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E Grober

Publications and source records attributed to E Grober.

24 records · Page 2Linked to original sources
PubMed1985

Impaired ranking of semantic attributes in dementia.

The present work explored the loss of semantic attributes that is said to occur in dementia. In the first two experiments, subjects had to select attributes that went with concepts like airplane and church. The finding that demented subjects maintained high levels of accuracy when selecting attributes suggested that the semantic content of their concepts was relatively well preserved. The organization of the content was explored in a third experiment by having subjects order attributes according to their relative importance in defining concepts. While demented subjects performed better than chance, they did not rank attributes as well as healthy aged subjects, suggesting a disruption in organization whereby the importance of central attributes is reduced. The hypothesized disruption in organization is viewed in relation to the learning and memory deficit that is the hallmark of the dementias.

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PubMed1984

Nonlinguistic memory in aphasia.

Two experiments were carried out to assess nonlinguistic memory in aphasia. In the first experiment, subjects had to make judgments about the frequency with which words in a study list were repeated, and, in the second, they had to recall the spatial location in which a pictured object had been presented originally. Aphasics were very accurate in both tasks and did not differ from normal controls. It is suggested that a comprehensive account of memory in aphasia requires that we look beyond their omnipresent language deficit to more general processing factors such as attentional capacity.

Adult↗
PubMed1984

The breakdown of word meanings in aphasia.

The present study evaluates an explanation of agrammatism that involves the conceptual distinction between nouns and predicative terms. It was argued that the degraded production of verbs relative to nouns that is characteristic of agrammatic speech reflects a selective disruption in the mental representation of predicative concepts. The data from a sorting task were consistent with a set of experimental predictions derived from this explanation and suggest that a satisfactory explanation of agrammatism should involve semantic variables in addition to syntactic ones.

Adult↗
PubMed1983

Age, sex, and aphasia type. Evidence for a regional cerebral growth process underlying lateralization.

The incidence of motor and sensory, (nonfluent and fluent) aphasia was studied in 389 patients with a left-sided vascular lesion. The mean age of patients with motor aphasia was 45.3 years, and the mean age of patients with sensory aphasia was 56.5 years. The age difference was also found in a separate analysis of 50 cases of traumatic aphasia. Nonfluent aphasias predominate in early life in both males and females, but are more common in females in the third decade. The relationship between aphasia type and age, and sex, is explained by a process of regional specification of the left language areas that proceeds more slowly in females than males. It is hypothesized that this process reflects the effects of the sex hormones on protein synthesis and brain growth.

Adult↗
PubMedDate not supplied

Memory and mental status correlates of modified Braak staging.

We assessed the relationships of performance on memory and mental status tests and neuropathologic stage of Alzheimer's disease as defined by Braak and Braak in 29 patients from a prospective clinicopathologic series. We predicted that memory changes would occur at an earlier Braak stage than mental status changes. Staging was accomplished by matching the topographic distribution of neurofibrillary lesions detected with tau immunocytochemistry to the best fitting diagram published by Braak and Braak. Higher Braak stages were associated with decrements in performance on both memory and mental status tests. As predicted, memory performance declined from stages II to III and mental status did not decline until stages III to IV. The association between memory and Braak stage was unchanged after adjusting for neocortical senile plaques, whereas adjustments for Braak stage eliminated the association between cognitive functioning and amyloid burden. We conclude that Braak staging provides a useful summary of Alzheimer's disease neuropathology, which is associated with both memory and mental status performance.

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