the ‘normal’ range

The Mini‐Mental State Examination (MMSE) is commonly used as a screening test for dementia, yet MMSE scores above the cut‐off for dementia (24–30) are widely thought to have limited utility, particularly in older persons. The study investigates whether scores within this range can be indicative of pre‐symptomatic levels of cognitive impairment.

Lexical processing in individuals with high-functioning autism and Asperger’s disorder

The presence or absence of clinically delayed language development prior to 3 years of age is a key, but contentious, clinical feature distinguishing autism from Asperger’s disorder. The aim of this study was to examine language processing in children with high-functioning autism (HFA) and Asperger’s disorder (AD) using a task which taps lexical processing, a core language ability. Eleven individuals with HFA, 11 with AD and 11 typically developing (TD) individuals completed a masked priming task, a psycholinguistic paradigm that directly examines lexical processes. Within-group analyses revealed the AD and TD groups had intact lexical processing systems and orthographic processing of the written word. The outcomes for the HFA group were ambiguous, suggesting that their lexical processing system is either delayed or is structurally different. This suggests that fundamental differences in lexical processing exist between HFA and AD and remain evident later in development.