The current study used behavioural and electroencephalograph measures to compare the transferability of three home-based interventions — cognitive training (CT), neurofeedback training (NFT), and CT combined with NFT — for reducing symptoms in children with attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (AD/HD). Following a multiple-baseline single-case experimental design, twelve children were randomised to a training condition. Each child completed a baseline phase, followed by an intervention phase. The intervention phase consisted of 20 sessions of at-home training. Tau-U analysis and standardised visual analysis were adopted to detect effects. Results showed that CT improved inhibitory function and NFT improved alpha EEG activity and working memory. The combined condition, which was a reduced ‘dose’ of CT and NFT, did not show any improvements. The three conditions did not alleviate AD/HD symptoms. While CT and NFT may have transfer effects on executive functions, considering the lack of improvement in symptoms, this study does not support CT and NFT on their own as a treatment for children with AD/HD.

Individuals with Williams syndrome (WS) present prosodic impairments. They are also interested in musical activities. In typical development, a body of research has shown that the linguistic prosodic skills of musically trained individuals are enhanced. However, it is not known whether, in WS, musical training is also associated with enhanced prosodic performance, a question this study sought to answer. We compared the performance on linguistic prosodic tasks among seven musically trained and fourteen musically untrained individuals with WS, and typically developing peers. Among those with WS, musically trained participants outperformed their musically untrained counterparts on the perception of acoustic parameters involved in prosody, the understanding of questioning and declarative intonation, and the comprehension of prefinal contrastive stress. The results suggest that musical training facilitates prosodic performance in WS. Our findings also suggest common processing mechanisms for acoustic parameters involved in both prosody and music, and that positive music-to-language transfer effects could take place in WS. We discuss the implications of these results for intervention purposes.

In this study we explored whether native Spanish speakers’ knowledge of grammatical gender in their native language (L1) affects speech production in a second language (L2) which lacks this feature (English). We selected Spanish–English bilinguals for testing who were immersed in either an L1 or an L2 context. Using a picture–word task, participants had to name pictures in their L2 while ignoring distractor words that could be either gender-congruent or gender-incongruent according to the Spanish translation. Results revealed that non-immersed participants were slower naming the pictures in the congruent condition, suggesting that bilingual people are influenced by knowledge about gender in their native language, even when producing utterances in a language in which this information does not apply. However, no such influence was observed for immersed bilinguals, suggesting that immersion environment attenuates access to the native language. We interpret our results as evidence of transfer effects between languages with different lexical systems, which seem to depend on language immersion.

Background: A growing number of studies are attempting to understand how effective cognitive interventions may be for patients with amnestic mild cognitive impairment (aMCI), particularly in relation to their memory problems.

Methods: The present study aimed to explore the benefits of a working memory (WM) training program in aMCI patients. Patients (N = 20) were randomly assigned to two training programs: the experimental group practiced with a verbal WM task, while the active control group conducted educational activities on memory.

Results: Results showed that the aMCI patients completing the WM training obtained specific gains in the task trained with some transfer effects on other WM measures (visuospatial WM) and on processes involved in or related to WM, e.g. fluid intelligence (the Cattell test) and long-term memory. This was not the case for the aMCI control group, who experienced only a very limited improvement.

Conclusion: This pilot study suggests that WM training could be a valuable method for improving cognitive performance in aMCI patients, possibly delaying the onset of Alzheimer's disease.