A timely diagnosis of the prodromal stages of dementia remains a big challenge for healthcare systems: many assessment tools have been proposed over recent years, but the commonest screening instruments are largely unreliable for detecting subtle changes in cognition. The scientific literature contains a rising number of reports about language disturbances at the earliest stages of dementia, a clinical syndrome known as “Mild Cognitive Impairment" (MCI). Here we take advantage of these findings to develop a novel NLP method capable of identifying cognitive frailty at a very early stage by processing Italian spoken productions. This study constitutes a first step in the creation of an automatic tool for non-intrusive, low-cost dementia screening exploiting linguistic biomarkers. Our findings show that acoustic features (i.e., fluency indexes and spectral properties of the voice) are the most reliable parameters for MCI early identification. Moreover, lexical and syntactic features, grabbing the erosion of verbal abilities caused by the pathology, emerge as statistically significant and can support speech traits in the classification process.

Despite extensive literature on tense-aspect acquisition, little attention has been devoted to African languages. This paper intends to broaden the typological coverage. It also aims at testing three basic issues often mentioned in connection with ATAM (Actionality, Temporality, Aspect, Mood) acquisition: (i) the higher percentage of nouns as opposed to verbs in the early phase of L1 learning; (ii) the late acquisition of future as opposed to present- and past-referring tenses; (iii) the role of Actionality and Aspect, as often proposed in the specialized literature. Mòoré (a Gur language) is a perfect candidate, due to its morphological properties, in particular its being a definitely Mood/Aspect-prominent language. The results of a longitudinal investigation on 4 children between (approximately) 1;6 and 2;6 show that: (i) the number of verbs overcomes that of nouns in the early phase of acquisition; (ii) the acquisition of the future tense is very precocious; (iii) despite high degree of explicitness of the aspectually-marked Mòoré forms, Aspect does not have the leading role in the acquisition process. It is instead proposed that ATAM acquisition is guided by the degree of semantic and morphophonological transparency: in particular, the children analyzed in the study learned the more transparent forms earlier than some of the aspectually explicit, but morphophonologically more complex ones.

n this paper, I investigate a morphological construction expressing the evaluative meaning of contempt in Italian. The words formed by means of this construction contain the string mal(e)-, linked to the adverb male 'badly', plus a base that can be an adjective, a verb or a participle (e.g. malsano 'insane', maltrattare 'to ill-treat', malvivente 'criminal', lit. 'badly living', or malnato 'miscreated'). Based on diachronic data ranging from Old to Contemporary Italian, I examine the evolution of this partially lexically specified construction focusing on its functional and distributional properties, within the framework of Construction Morphology (Booij 2010). The analysis reveals that mal(e)- displays a prefix-like behavior and conveys a pejorative or a negative value, depending on the meaning of the base word and the context. I argue that it can be considered as an evaluative prefix and that mal(e)- construction is at the present stage closer to derivation than compounding.