Background: Dementia is a syndrome that affects multiple cognitive domains and causes functional decline. People with dementia (PwD) often experience pain, still could not report the symptom due to the decline in cognition that leads to communication problems. Therefore, pain in PwD is often underrecognized and undertreated. Many behavioral observation tools have been developed to help identify pain in PwD; the Pain Assessment in Advanced Dementia (PAINAD) scale is one of the recommended tools to evaluate pain in PwD. The PAINAD has been translated into many languages, yet not translated into Thai language. Since there is no pain assessment tool for PwD in Thailand.

Objective: This study aimed to assess the reliability"and validity of the PAINAD in Thai version (PAINAD-Th) for measuring pain in people with"PwD

Materials and Methods: The cross-cultural translation including forward translation and back-translation of PAINAD-Th were performed, then the content validity was assessed by the expert committee. Enrolled participants were inpatients aged 60 years or over, and had dementia with Functional Assessment Staging Test (FAST) of at least 6 which represented moderately severe stage. A research assistant recorded 5-minute videos of the participants, the first video was during the activity that could provoke the pain and the second video was at rest. Two trained nurses independently rated the pain of the participants by observing the videos using the PAINAD-Th to examine the inter-rater reliability and the concurrent validity of the test against the reference standard which was the numeric rating scale (NRS) rated by the expert committee. The same rating process was reproduced one week apart to explore the test-retest reliability.

Results: The content validity index of the PAINAD-Th was 1.00 and 0.93 (forward and back-translation, respectively)."The inter -rater and test-retest reliability showed an excellent intra-class correlation coefficient of"0.92 and 0.96, respectively. The concurrent validity was significantly correlated with the reference standard with an excellent intra-class correlation coefficient of"0.95.

Conclusions: The PAINAD-Th is a promising tool for pain evaluation in PwD as it provides an excellent concurrent validity against the reference standard. Also, it has excellent content validity, inter-rater, and test-retest reliability.

This paper provides evidence for a kind of nominal licensing (Vergnaud licensing) in a number of morphologically caseless languages. Recent work on Bantu languages has suggested that abstract Case or nominal licensing should be parameterised (Diercks 2012, Van der Wal 2015a). With this is mind, we critically discuss the status of Vergnaud licensing in six languages lacking morphological case. While Luganda appears to systematically lack a Vergnaud licensing requirement, Makhuwa more consistently displays evidence in favour of it, as do all of the analytic languages that we survey (Mandarin, Yoruba, Jamaican Creole and Thai). We conclude that, while it seems increasingly problematic to characterise nominal licensing in terms of uninterpretable/abstract Case features, we nonetheless need to retain a (possibly universal) notion of nominal licensing, the explanation for which remains opaque.

In this article, we argue that insights concerning the word-based nature of morphology, especially the hypothesis that periphrastic expressions are cross-linguistically common exponents of lexical relations, permit a novel lexical constructional analysis of periphrastic predicates that preserves the restriction of morphosyntactic mapping operations, such as passive, to the lexicon. We do this in the context of the periphrastic Thai thuuk passive, justifying in detail the monoclausal status of the construction, its flat phrase structure, the semantics of affectedness associated with it, and its paradigmatic opposition with other passive constructions in the language. Building on the proposal of Bonami & Webelhuth (2013) and Bonami (2015) that a periphrase relies on a form of the main verb that selects collocationally for an auxiliary element, we develop an analysis of Thai periphrastic passives in which the surface syntax of these predicates is mediated by appropriate lexical representations. Crucially, the rearrangement of arguments in the passive is done lexically, via lexical rule, rather than in the syntax. The resulting analysis is consistent with the classical tradition of Word and Paradigm morphology, which posits periphrastic expression as one of several encoding strategies for the realization of morphosyntactic information within words.

The effect of referent salience on second language (L2) article production in real time was explored. Thai (–articles) and French (+articles) learners of English described dynamic events involving two referents, one visually cued to be more salient at the point of utterance formulation. Definiteness marking was made communicatively redundant with all referents. Thai groups omitted articles more with more than with less salient referents. The results corroborate previous offline data suggestive of the salience effect for L2 users from article-less L1 backgrounds, but point against the view that this is due to the redundancy of definiteness marking. The results seem better explained by persistent grammatical competition between L1 and L2 structures, consistent with the view that language systems within a bilingual mind cannot be kept fully apart.

Background: Activities of daily living (ADL) vary across cultures, and measure of ADL needs to be specific to the population under study. We developed an ADL measure for Thai elderly with dementia and investigated the reliability and validity of this instrument. Materials and Methods: Item construction was accomplished with a panel of neurologists and a rehabilitation medicine physician. One hundred eighty-one subjects were interviewed using the Thai ADL measure. Of this sample, one hundred fifty-nine had dementia according to the Diagnosic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, fourth edition criteria. These data were analyzed for internal consistency; concurrent validity was determined by comparison with the Barthel Index, Functional Assessment Questionnaire (FAQ), Thai Mental State Exam (TMSE), and Clinical Dementia Rating (CDR) scale; and discriminant validity was determined by comparison with the Neuropsychiatric Inventory (NPI). Thirty subjects were tested to determine interrater and test-retest reliability. Results: Thai ADL measure was composed of six basic ADL and seven instrumental ADL. It had high correlation with TMSE scores (r = −.69), CDR scores (r = .81), Barthel Index scores (r = −.08), and FAQ scores (r = .88), and moderate correlation with NPI scores (r = .46). The instrument had high test-retest reliability (intraclass correlation coefficient [ICC] = .92, .89) and high interrater reliability (ICC = .96, .93). Conclusion: The Thai ADL scale is easy to use and it has high reliability. It had high concurrent validity with previously published ADL scales. The methodology used to develop the Thai ADL scale can provide a model for creating culturally competent ADL scales.

Upon engaging in a speech event, participants mutually try to create the most appropriate speech register for that occasion. Special formality-marking particles, pronominals, names, kin terms, titles, and pragmatic particles are some linguistic signs that are available for Thai speakers for this purpose. Through varied frequencies and combinations of different signs, various shades of speech register are created. The type and quality of speech register are largely predictable when the participants are familiar with the speech situation because of their past interactional history, or with the protocol required for a particular type of interaction. However, when the participants are thrown into an unfamiliar situation with strangers, they must find a middle ground in their register and adjust their speech behavior to achieve a balanced speech interaction. In this essay, we analyze four different conversations, both quantitatively and qualitatively, in order to observe how speech register is created in different types of interaction, thereby going beyond simple taxonomic description of sociolinguistic signs.