Persona: Martín-Aragoneses, María Teresa
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0000-0003-3005-7174
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Martín-Aragoneses
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María Teresa
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Publicación Sentence reading in older adults with and without Mild Cognitive Impairment: The role of Working Memory and Interference Control(John Benjamins Publishing Company, 2020-10-21) Martín-Aragoneses, María Teresa; Rio Grande, David Pedro del; López Higes, Ramón; Prados, José María; Montejo, Pedro; Delgado Losada, María LuisaWhile language comprehension tends to be well preserved in older adults, the processing and comprehension of syntactically complex sentences might be influenced by age-related changes in Working Memory (WM) and Interference Control (IC). Further, aging can be accompanied by cognitive decline caused by neurological conditions such as Mild Cognitive Impairment (MCI), but its impact on on-line sentence processing has rarely been studied. We report a study of word-by-word reading times and comprehension of sentences with different syntactic complexity in young adults (n = 69) and two subgroups of older adults: healthy older adults (n = 32) and older adults with single- and multi-domain amnestic MCI (n = 21). The experimental protocol was based on a self-paced reading task and a variety of neuropsychological measures including Operation Span (WM) and Stroop (IC) tasks. Syntactic complexity was induced using Spanish embedded relative clauses varying subject- versus object-extraction of the antecedent noun phrase (canonical or non-canonical word order, respectively). Moreover, within non-canonical sentences, we distinguished between those that did or did not contain long-distance dependencies between the extracted object and embedded verb. All these manipulations were expected to lead to a gradual recruitment of IC and WM based on the complexity of the sentence structure. Comprehension was similar across groups, with differences explained by WM capacity. In both subgroups of older adults, the on-line processing of object extracted sentences was modulated by their available IC and WM resources, although older adults with MCI seem to recruit WM to a lesser extent. In conclusion, results suggest that IC and WM have a modulatory role in the processing and comprehension of syntactically complex sentences in older adults. Moreover, older adults with MCI seem to be particularly overwhelmed by WM demands during sentence processing and comprehension.Publicación Preserved semantic categorical organization in mild cognitive impairment: A network analysis of verbal fluency(Elsevier, 2021-07-01) Nevado, Ángel; Rio, David del; Martín-Aragoneses, María Teresa; Prados, José M.; López Higes, RamónThe decline in semantic verbal fluency as we age may originate from both semantic memory degradation and executive function deficits. We investigated to what extent semantic memory is organized into categories in older adults with mild cognitive impairment (n = 81) and healthy controls (n = 83). We obtained the semantic networks automatically from the probability of co-occurrence of words in a verbal fluency test and characterized them with graph-theory tools. We found that the degree of categorical organization was similar for both diagnostic groups, but there was a higher tendency to transition to other categories during word production in the patient group. These results suggest that the semantic network is preserved in mild cognitive impairment, but also that the existing associations are exploited less efficiently during long-term memory search, possibly because of deficits in executive function.Publicación Morpho-Syntactic Reading Comprehension in Children With Early and Late Cochlear Implants(Oxford University Press, 2015-04-01) López Higes, Ramón; Gallego, Carlos; Martín-Aragoneses, María Teresa; Melle, NatalieThis study explores morpho-syntactic reading comprehension in 19 Spanish children who received a cochlear implant (CI) before 24 months of age (early CI [e-CI]) and 19 Spanish children who received a CI after 24 months (late CI [l-CI]). They all were in primary school and were compared to a hearing control (HC) group of 19 children. Tests of perceptual reasoning, working memory, receptive vocabulary, and morpho-syntactic comprehension were used in the assessment. It was observed that while children with l-CI showed a delay, those with e-CI reached a level close to that which was obtained by their control peers in morpho-syntactic comprehension. Thus, results confirm a positive effect of early implantation on morpho-syntactic reading comprehension. Inflectional morphology and simple sentence comprehension were noted to be better in the e-CI group than in the l-CI group. The most important factor in distinguishing between the HC and l-CI groups or the e-CI and l-CI groups was verbal inflectional morphology.Publicación Task Demands and Sentence Reading Comprehension among Healthy Older Adults: The Complementary Roles of Cognitive Reserve and Working Memory(MDPI, 2023-03-01) Martín-Aragoneses, María Teresa; Mejuto, Gema; Rio, David del; Fernandes, Sara Margarida; Rodrigues, Pedro E.S.; López Higes, RamónAgeing entails different functional brain changes. Education, reading experience, and leisure activities, among others, might contribute to the maintenance of cognitive performance among older adults and are conceptualised as proxies for cognitive reserve. However, ageing also conveys a depletion of working memory capacity, which adversely impacts language comprehension. This study investigated how cognitive reserve proxies and working memory jointly predict the performance of healthy older adults in a sentence reading comprehension task, and how their predictive value changes depending on sentence structure and task demands. Cognitively healthy older adults (n = 120) completed a sentence–picture verification task under two conditions: concurrent viewing of the sentence and picture or their sequential presentation, thereby imposing greater demands on working memory. They also completed a questionnaire on cognitive reserve proxies as well as a verbal working memory test. The sentence structure was manipulated by altering the canonical word order and modifying the amount of propositional information. While the cognitive reserve was the main predictor in the concurrent condition, the predictive role of working memory increased under the sequential presentation, particularly for complex sentences. These findings highlight the complementary roles played by cognitive reserve and working memory in the reading comprehension of older adults.Publicación Efficacy of Cognitive Training in Older Adults with and without Subjective Cognitive Decline Is Associated with Inhibition Efficiency and Working Memory Span, Not with Cognitive Reserve(Frontiers Media, 2018-02-02) López Higes, Ramón; Martín-Aragoneses, María Teresa; Rubio Valdehita, Susana; Delgado-Losada, María L.; Montejo, Pedro; Montenegro, Mercedes; Prados, José M.; Frutos Lucas, Jaisalmer; López Sanz, DavidThe present study explores the role of cognitive reserve, executive functions, and working memory (WM) span, as factors that might explain training outcomes in cognitive status. Eighty-one older adults voluntarily participated in the study, classified either as older adults with subjective cognitive decline or cognitively intact. Each participant underwent a neuropsychological assessment that was conducted both at baseline (entailing cognitive reserve, executive functions, WM span and depressive symptomatology measures, as well as the Mini-Mental State Exam regarding initial cognitive status), and then 6 months later, once each participant had completed the training program (Mini-Mental State Exam at the endpoint). With respect to cognitive status the training program was most beneficial for subjective cognitive decline participants with low efficiency in inhibition at baseline (explaining a 33% of Mini-Mental State Exam total variance), whereas for cognitively intact participants training gains were observed for those who presented lower WM span.