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Biomedical subjects

E Zurif

Publications and source records attributed to E Zurif.

30 records · Page 2Linked to original sources
PubMed1985

Grammatical class effects in relation to normal and aphasic sentence processing.

Agrammatic, Broca's aphasic patients, Wernicke's aphasic patients, and neurologically intact control subjects were asked to detect target letters in prose passages and in a scrambled word passage. The targets were embedded, in some instances, in content words (open-class vocabulary items), and in other instances, in function words (closed-class vocabulary items). With respect to the prose passages, both the control subjects and Wernicke's aphasic patients were more apt to notice target letters when they appeared in the open-class items than when in closed-class items; by contrast, the agrammatic Broca's patients showed no vocabulary class detection difference. The Wernicke's patients were not entirely normal, however: Whereas the normal subjects showed a much smaller vocabulary class effect for letter detection in the scrambled condition, the Wernicke's maintained the pattern they had shown in the prose condition. These and other findings obtained on the letter cancellation task are discussed in relation to lexical access mechanisms geared to sentence parsing.

Adult↗
PubMed1975

Critical reading at the sentence level in aphasia.

A sentence-reading test was devised in order to assess the aphasic's ability to detect errors in written discourse. One hundred pairs of sentences, each containing one correct and one erroneous sentence, were presented to the patients, who were required to locate the error in one of the two sentences. So that comprehension in the auditory and visual modalities might be compared, the identical test was administered orally to a subset of the aphasic population. Contrary to expectations, there was no difference in overall scores between patients with anterior and posterior pathology. Anterior patients performed somewhat better on the oral version, posterior patients on the written version of the test. Finally, an examination of errors revealed a regular order of difficulty in sentences which featured contradictions to "real-world" knowlege, irrespective of the locus of brain damage, while the order of difficulty of sentences featuring syntactic deviations differed appreciably, depending on the locus of lesion. An attempt is made to relate these findings to current experimental and clinical knowledge.

Aphasia↗
PubMedDate not supplied

Affective/motivational factors in the recall of prose passages by alcoholic Korsakoff patients.

The present study assessed the role of motivational/affective factors in the recall of short stories by alcoholic Korsakoff patients. On both immediate and delayed recall, the Korsakoff patients remembered proportionately more of stories with a sexual theme than of passages which were neutral or aggressive in content. In contrast to the Korsakoff patients, the emotional theme of the story had no effect upon the recall performance of alcoholic (non-Korsakoff) and normal control subjects. While the two control groups evidenced no forgetting of textual material between immediate and delayed recall, the alcoholic Korsakoff patients showed a rapid and equivalent rate of forgetting of all three story types. These findings suggest that while motivational/affective factors may influence the alcoholic Korsakoff patients' selective attention and immediate recall, they have little or no influence upon the patients' inability to retain verbal information. The importance of this conclusion for encoding theories of amnesia is discussed.

Affect↗
PubMedDate not supplied

Pragmatics in aphasia: crosslinguistic evidence.

Previous research suggests that English Broca's and Wernicke's aphasics retain sensitivity to pragmatic factors governing forms of reference, in particular the ability to choose lexical expressions that convey givenness and newness of information. The present study investigates the generality of this phenomenon across patients and language types. Normal and aphasic speakers of English, German, and Italian described nine picture triplets in which one element varied while the others remained constant. Dependent variables included lexicalization versus ellipsis, pronominalization, and definite and indefinite article use. For a subset of German and Italian patients, data were compared to performance in a biographical interview. Results indicate that (a) the pragmatics of reference are preserved in both Broca's and Wernicke's aphasics, despite syndrome-specific problems in retrieving content words and/or closed-class grammatical elements, and (b) certain language-specific patterns of reference are also preserved, including crosslinguistic differences in subject omission. Differences between picture description and the biographical interview reinforce this conclusion. Evidence for the preservation of pragmatics in aphasis is not surprising in its own right, but evidence for the sparing of language-specific relations among pragmatic, lexical, and morphosyntactic patterns can be used to argue against any strong view of grammatical impairment as a disconnection syndrome and/or a loss of grammatical competence. Instead, these data support theories in which grammatical impairment is viewed as a performance deficit.

Adult↗