Actitudes hacia la lengua náhuatl : Un estudio sociolingüístico con jóvenes de la Ciudad deMéxico.

Nahuatl is one of the indigenous languages in Mexico that is at risk of falling out of use. The research in the last years have showed that this occurs due to the low amount of Nahuatl speakers and the social stigma and discrimination towards the indigenous peoples, among other factors.The studies of language attitudes are relevant when making attempts to revitalize a language. As Mexico City authorities have considered to implement a revitalization project, we wanted to approach the real situation of Nahuatl in that city. Our purpose was to measure the attitudes of young people towards this language. By using a direct method –a questionnaire- we asked two groups of students if they agreed or disagreed with some items about Nahuatl and its speakers. One group had contact with Nahuatl speakers and but not the other one. We compared the results and they showed that the students who have contact with Nahuatl have more positive attitudes than those who don’t have any contact with it. This study also revealed that the reason why the first group showed positive attitudes was solidarity with the Nahuatl speakers. However, the both groups considered that speaking or learning Nahuatl cannot contribute to raise their status in the Mexican society.

Automatic and objective assessment of alternating tapping performance in Parkinson’s disease

This paper presents the development and evaluation of a method for enabling quantitative and automatic scoring of alternating tapping performance of patients with Parkinson’s disease (PD). Ten healthy elderly subjects and 95 patients in different clinical stages of PD have utilized a touch-pad handheld computer to perform alternate tapping tests in their home environments. First, a neurologist used a web-based system to visually assess impairments in four tapping dimensions (‘speed’, ‘accuracy’, ‘fatigue’ and ‘arrhythmia’) and a global tapping severity (GTS). Second, tapping signals were processed with time series analysis and statistical methods to derive 24 quantitative parameters. Third, principal component analysis was used to reduce the dimensions of these parameters and to obtain scores for the four dimensions. Finally, a logistic regression classifier was trained using a 10-fold stratified cross-validation to map the reduced parameters to the corresponding visually assessed GTS scores. Results showed that the computed scores correlated well to visually assessed scores and were significantly different across Unified Parkinson’s Disease Rating Scale scores of upper limb motor performance. In addition, they had good internal consistency, had good ability to discriminate between healthy elderly and patients in different disease stages, had good sensitivity to treatment interventions and could reflect the natural disease progression over time. In conclusion, the automatic method can be useful to objectively assess the tapping performance of PD patients and can be included in telemedicine tools for remote monitoring of tapping.