Biomedical subjects

S Curtiss

Publications and source records attributed to S Curtiss.

24 records · Page 2Linked to original sources

PubMed1989

Familial aggregation in specific language impairment.

Self-report data from the families of children participating in the San Diego Longitudinal Study of specific developmental language impairment were used to assess familial aggregation in the disorder. Families of impaired children reported higher rates of affected first-degree relatives than did families of matched controls. Significantly higher incidence of maternal and paternal childhood language and/or learning disabilities, as well as sibling disability rates, were reported. The extent to which familial aggregation reflects genetic or environmental influences in specific language disorders remains to be determined.

Adult↗

PubMed1987

Syntactic preservation in Alzheimer's disease.

Language ability of 20 patients with probable Alzheimer's disease (AD) was evaluated. Analysis of spontaneous speech revealed a normal range and frequency of syntactic constructions but poor lexical use. A writing task showed a similar divergence, with the ability to use syntactic cues significantly more intact than the ability to use semantic cues. The results are taken to indicate that syntactic ability is selectively preserved in AD. These findings are consistent with a modular theory of grammar and of mental functions more generally. A tentative explanation of these phenomena is proposed in which the overlearned and automatic nature of syntactic ability helps account for its resilience to cognitive dissolution and cortical degeneration.

Aged↗

PubMed1984

The characterization of chromosome breaks in Drosophila melanogaster. I. Mass isolation of deficiencies which have an end point in the 14A-15A region.

A total of 2.7 X 10(6) chromosomes have been screened for deficiencies that extend into some portion of the 14A-15A segment of the X-chromosome. Mutants have been identified on the basis of their paralysis at high temperature (the para ts phenotype) in a stock which contains a para ts allele on the X-chromosome and a para+ allele on the Dp(1;4)r+f+ chromosome. Several hundred mutants have been genetically characterized and a large percentage are deficiencies. Cytological characterization of a sub-set suggests that breakpoints are distributed throughout the 14B-15A region, but in a non-random fashion.

Animals↗

PubMed1981

Dissociations between language and cognition: cases and implications.

An important issue for the cognitive sciences is whether grammar is to any nontrivial extent an autonomous cognitive system. Current cognitive hypotheses of language acquisition would argue against an autonomous linguistic system and would support the notion that language emerges from more general cognitive knowledge and is throughout its development fundamentally tied to a nonlinguistic cognitive base. This paper explores this issue and presents data from case studies of children showing clear dissociations between language and nonlanguage cognitive abilities. The implications of such data are discussed. The major implications appear to be that lexical and relational semantic abilities are deeply linked to broader conceptual development but morphological and syntactic abilities are not. The development of a normal linguistic system, however, one in which grammar is systematically related to meaning, requires concurrent and concomitant linguistic and nonlingustic cognitive development.

Adolescent↗

PubMed1979

Pragmatic and semantic development in young children with impaired hearing.

The purpose of the study was to characterize the early pragmatic-semantic communicative development of young hearing-impaired children learning spoken English as a first language. Twelve children with impaired hearing, ranging in age from 22 months to 60 months, were videotaped. Approximately 13 hours of videotaped data from four different communicative settings were analyzed. The pragmatic and semantic categories used by these children varied across age groups. Results are discussed with regard to age, expressive modality, mean length of utterance (MLU), and hearing loss. There was much variation among these parameters in communicative development across children.

Age Factors↗

PubMedDate not supplied

Language after hemispherectomy.

We studied the spoken language of 49 children who had undergone hemispherectomy as part of the UCLA Pediatric Epilepsy Surgery Research Program and analyzed, among a number of clinical factors, the relation between acquired vs developmental pathology and spoken language outcomes. In this paper we will briefly review the results of our study and attempt to explain (1) why "the early" is not always better, (2) why so many right hemispherectomies fail to develop language, and (3) why some left hemispherectomized children develop remarkably good language despite removal of the "language" hemisphere. This account will rest on the proposed model of brain maturation and progressive lateralization.

Brain↗