ASHA membership trends: a brief look over our shoulder.
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Biomedical subjects
Publications and source records attributed to C M Shewan.
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Aphasics' and spouses' perceptions of the presence and degree of bothersomeness of communication-related problems and whether enrollment in a language treatment program affected these perceptions were examined. Aphasic-spouse perceptions were more concordant in the treated group; aphasic patients in the untreated group reported their problems did not bother them. Type and severity of aphasia were not related either to the reported frequency or to the degree of bothersomeness of problems. Interview data from spouses revealed that the speech-language pathologists' role extended beyond solely providing information about language behavior.
Language recovery in aphasic patients who received one of three types of speech and language treatment was compared with that in aphasic patients who received no treatment. One hundred aphasic patients were followed from 2 to 4 weeks postonset for 1 year or until recovery, using a standardized test battery administered at systematic intervals. Both treatment methods provided by trained speech-language pathologists were efficacious, while the method provided by trained nonprofessionals approached statistical significance. Small group size prevented resolution of the question of whether one type of treatment was superior to another.
We studied the functional and anatomical relationship between aphasia and apraxia in 177 patients with CT evidence of left hemisphere stroke. In six severe aphasics, praxis was spared; these cases were analyzed in detail. One patient had a small temporal lesion with severe Wernicke's aphasia. Large frontoparietal lesions were found in the others. The sparing of praxis suggested bilateral representation of visuokinesthetic motor patterns, and functionally active right parietofrontal connections. Some of these patients had uncommon patterns of skull asymmetries that may have been related to bilateral distribution of function.
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The reliability and validity characteristics of the Western Aphasia Battery (WAB) are described. High internal consistency measures and high test-retest reliability argue for stability of the test both because its parts contribute to the composite index and because of its temporal reliability. Inter- and intrajudge reliability are both very high, suggesting consistent scoring within and between scorers. The WAB satisfies face- and content-validity criteria. Results from the WAB and the Neurosensory Center Comprehensive Examination for Aphasia (NCCEA) highly correlate, indicating good construct validity. WAB AQ scores and Raven's Coloured Progressive Matrices scores significantly correlate, suggesting that the language portions of the WAB are not totally independent from nonverbal functioning. WAB AQ scores reliably differentiate between aphasic and control groups, with only a small overlap for high functioning anomic aphasic subjects.
A training program was designed to facilitate sentence formulation in a Broca's aphasic patient. Two training methods were compared and generalization to untrained stimuli was measured. Training, using either method, resulted in increased production of correct linguistic constituents and appropriate lexical items. Gains tended to occur on the trained items and generalization to untrained items was limited.
The error patterns of normal and aphasic adults on a sentence comprehension test were studied. For position of error, both normals and the three aphasic groups performed consistently with the expected error distribution. Neither sentence half was experienced as more difficult to process. All groups, both aphasic and normal, demonstrated error patterns for grammatical class and for surface structure linguistic constituent which were consistent with the expected error distributions. Exceptions were noted for the normals on the verb class and for the Wernicke's aphasics on the NP and VP linguistic constituents. Rank orderings of error proportions were similar across groups for both grammatical form class and linguistic constituent. The general findings lend support to the notion that, for auditory comprehension of sentences, aphasic patients differ quantitatively from normal adult speakers, but behave qualitatively similar to them.
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