Biomedical subjects

L Cipolotti

Publications and source records attributed to L Cipolotti.

56 records · Page 4Linked to original sources

PubMed1988

Acquired stuttering: a motor programming disorder?

Acquired stuttering (AS) can follow unilateral right, left or bilateral hemispheric lesion, and can, but not necessarily, coexist with aphasia. In this paper we experimentally tested motor programming skills in a patient with AS of vascular origin. Motor programming consists in the structuration of the whole sequence of response prior to the onset of the first response element of a sequence of responses. Chronometric studies have shown that the time to initiate a sequence of manual responses is a function of the characteristics of the forthcoming sequence of responses. In our patient, reaction times involving single motor responses performed by right hand were within normal limit. On the contrary, when the task required a sequence of motor responses, there was a consistent difficulty in following the sequence: moreover, in the few correct sequences, reaction time analysis showed a lack of motor programming. It is suggested that AS could be the speech epiphenomenon of a more generalized disturbance of motor programming.

Cognition Disorders↗

PubMedDate not supplied

Towards a unitary account of access dysphasia: a single case study.

We report the case of a patient, H.E.C., with a profound verbal comprehension impairment. His comprehension impairment involved both common names (animal and inanimate items) and proper names. Within the proper name category, his comprehension of country and famous peoples' names was better than his comprehension of common forenames. By using matching to sample techniques, H.E.C.'s impairment was found to be affected by presentation rate and by semantic relatedness, but not by word frequency. An analysis of his responses showed marked inconsistency and serial position effects (i.e. a decrement of performance on subsequent presentations of the same items). H.E.C.'s comprehension deficit was interpreted in terms of an "access" impairment within the word-meaning system. A unitary account of this impairment in terms of a deficit that delays the return, following activation, of the set of representations underlying a word, to a "ready state" is proposed.

Anomia↗