The role of morphemes in lexical recognition has been extensively explored in recent years, although the evidence from older adults is extremely scarce. In this study, we carry out a lexical decision task to assess the interference generated by morphological composition of pseudo-words (i.e., the longer and more error prone decisions on pseudo-words made up of morphemes in comparison to pseudo-words without morphological appearance) in a group of young and older adults (mean = 74 years). The results show the expected effect on both response latencies and error rates for both groups. The effect of imageability is also significant. The specific results for the older adults show an interaction between the morphological effect and cognitive reserve: older adults with higher levels of cognitive reserve are more sensitive to morphological interference than older adults with lower cognitive reserve. The overall results are interpreted based on current models of morphological processing and aging.

Recent work on Object Shift (OS) suggests that this is not as uniform an operation as traditionally assumed. In this paper, we examine OS in the spontaneous speech of adults in large Danish, Norwegian and Swedish child language corpora in order to explore variation with respect to OS across these three languages. We evaluate our results against three recent strands of accounts of OS, namely a prosodic/phonological account, an account in terms of cognitive status, and an account in terms of information structure. Our investigation shows that there is both within-language and across-language variation in the application of OS, and that the three accounts can explain some of our data. However, all accounts are faced with challenges, especially when explaining exceptional cases.

Background: In normal aging, the decrease in the syntactic complexity of written production is usually associated with cognitive deficits. This study was aimed to analyze the quality of older adults' textual production indicated by verbal fluency (number of words) and grammatical complexity (number of ideas) in relation to gender, age, schooling, and cognitive status.

Methods: From a probabilistic sample of community-dwelling people aged 65 years and above (n = 900), 577 were selected on basis of their responses to the Mini-Mental State Examination (MMSE) sentence writing, which were submitted to content analysis; 323 were excluded as they left the item blank or performed illegible or not meaningful responses. Education adjusted cut-off scores for the MMSE were used to classify the participants as cognitively impaired or unimpaired. Total and subdomain MMSE scores were computed.

Results: 40.56% of participants whose answers to the MMSE sentence were excluded from the analyses had cognitive impairment compared to 13.86% among those whose answers were included. The excluded participants were older and less educated. Women and those older than 80 years had the lowest scores in the MMSE. There was no statistically significant relationship between gender, age, schooling, and textual performance. There was a modest but significant correlation between number of words written and the scores in the Language subdomain.

Conclusions: Results suggest the strong influence of schooling and age over MMSE sentence performance. Failing to write a sentence may suggest cognitive impairment, yet, instructions for the MMSE sentence, i.e. to produce a simple sentence, may limit its clinical interpretation.

This study examines the caregiving networks of older adults, with particular emphasis on differences according to cognitive status (n = 303). Individuals with cognitive impairment were significantly more likely than those who were cognitively intact to receive assistance with personal care, linking with the outside world, and mobility. The types of network were generally similar for care receivers with cognitive impairment and those who were cognitively intact, although the percentage of networks comprised solely of the identified caregiver varied depending on the tasks. Coresidence of the caregiver and care receiver was more important than the care receiver's cognitive status for exclusive care by the identified caregiver. Having more ADL/IADL limitations was associated with a reliance on a network of the identified caregiver, in conjunction with other caregivers in several task areas. The findings highlight the complexity of sources of help in later life and the need for future research to consider the caregiving network as a whole.

Background: Vascular risk factors are blamed as being involved in the pathogenesis of cognitive dysfunction in the elderly. Alzheimer's disease or vascular-type dementia could be part of a metabolic syndrome. The aim of this study was to evaluate whether there is any relation between insulin resistance and cognitive status of the elderly regarding normal, mild cognitive impairment (MCI), Alzheimer's disease (AD), vascular dementia (VaD) and mixed dementia.

Methods: 267 elderly patients admitted to an outpatient geriatrics clinic were evaluated medically and cognitively in this study. The patients were diagnosed using ARDRA and DSM-IV criteria for AD; NINDS-AIREN and DSM-IV criteria for VaD; and Petersen criteria for MCI. Insulin resistance was calculated using both the homeostasis model assessment (HOMA) and quantitative insulin sensitivity check index (QUICKI) formulas.

Results: The mean values of HOMA and QUICKI scores were 2.79 (SD ± 3.56) and 0.346 (SD ± 0.036) for the normal group, 2.81 (SD ± 3.06) and 0.354 (SD ± 0.047) for AD group, 2.20 (SD ± 1.82) and 0.360 (SD ± 0.048) for VaD group, 2.87 (SD ± 1.81) and 0.339 (SD ± 0.038) for mixed dementia group, 2.79 (SD ± 2.81) and 0,349 (SD ± 0.042) for MCI group, respectively. There were no statistically significant differences between HOMA and QUICKI scores of all the groups.

Conclusion: This is the first study of the possible relation between insulin resistance and cognitive function in people categorized according to five forms of cognitive status. Unfortunately the results do not allow generalizations. Further prospective cohort studies that follow a normal cognitive group and MCI patients with and without insulin resistance are necessary.