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Biomedical subjects

D Caplan

Publications and source records attributed to D Caplan.

At least 73 records · Page 4Linked to original sources
PubMed1988

Agrammatism in sentence production without comprehension deficits: reduced availability of syntactic structures and/or of grammatical morphemes? A case study.

A French-speaking patient with Broca's aphasia--following a left-hemisphere lesion involving the sylvian region but sparing Broca's area--is presented. Like G. Miceli, A. Mazzuchi, L. Menn, and H. Goodglass's (1983, Brain and Language, 19, 65-97) case 2, this patient produces agrammatic speech in the absence of any comprehension deficit. Unlike Miceli's patient, though, agrammatic speech can be observed in all sentence production tasks (from spontaneous speech to repetition, oral reading, and writing) whereas production of individual words--be they open class or closed class--is almost always intact. On the basis of extensive (psycho)linguistic testing, it is argued that this patient's deficit is not central and not crucially syntactic (at least) at the level of knowledge but seems to disrupt specifically those (automatic?) processes responsible for both retrieval and production of free-standing grammatical morphemes whenever they have to be inserted into phrases and sentences.

Aphasia↗
PubMed1987

Salicylate and mitochondrial monoamine oxidase function in Reye's syndrome.

The main objective of this investigation was to study the effect of salicylate on platelet mitochondrial monoamine oxidase (MAO) activity isolated from blood of two patients with Reye's syndrome. Comparative studies were made with hospitalized children without Reye's syndrome (n = 27) and healthy children (n = 19) serving as controls. Platelet MAO was measured by a radioenzymatic technique with [14C]tyramine as a substrate. The results of this study showed that salicylate (1.0 mM) caused an appreciable inhibition of the platelet MAO activity of patients with Reye's syndrome at the onset of the illness. This was demonstrated by a greater than 50% reduction in enzyme maximum velocity (Vmax) value. The salicylate MAO-inhibitory effect was maintained throughout the duration of the illness. Salicylate had only a minimal MAO-inhibitory effect on platelets isolated from blood of recovered Reye's syndrome patients, healthy controls, and non-Reye's hospitalized children, and no apparent effect on enzyme Vmax values. These preliminary findings suggest that salicylate-induced mitochondrial injury may affect MAO function in children with Reye's syndrome.

Adolescent↗
PubMed1987

Discrimination of normal and aphasic subjects on a test of syntactic comprehension.

An Anglophone population consisting of 37 aphasic patients and 23 normal control subjects, and a Francophone population consisting of 49 aphasic patients and 23 control subjects were given a task requiring the comprehension of syntactic structures for the correct assignment of thematic roles to nouns. Discriminant analysis was used to classify subjects into aphasic and normal groups according to their scores on the task. In both populations--Anglophone and Francophone--most of the subjects were classified into their actual groups except for an occasional normal subject classified with the aphasic group and a small number of aphasics classified as normal. A cut-off score below which performance is clearly abnormal and above which performance is clearly normal can be set for this test. Patients who performed normally on this test had lesions affecting any single lobe within the dominant perisylvian cortex and mostly consisted of patients with dysarthria, apraxia of speech, and 'mixed' aphasia types. The results have implications for the incidence of aphasic disturbances of syntactic comprehension and for the nature of language representation in the brain.

Aphasia↗
PubMed1986

The significance of supraclavicular fossa node recurrence after radical mastectomy.

The clinical and pathologic features of 35 patients who had ipsilateral supraclavicular node (SCF) recurrence after radical mastectomy were reviewed. These were compared with the features of 70 patients who had a local skin recurrence after radical mastectomy, 48 of whom had a single nodule and 22 of whom had multiple skin nodules. There were no significant differences between age at diagnosis, disease-free interval, menstrual status, tumor type and grade, and extent and location of axillary node metastases in the three groups. Survival of the SCF group was intermediate between those of the single-nodule and multiple-nodule groups. SCF recurrence is an almost invariable signal of micrometastatic disease; thus, such patients are ideal candidates for trials of adjuvant therapy.

Actuarial Analysis↗
PubMed1986

Assignment of thematic roles to nouns in sentence comprehension by an agrammatic patient.

We present the results of a study of sentence comprehension in an agrammatic patient. The patient showed striking regularities in interpreting a wide variety of sentence structures. We analyze her performance as the result of attempting to interpret a simplified syntactic structure, consisting of a linear sequence of lexical categories, according to a number of simple interpretive strategies.

Adult↗
PubMed1983

A note on the "word-order problem" in agrammatism.

This brief note has two parts. First, it presents an analysis of the ability of English agrammatic patients to assign the thematic roles of agent, instrument, theme, and locative to noun phrases in active and passive sentences and prepositional phrases. Data regarding this ability have been presented by Schwartz, Saffran, and Marin (Brain and Language, 10, 149-262 (1980) regarding comprehension, and by Saffran, Schwartz, and Marin (Brain and Language, 10, 263-280 (1980) regarding production. These authors claim their data show that English agrammatic aphasics do not map "word order" onto thematic information. However, a very simple set of principles accounts for all their results, including results which are discrepant in their treatment, but requires that English agrammatics assign thematic roles to NPs in part by virtue of the position of an NP in a sentence or a phrase. In the second part of this note, several issues raised by this re-analysis are briefly discussed.

Humans↗