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At least 811 records · Page 45Linked to original sources
PubMed1997

Eye fixations, speech rate and bilingual digit span: numeral reading indexes fluency not word length.

The present study examined whether the reading of language-neutral stimuli, as numerals are, at maximal speed by bilinguals indexes processes related to fluency rather than differences in articulation time between languages. We tested two groups of bilinguals that spoke the same languages (Finnish and Swedish) but whose mother tongues were different and obtained measures of Arabic numeral processing by monitoring eye movements. These measures were contrasted with articulation and numeral reading estimates of word length. The results indicated that Finnish- and Swedish-dominant bilinguals had shorter gaze durations and shorter reading times in their respective dominant languages, whereas both groups articulated digits faster in Swedish than Finnish. The Swedish-dominant group had a larger digit span in Swedish, whereas digit span was marginally greater in Finnish than Swedish for the Finnish-dominant group. The finding that numeral reading was influenced by cognitive loads independent of articulation, thus, moderated the view that bilingual digit span effects are mediated exclusively by variation in word length between languages.

Finland↗
PubMed2006

Effect of semantic naming treatment on crosslinguistic generalization in bilingual aphasia.

PURPOSE: The effect of semantic naming treatment on crosslinguistic generalization was investigated in 3 participants with English-Spanish bilingual aphasia. METHOD: A single-subject experimental designed was used. Participants received semantic treatment to improve naming of English or Spanish items, while generalization was tested to untrained semantically related items in the trained language and translations of the trained and untrained items in the untrained language. RESULTS: Results demonstrated a within- and across-languages effect on generalization related to premorbid language proficiencies. Participant 1 (P1; equal premorbid proficiency across languages) showed within-language generalization in the trained language (Spanish) as well as crosslinguistic generalization to the untrained language (English). Participant 2 (P2) and Participant (P3) were more proficient premorbidly in English. With treatment in English, P2 showed within-language generalization to semantically related items, but no crosslinguistic generalization. With treatment in Spanish, both P2 and P3 exhibited no within-language generalization, but crosslinguistic generalization to English (dominant language) occurred. Error analyses indicated an evolution of errors as a consequence of treatment. CONCLUSIONS: These results are preliminary because all participants were not treated in both languages. However, the results suggest that training the less dominant language may be more beneficial in facilitating crosslinguistic generalization than training the more proficient language in an unbalanced bilingual individual.

Aphasia↗
PubMed2006

Cognitive performance predicts treatment decisional abilities in mild to moderate dementia.

OBJECTIVE: To examine the contribution of neuropsychological test performance to treatment decision-making capacity in community volunteers with mild to moderate dementia. METHODS: The authors recruited volunteers (44 men, 44 women) with mild to moderate dementia from the community. Subjects completed a battery of 11 neuropsychological tests that assessed auditory and visual attention, logical memory, language, and executive function. To measure decision making capacity, the authors administered the Capacity to Consent to Treatment Interview, the Hopemont Capacity Assessment Interview, and the MacCarthur Competence Assessment Tool--Treatment. Each of these instruments individually scores four decisional abilities serving capacity: understanding, appreciation, reasoning, and expression of choice. The authors used principal components analysis to generate component scores for each ability across instruments, and to extract principal components for neuropsychological performance. RESULTS: Multiple linear regression analyses demonstrated that neuropsychological performance significantly predicted all four abilities. Specifically, it predicted 77.8% of the common variance for understanding, 39.4% for reasoning, 24.6% for appreciation, and 10.2% for expression of choice. Except for reasoning and appreciation, neuropsychological predictor (beta) profiles were unique for each ability. CONCLUSIONS: Neuropsychological performance substantially and differentially predicted capacity for treatment decisions in individuals with mild to moderate dementia. Relationships between elemental cognitive function and decisional capacity may differ in individuals whose decisional capacity is impaired by other disorders, such as mental illness.

Aged↗
PubMed2006

Errors in nonword repetition: bridging short- and long-term memory.

According to the working memory model, the phonological loop is the component of working memory specialized in processing and manipulating limited amounts of speech-based information. The Children's Test of Nonword Repetition (CNRep) is a suitable measure of phonological short-term memory for English-speaking children, which was validated by the Brazilian Children's Test of Pseudoword Repetition (BCPR) as a Portuguese-language version. The objectives of the present study were: i) to investigate developmental aspects of the phonological memory processing by error analysis in the nonword repetition task, and ii) to examine phoneme (substitution, omission and addition) and order (migration) errors made in the BCPR by 180 normal Brazilian children of both sexes aged 4-10, from preschool to 4th grade. The dominant error was substitution [F(3,525) = 180.47; P < 0.0001]. The performance was age-related [F(4,175) = 14.53; P < 0.0001]. The length effect, i.e., more errors in long than in short items, was observed [F(3,519) = 108.36; P < 0.0001]. In 5-syllable pseudowords, errors occurred mainly in the middle of the stimuli, before the syllabic stress [F(4,16) = 6.03; P = 0.003]; substitutions appeared more at the end of the stimuli, after the stress [F(12,48) = 2.27; P = 0.02]. In conclusion, the BCPR error analysis supports the idea that phonological loop capacity is relatively constant during development, although school learning increases the efficiency of this system. Moreover, there are indications that long-term memory contributes to holding memory trace. The findings were discussed in terms of distinctiveness, clustering and redintegration hypotheses.

Analysis of Variance↗
PubMed1998

Primary progressive semantic aphasia: a case study.

A longitudinal case study of a patient with a progressive loss of meaning of objects with preserved phonology and syntax is presented. Repeated measures of language, praxis, visual cognition, and semantic processing were carried out. The patient still has preserved conversational speech, social skills, and orientation in her 8th year of her illness, but shows severe anomia and comprehension deficit in all modalities of stimulus presentation. In addition to standardized tests of language, cognition, and memory, specific experiments of categorization, modalities of word access, item consistency, category specificity, and definition of words were carried out. Results indicate a frequency dependent loss of meaning that was consistent in all modalities and throughout all object categories. However, the relative preservation of visual categorization of all categories tested and the language based categorization of animals suggested some fractionation of semantic memory. Relative preservation of autobiographical and personal memories versus semantic memory was a striking observation. Evidence for selective impairment of central semantic processing was obtained from experiments indicating item consistency of loss and the lack of semantic cuing. Neuroimaging evidence of left temporal lobe atrophy and the classical picture is compatible with similar cases published under the term semantic dementia or "transcortical sensory aphasia with visual agnosia" and suggest the diagnosis of Pick's disease.

Anomia↗
PubMed2004

Validation of a Dutch language screening instrument for 5-year-old preterm infants.

AIM: The validation of the Dutch Taal Screenings Test (TST), a language-screening test, which is included in a follow-up instrument developed to enable paediatricians to assess 5-y-old preterm infants for their motor, cognitive and speech and language development. METHODS: The speech and language development of 145 5-y-old infants born before 32 wk of gestation and/or with a birth weight of less than 1500 g was assessed by a paediatrician using the TST and by a speech therapist using standardized language tests. RESULTS: All correlations between the instruments were significant. Using the original cut-off point of the TST for abnormal speech and language development (18 points), the paediatrician will only identify 62% of the children who need speech therapy. For this group of children, a cut-off point of 17 is more effective. The positive predictive value of the TST improved from 77% to 82% by using a parent and school questionnaire to evaluate in a more subjective way the speech and language development. CONCLUSION: Using the TST, paediatricians will be able to identify speech or language problems in 5-y-old preterm infants.

Child, Preschool↗
PubMed1978

Testing for a specific syntactic structure.

Nine language delayed children who had failed the "is interrogative" test item on the Programmed Conditioning for Language Test served as subjects. A comparison was made of subjects' syntactic performance on six language tasks designed by the investigators to elicit the "is interrogative" structure. These tasks ranged along an imitative-to-spontaneous continuum demonstrating varying degrees of communicative intention, presence or absence of contextual referents, and varying levels of task structure. Analyses indicated all nine subjects produced complete grammatical "is interrogative" utterances on one or more of the language tasks. The most effective tasks for eliciting the specific structure were those that required communicative intention, included specific contextual referents, and provided a relatively structured situation. The direct imitative task was less effective, although it elicited more correct productions than the spontaneous language sampling task. However, the relative eliciting potential of each task was not the same for each child. Theoretical and clinical implications of these findings are discussed.

Child↗
PubMed1998

Language-impaired preschoolers: a follow-up into adolescence.

This paper reports a longitudinal follow-up of 71 adolescents with a preschool history of speech-language impairment, originally studied by Bishop and Edmundson (1987). These children had been subdivided at 4 years into those with nonverbal IQ 2 SD below the mean (General Delay group), and those with normal nonverbal intelligence (SLI group). At age 5;6 the SLI group was subdivided into those whose language problems had resolved, and those with persistent SLI. The General Delay group was also followed up. At age 15-16 years, these children were compared with age-matched normal-language controls on a battery of tests of spoken language and literacy skills. Children whose language problems had resolved did not differ from controls on tests of vocabulary and language comprehension skills. However, they performed significantly less well on tests of phonological processing and literacy skill. Children who still had significant language difficulties at 5;6 had significant impairments in all aspects of spoken and written language functioning, as did children classified as having a general delay. These children fell further and further behind their peer group in vocabulary growth over time.

Achievement↗
PubMed2001

Sign language in childhood epileptic aphasia (Landau-Kleffner syndrome).

Acquired epileptic aphasia (AEA, or Landau-Kleffner syndrome) is a unique condition in which children can lose oral language (OL) comprehension and expression for a prolonged period. These children can benefit from visual forms of language, mainly sign language (SL), but the quality of SL has never been analyzed. The case is reported here of a boy with AEA who lost speech comprehension and expression from 3 years 6 months to 7 years and was educated in SL from the age of 6 years. His SL was evaluated at the age of 13 years and 6 months and compared with a control child with congenital sensorineural deafness. It was found that: (1) our patient achieved the same proficiency in SL as the control child with deafness; (2) SL learning did not compete with, but perhaps even hastened, the recovery of OL. Intact ability to learn a new linguistic code such as SL suggests that higher-order language areas were preserved and received input from a separate visual route, as shown by neuropsychological and functional imaging research in deaf and hearing signers.

Adolescent↗
PubMed1995

Wada testing.

Explore the source record for details and available documents.

Dominance, Cerebral↗
PubMed1998

Alzheimer's disease: patterns of cognitive impairment at different levels of disease severity.

The aim of this study was to establish the presence and the consistency of different cognitive profiles in AD patients taking into consideration the severity of mental impairment. Therefore we stratified 679 neuropsychological observations on 119 probable AD patients followed longitudinally on the basis of overall degree of cognitive impairment. To compare performance on tests with different score ranges we transformed raw test scores into coefficients; to summarize our results in terms of language versus visuo-spatial performance we computed indices of prevalent impairment of performance (IPIP) by subtracting the coefficients for constructional praxis from coefficients for language-related tests. Finally, we converted these indices into z-scores for each level of mental decline to identify patients with generalized, language (L) or visuo-spatial (V) prevalent impairment. The latter, 30% of the sample, can be detected at all stages of dementia. There was a higher percentage of males among language impaired patients (P<0.05). Approximately half of patients with L/V prevalent impairment continued to show such a focality when followed longitudinally. The groups did not differ in the annual rate of cognitive decline.

Age of Onset↗
PubMed1999

The influence of handedness on the clinical presentation and neuropsychology of Alzheimer disease.

BACKGROUND: Research on the influence of handedness on the clinical presentation and neuropsychology of Alzheimer disease (AD) is scarce. OBJECTIVE: To compare clinical presentation and neuropsychological test performance of right- and left-handed patients with AD. DESIGN: We hypothesized that left-handedness would be associated with younger onset, more rapid progression, and possibly cognitive hemispheric asymmetry. After determining handedness with the Edinburgh Inventory for Handedness for 922 patients with AD, 18 left-handed patients were compared with 18 right-handed patients matched individually on Mini-Mental State Examination scores, education, and age. We compared clinical characteristics (eg, age of onset), estimated rate of initial cognitive decline, language and visuospatial test performances, and patterns of cognitive and motor asymmetries for the 2 groups. SETTING: Alzheimer's Disease Research Center at Baylor College of Medicine, Houston, Tex. MAIN OUTCOME MEASURES: Results of the Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale-Revised verbal and performance IQ tests, the Western Aphasia Battery sequential commands subtest, the Boston Naming Test, the Halstead-Reitan Finger-Tapping Test, and the calculated Rate of Initial Progression. RESULTS: We found that left-handed patients had younger ages of onset but unexpectedly lower estimated rates of initial cognitive decline, and their results on language tests did not differ from those of right-handed patients. Regarding asymmetry, left-handed patients were more likely than right-handers to obtain lower verbal IQ than performance IQ scores and to exhibit faster finger-tapping speeds with their nondominant hand, but group differences did not attain statistical significance. There were disproportionately few left-handed patients with AD compared with population norms. CONCLUSIONS: Left-handed patients with AD do not differ from right-handed patients in the severity or pattern of neuropsychological deficits. Left-handedness or some factor associated with it may contribute to the early appearance of cognitive deficits during the development of Alzheimer disease, but may temper the subsequent rate of progression of deficits.

Aged↗
PubMed2002

Breaking the barrier? Children fail to translate their preverbal memories into language.

We examined children's ability to translate their preverbal memories into language following a period of substantial language development. Children participated in a unique event, and their memory was assessed 6 months or 1 year later. At the time of the event and at the time of the test, their language skills were also assessed. Children of all ages exhibited evidence of verbal and nonverbal memory. Their language skills also improved over the delay. By the time of the test, children of all ages had acquired most of the vocabulary necessary to describe the target event. Despite this, they did not translate preverbal aspects of their memory into language during the test. In no instance did a child verbally report information about the event that was not part of his or her productive vocabulary at the time of encoding. We conclude that language development plays a pivotal role in childhood amnesia.

Analysis of Variance↗
PubMedDate not supplied

Implementations of clinical functional magnetic resonance imaging using character-based paradigms for the prediction of Chinese language dominance.

PURPOSE: Recently, functional MRI (fMRI) using word generation (WG) tasks has been shown to be effective for mapping the Chinese language-related brain areas. In clinical applications, however, patients' performance cannot be easily monitored during WG tasks. In this study, we evaluated the feasibility of a word choice (WC) paradigm in the clinical setting and compared the results with those from WG tasks. METHOD: Intrasubject comparisons of fMRI with both WG and WC paradigms were performed on six normal human subjects and two tumor patients. Subject responses in the WC paradigm, based on semantic judgments, were recorded. Activation strength, extent, and laterality were evaluated and compared. RESULTS: Our results showed that fMRI with the WC paradigm evoked weaker neuronal activation than that with the WG paradigm in Chinese language-related brain areas. It was sufficient to reveal language laterality for clinical use, however. In addition, it resulted in less nonlanguage-specific brain activation. CONCLUSION: Results from the patient data demonstrated strong evidence for the necessity of incorporating response monitoring during fMRI studies, which suggested that fMRI with the WC paradigm is more appropriate to be implemented for the prediction of Chinese language dominance in clinical environments.

Adult↗