The 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.

This 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.

Object-relative clauses are generally harder to process than subject-relative clauses. Increased processing costs for object-relatives have been attributed either to working memory demands for the establishment of long-distance dependencies or to difficulties processing unexpected, noncanonical structures. The current study uses self-paced reading to contrast the impact of both kinds of factors in Spanish object-relative clauses, manipulating the interposition of the subject of the relative clause between object and verb. In addition, object-relatives were unambiguously marked at their onset with the Spanish preposition “ a”. Reading times increased at the onset and final regions of object-relative clauses, regardless of interference-based working memory costs, although interference costs may affect the processing of post-relative-clause regions. These results suggest that, beyond interference-related working memory costs, end-of-clause integration processes may be affected by a preference for canonical structures, thus increasing processing difficulties when confronted with a noncanonical form.

The ECCO Test (Cognitive Assessment of Sentence Comprehension in english) has shown its usefulness as an assessment tool of grammatical comprehension in older people along several studies published from its creation. The ECCO_Senior, a shorter and updated version derived from the original one and adapted to the elderly population, has good psychometric properties, and offers some promising results in the study of the language profiles of patients with mild cognitive impairment (MCI) when consider variables such as working memory capacity and educational level. The paper summarizes the results obtained with both tests, and also we present some future directions related to this line of research