Papers by Alexandra Prentza
Brain Sciences
One of the components of a dementia diagnosis is the assessment of functional abilities. These ab... more One of the components of a dementia diagnosis is the assessment of functional abilities. These abilities are measured via screeners, such as the Instrumental Activities of Daily Living (IADL) scale. The IADL scale is a valid tool that has been adapted in many languages. This study aimed to provide a cut-off point and validate the Greek version of the IADL scale in populations with cognitive impairment. IADL data were collected from 132 individuals: 24 PD patients, 24 Parkinson’s disease dementia (PDD) patients, and 24 AD patients. The remaining 60 participants were cognitive healthy adults (CHAs). The CHA group and the PD group served as the cognitively unimpaired group (CUG), while the PDD and AD groups served as the cognitively impaired group (CIG). Additionally, the MMSE, the AMTS, the Clock Drawing Test CDT, the Arizona Battery for Communication Disorders of Dementia (ABCD), the NPI, and the GDS-15 were administered to the participants. Statistically significant differences in t...
Languages
This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative... more This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY
Neuroscience Research Notes
The evaluation of cognitive-communication disorders is performed with several types of assessment... more The evaluation of cognitive-communication disorders is performed with several types of assessment methods. These methods include different types of cognitive and language tests such as the Arizona Battery for Communication Disorders of Dementia (ABCD). The present study aimed to validate the ABCD in the Greek language. 132 individuals participated in the study: 60 adults in cognitive health (ACH) and 72 patients [24 Parkinson Disease (PD) patients without cognitive impairment, 24 with Parkinson Disease Dementia (PDD) and 24 with Alzheimer's Disease (AD)]. The cognitive and mental status of all participants was estimated by means of the Mini Mental State Examination (MMSE), the Abbreviated Mental Test Score (AMTS), the Clock Drawing Test (CDT), the Instrumental Activities of Daily Living (IADL), the Neuropsychiatric Inventory (H-NPI) the Geriatric Depression Scale -15 (GDS-15) and the ABCD. Statistically significant differences were found between all tests administered with the P...
International Journal of Language & Communication Disorders
Journal of Psycholinguistic Research, 2022
This study provides a preliminary validation of a Greek Sentence Repetition Task (SRT) with a sam... more This study provides a preliminary validation of a Greek Sentence Repetition Task (SRT) with a sample of 110 monolingual and bilingual typically developing (TLD) children and examines the test's ability to distinguish between Greek monolingual children and age-matched Albanian-Greek bilinguals using a Receiver Operating Characteristics (ROC) analysis. This is the first study to report on the psychometric evaluation of a Greek SRT and its discriminatory ability with typical populations. Since most language assessments are standardized with monolinguals and bilingual children tend to underperform on these compared to monolinguals, it is essential to establish the level of bilingual TLD children's ability on the same tests before moving on to diagnose language impairment in bilinguals. Results showed that the Greek SRT had very high validity and reliability scores, with Accuracy measures being more reliable than Grammaticality measures. The school-age monolingual and bilingual TLD children reached different cut-off scores on this task.
Communication Disorders Quarterly, 2021
The study aimed at evaluating the diadochokinetic (DDK) skills of Greek-speaking preschool childr... more The study aimed at evaluating the diadochokinetic (DDK) skills of Greek-speaking preschool children with phonological disorder (PD) by means of a structured evaluation protocol and at proposing cut-off points for children at risk of speech impairment. The participants were 36 children with PD and 60 typically developing (TD) peers. The groups were matched on age and gender. The PD group performed significantly slower than the TD group in all speech DDK tasks but not in the oral-motor tasks. The ROC analysis showed a statistically significant positive discrimination for all speech tasks. The internal consistency of the protocol was excellent (Cronbach’s α = .844), while complex stimuli showed a better discriminatory ability. The obtained results agree with Dodd’s classification for speech sound disorders (SSDs). Different types of speech stimuli must be included in the evaluation of DDK performance as a clinical predictor for preschoolers with SSDs who face difficulties in speech mat...
International Journal of Bilingualism, 2017
Aim:The objectives of this study are to examine (a) the development of gender assignment and agre... more Aim:The objectives of this study are to examine (a) the development of gender assignment and agreement in real and pseudo nouns by bilingual Greek-Albanian children and (b) how different input-related factors impact on these different processes.Methodology:Real and pseudo nouns were investigated to assess the effect of lexical knowledge (real nouns) and of morphological cues (pseudo nouns). Four tasks eliciting gender production in determiner phrases (assignment) and adjective predicates (agreement) for real and pseudo items were administered.Data:150 bilingual children and 57 Greek monolingual children, aged 8–12 years old, were tested. Bilingual performance is investigated in relation to the role of the bilinguals’ Greek vocabulary knowledge, as well as in relation to early/current language exposure, oral input, literacy, monolingual/bilingual schooling and parental education as a proxy for socioeconomic status.Findings:The results show a strong relationship between the bilinguals...
Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders, 2019
This study investigated whether children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) are sensitive to mis... more This study investigated whether children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) are sensitive to mispronunciations of familiar words and compared their sensitivity to children with typical-development. Sixty-four toddlers with ASD and 31 younger, typical controls participated in a looking-while-listening task that measured their accuracy in fixating the correct object when it was labelled with a correct pronunciation versus mispronunciation. A cognitive style that prioritizes processing local, rather than global features, as claimed by the weak central coherence theory, predicts that children with ASD should be more sensitive to mispronunciations than typical controls. The results, however, reveal no differences in the effect of mispronunciations on lexical processing between groups, even when matched for receptive language or non-verbal cognitive skills.
International Journal of Bilingualism, 2019
Aim:The present study examines input and literacy effects in simultaneous and sequential bilingua... more Aim:The present study examines input and literacy effects in simultaneous and sequential bilinguals with the aim of (a) investigating the differences between bilingual and monolingual populations and (b) disentangling the individual contribution of different factors in bilingual syntactic abilities.Methodology:A sentence repetition task (SRT) in Greek with eight structures (Subject Verb Object [SVO], negative clauses, clitic structures, complement clauses, coordinated sentences, adverbial clauses, wh-questions and relative clauses) was employed. All bilinguals additionally participated in a standardized expressive vocabulary task in Greek to measure their lexical ability.Data:Sixty 8–10-year-old children (20 monolingual, 20 simultaneous and 20 late sequential bilinguals) were tested.Findings:The analysis showed that (a) monolinguals outperform sequential bilinguals in sentence repetition, (b) clitic structures are highly problematic for all participants, (c) vocabulary and syntactic...
Major Trends in Theoretical and Applied Linguistics Volume 2
This study examines the L2 acquisition of English pronominal subjects by Greek learners and its p... more This study examines the L2 acquisition of English pronominal subjects by Greek learners and its possible causes. It also considers the factors that affect pronoun resolution in L1 Greek. Null pronominal subjects were found to be used even by advanced learners, especially in topic-continuity contexts. This is attributed to the transfer of the L1 property of null subjects and to the interpretive effects thereby achieved. Regarding pronoun resolution in Greek, we found that the syntactic constraint related to the null/overt realization of pronominal subjects is such a decisive factor that its effect surfaces even when antecedents are pragmatically inferred.
Theory and Practice in Language Studies, 2014
This paper reports the results of the pilot part of a wider study exploring the second language (... more This paper reports the results of the pilot part of a wider study exploring the second language (L2) grammars of beginner, intermediate and advanced Greek learners of English. The experiment considers the acceptability of structures with null and postverbal subjects, as well as the acceptability of permutations inducing that-t violations in L2 English. The results have suggested that there is a developmental trend with increasing proficiency with the more proficient groups exhibiting improved performance. However, it was found that L2 performance does not reach native standards, since the advanced group fared significantly less successfully than the English control group in all the structures tested. This data lends empirical support to recent theoretical proposals that cross-linguistic differences between L1 and L2 in the form of syntactic feature mismatch can cause prolonged learnability problems which are difficult, if not impossible, to overcome.
Theory and Practice in Language Studies, 2012
This paper examines the formation of Restrictive Relative Clauses (RRC) in Greek and English and ... more This paper examines the formation of Restrictive Relative Clauses (RRC) in Greek and English and investigates the acquisition of English RRCs by advanced Greek learners. On the assumption that L1 Greek and L2 English exhibit parametrically different choices as regards RRC formation which are associated with abstract syntactic features, the current experiment addresses the question of whether parameter resetting is possible in adult L2 acquisition. The results have shown that non-native speakers (NNSs) fared significantly less successfully than native speakers (NSs) in the relevant grammaticality judgement task. The conclusion is that advanced Greek learners fail to acquire the feature specification of the English relative C. The obtained data lends additional support to recent L2 theories which maintain that syntactic divergence between L1 and L2 is associated with prolonged acquisitional problems.
Journal of Greek Linguistics, 2013
We examine the microparameters of null and postverbal subjects in the Greek L1/English L2 interla... more We examine the microparameters of null and postverbal subjects in the Greek L1/English L2 interlanguage, exploring the role of interpretability in interlanguage representations. Our results suggest that while uninterpretable features are inaccessible in L2 acquisition, interpretable features are available and play a compensatory role. Although the abstract L1 properties of subject-verb agreement seem to transfer to the L2 representation, the effects appear scattered and transfer is not direct. We thus suggest that Greek-learner L2 English grammar exhibits non-random optionality in the properties of null and postverbal subjects, regulated by parameter-resetting (feature re-valuation) which is, however, neither the L1 (Greek) nor the target L2 (English) option.
Languages
We investigate the effects of the historical language contact of Modern Greek (MG) with Vlach Aro... more We investigate the effects of the historical language contact of Modern Greek (MG) with Vlach Aromanian (VA) in bilingual speakers of three generations living in Epirus, Greece. We focus on a VA variety spoken in a specific language community, with our study constituting one of the early attempts in this field of research. (1) Background: Given that bilingualism is a dynamic process in which language domains are not uniformly affected by external (i.e., sociolinguistic) factors, the investigation of bidirectional crosslinguistic influence can shed light on the resilience of morphosyntactic and semantic feature changes. MG differs from VA in a number of morphosyntactic properties at the DP domain, namely definiteness marking, positioning the adjective and gender marking. (2) Methods: To examine the language contact effects in VA–MG bilinguals, we elicited spontaneous language production in VA and MG from speakers across three generations with different levels of proficiency in each l...
Supplemental material, sj-pdf-1-cdq-10.1177_15257401211017065 for Evaluation of Diadochokinesis i... more Supplemental material, sj-pdf-1-cdq-10.1177_15257401211017065 for Evaluation of Diadochokinesis in Greek Preschoolers With Speech Sound Disorders Using a Diadochokinetic Rates Protocol by Dionysios Tafiadis, Vasiliki Zarokanellou, Louiza Voniati, Alexandra Prentza, Konstantinos Drosos, Angelos Papadopoulos and Nafsika Ziavra in Communication Disorders Quarterly
Supplemental material, sj-pdf-1-cdq-10.1177_15257401211017065 for Evaluation of Diadochokinesis i... more Supplemental material, sj-pdf-1-cdq-10.1177_15257401211017065 for Evaluation of Diadochokinesis in Greek Preschoolers With Speech Sound Disorders Using a Diadochokinetic Rates Protocol by Dionysios Tafiadis, Vasiliki Zarokanellou, Louiza Voniati, Alexandra Prentza, Konstantinos Drosos, Angelos Papadopoulos and Nafsika Ziavra in Communication Disorders Quarterly
Journal of Clinical and Experimental Neuropsychology, 2022
ABSTRACT Introduction The present study aims to be the first to validate the Tuokko version of th... more ABSTRACT Introduction The present study aims to be the first to validate the Tuokko version of the Clock Drawing Test (CDT) and estimate its cutoff score after its translation into the Greek language and administration in the Greek population. Methods One hundred and thirty-two individuals participated in this study [60 with Good Cognitive Health (GCH), 24 with Parkinson’s Disease (PD), 24 with Parkinson’s Disease Dementia (PDD) and 24 with Alzheimer’s Disease (AD)]. The CDT was administered to all participants. Additionally, the cognitive and mental status of the sample were estimated through the use of the Mini Mental State Examination (MMSE), Abbreviated Mental Test Score (AMTS), Arizona Battery for Communication Disorders of Dementia (ABCD), Instrumental Activities of Daily Living (IADL), the Neuropsychiatric Inventory (H-NPI) and the Geriatric Depression Scale −15 (GDS-15). Results Statistically significant differences were found between all groups on the CDT, with AD patients having lower scores than all subgroups in the study. The CDT showed a high internal consistency (Cronbach’s alpha = 0.832). The ROC analysis provided a cutoff point equal to 4.00 (AUC: 0.821, p < 0.001) between the Cognitively Unimpaired Group (CUG: GCH and PD group) and the Cognitively Impaired Group (CIG: PPD and AD patients), 5.00 (AUC: 0.845, p < 0.001) between the GCH group and the PDD group, and 4.00 (AUC: 0.780, p < 0.001) between the GCH group and the AD group. Finally, the cutoff point between the PD group and the PDD group was 4.00 (AUC: 0.896, p < 0.005), and 3.00 (AUC: 0.899, p < 0.001) between the PD group and the AD group. Significant positive Pearson’s correlations were observed between CDT and MMSE (r = 0.808, p < 0.001), CDT and AMTS (r = 0.688, p < 0.001), CDT and ABCD (r = 0.770, p < 0.001), CDT and the ABCD Visuospatial Construction subdomain (r = 0.880, p < 0.001); while a negative correlation was found between CDT and IADL (r = −0.627, p < 0.001) between the CUG and the CIG groups. Conclusion Given the results obtained, the CDT appears to be a clinically valid screening instrument for the assessment of visuospatial abilities, with high reliability in Greek populations with cognitive impairment.
BACKGROUND Screening people's cognitive skills have been proven essential for reference to fu... more BACKGROUND Screening people's cognitive skills have been proven essential for reference to full assessment. These methods include short scales, such as the Abbreviated Mental Test Score (AMTS). The AMTS is a valid 10-item questionnaire that has been translated into many languages, but not in Greek yet. The aim of this study is the validation of the Greek version of the AMTS with an additional estimation of its cutoff scores. METHODS About 132 individuals [60 controls and 72 patients (24 with Parkinson's disease (PD), 24 with Parkinson's disease dementia (PDD), and 24 with Alzheimer's disease (AD)] participated in this study. All participants besides the AMTS completed the Mini Mental State Examination (MMSE), the Tuokko's Clock Drawing Test (CDT), the Instrumental Activities of Daily Living (IADL), the Arizona Battery for Communication Disorders of Dementia (ABCD), the Hellenic versions of the Neuropsychiatric Inventory (NPI), and the Geriatric Depression Scale (...
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Papers by Alexandra Prentza