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PubMedDate not supplied

Foreign language proficiency of at-risk and not-at-risk learners over 2 years of foreign language instruction: a follow-up study.

In this follow-up study, students at risk for problems with learning a foreign language who were taught using a multisensory, structured language approach to Spanish made significant gains over 2 years on three native language phonological/orthographic measures and a foreign language aptitude test. Despite gains, at-risk students did not "catch up" with not-at-risk students on these measures. Qualitative between-group differences were noted on foreign language proficiency measures.

Adolescent↗
PubMed1987

Rapid assessment of mental status in the infant and young child.

This article reviews some of the tests for determining mental status in the infant and child. This assessment, in the setting of acute insult, is considerably more difficult than it is in the adult, since language skills and performance expectations differ in this age group.

Child, Preschool↗
PubMed2006

Eligibility criteria for language impairment: is the low end of normal always appropriate?

PURPOSE: The assumption that children with language impairment will receive low scores on standardized tests, and therefore that low scores will accurately identify these children, is examined through a review of data in the manuals of tests that are intended for use in identifying such children. METHOD: Data from 43 commercially available tests of child language were compiled to identify whether evidence exists to support their use in identifying language impairment in children. RESULTS: A review of data concerning the performance of children with impaired language failed to support the assumption that these children will routinely score at the low end of a test's normative distribution. A majority of tests reported that such children scored above 1.5 SD below the mean, and scores were within 1 SD of the mean for more than a quarter (27%) of the tests. The primary evidence needed to support the purpose of identification, test sensitivity and specificity, was available for 9 of the 43 tests, and acceptable accuracy (80% or better) was reported for 5 of these tests. IMPLICATIONS: Specific data supporting the application of "low score" criteria for the identification of language impairment is not supported by the majority of current commercially available tests. However, alternate sources of data (sensitivity and specificity rates) that support accurate identification are available for a subset of the available tests.

Age Factors↗
PubMed2004

Testing a social psychological model of strategy use with students of english as a foreign language.

This replication study tested MacIntyre's Social Psychological Model of Strategy Use. Participants were 137 first-year college students (100 men and 37 women), all in their late teens or early 20s, learning English as a foreign language in a university in Taiwan. McIntyre specified three conditions for use of language-learning strategies in his model: awareness of the strategy, having a reason to use it, and not having a reason not to use it. Stepwise multiple regression analyses of data measured by Oxford's 50-item Strategy Inventory for Language Learning partially support this model because only Knowledge about the Strategy (representing the first condition) and Difficulty about Using It (representing the third condition) made significant independent contributions to the prediction of use of most of the 50 strategies. Close examination of the results poses questions about MacIntyre and Noels' thesis, as implied in their revised model, that reason to use the strategy and reason not to use the strategy are independent. The present replication suggests a need for further revision of the model. Use of methods more advanced than the multiple regression is recommended to test and refine the model.

Adolescent↗
PubMed1985

Language and thinking in psychosis. Is there an input abnormality?

We studied "formal thought disorder" in schizophrenics, schizoaffectives, and manics by examining syntax processing and perception of meaning, using the "embedded click" and "memory for gist tasks," two paradigms that were developed by psycholinguists. To control for generalized performance deficits, a matched-task design was used. Contrary to expectation, patients did worse on a matched memory for digits task than on sentence processing. At a six-month follow-up examination, schizophrenics' performance did not improve while other patients' did. We concluded that psychotic patients have no specific language perception deficit but do have a short-term memory deficit. This deficit tends to remit for manics and schizoaffectives, but not for schizophrenics.

Adult↗
PubMed1993

Memory impairment and executive control in individuals with stroke-induced aphasia.

The purpose of this study was to examine memory abilities of aphasic individuals in relation to site of neurological lesion. Fourteen individuals with stroke-induced aphasia (7 with anterior lesions; 7 with posterior lesions) and 14 demographically matched control subjects were given selected tests of short-term memory (STM) and long-term memory (LTM). Stroke patients were impaired relative to control subjects on tests of verbal memory, with greater impairment of LTM associated with anterior lesions and greater impairment of STM associated with posterior lesions. Verbal memory performance did not correlate highly with language ability, and did not appear to be simply a consequence of language impairment. Executive control deficits were postulated as explanatory of the LTM impairment associated with anterior lesions.

Aged↗
PubMed2005

Comprehension of humor in primary agenesis of the corpus callosum.

Individuals with agenesis of the corpus callosum (ACC) can, in some cases, perform normally on standardized intelligence tests. Nevertheless, recent studies suggest that individuals with ACC and normal IQ scores have deficits in domains of fluid and social intelligence. Anecdotal reports from families suggest diminished appreciation of the subtleties of social interactions, and deficits in the comprehension of jokes and stories. In this research, both the cartoon and narrative joke subtests of a humor test (developed by Brownell et al. [Brownell, H., Michel, D., Powelson, J., & Gardner, H. (1983). Surprise but not coherence: sensitivity to verbal humor in right-hemisphere patients. Brain and language, 18(1), 20-27] and Bihrle et al. [Bihrle, A. M., Brownell, H. H., Powelson, J. A., & Gardner, H. (1986). Comprehension of humorous and non-humorous materials by left and right brain-damaged patients. Brain and Cognition, 5(4), 399-411]) were given to 16 adults with complete ACC (all with IQs>80) and 31 controls of similar age and IQ. Individuals with ACC performed worse than controls on the narrative joke subtest (p<.025) when VIQ was controlled. However, on the cartoon subtest the two groups were not significantly different. Covarying age, forms of IQ, narrative memory, set-switching, and literal language comprehension did not substantially alter the group difference. However, covarying comprehension of nonliteral language and proverbs eliminated the difference, suggesting a common origin for the comprehension of jokes, nonliteral language, and proverbs, most likely related to capacity for understanding second-order meanings.

Adolescent↗
PubMed1988

Effects of instructional set on amnesic recognition memory performance.

Tests that tapped memory for spatial location, temporal order, frequency of occurrence, and category membership were administered to a group of alcoholic Korsakoff patients, a group of mixed amnesic patients with primarily temporal lobe pathology, and a group of normal subjects. The four tests were administered with incidental as well as intentional learning conditions. All groups performed better in the intentional than the incidental condition of the category recognition test. None of the groups performed better in the intentional than the incidental conditions on any of the other tests. The data were interpreted as implying that amnesic patients do not benefit from intentional learning conditions in tests of memory for contextual stimuli.

Alcohol Amnestic Disorder↗
PubMedDate not supplied

Academic outcomes in children with histories of speech sound disorders.

Tests of phonology, semantics, and syntax were administered to 52 preschool children (19 girls and 33 boys, age 4-6 years) with moderate to severe speech sound disorders. The children's performance on these tests was used to predict language, reading, and spelling abilities at school age (age 8-11 years). Language impairment at school age was related to poor performance on preschool tests of syntax and nonsense word repetition, while reading impairment was predicted by poor performance in all preschool test domains (phonology, semantics, and syntax). In contrast, spelling impairment was predicted by deficits in preschool tests of phonological processing as measured by the Word Discrimination subtest of the Test of Language Development - Primary 2. Family history for speech and language disorders did not predict language, reading, or spelling impairment at school age. However, family history for reading disorders was a good predictor of school-age spelling difficulties.

Child↗
PubMed1986

Performance of adults with developmental handicaps on alternate forms of the Peabody Picture Vocabulary Test.

A total of 154 adults with developmental handicaps involved in a comprehensive community-based habilitation program were tested on alternate forms of the PPVT and PPVT--Revised to determine interest reliabilities. A comparison of response profiles indicated that there was a significant degree of correspondence in general performance using alternate forms (p less than .0001). This correspondence was maintained regardless of whether overall raw score or mental age equivalents were used. However, a comparison of performance on individual test items that were identical on alternate forms showed less consistent results. Particular aspects of the administration and structure of the PPVT/PPVT-R and response characteristics of individuals with developmental handicaps are suggested as being important factors in test administration and interpretation with this population.

Adolescent↗
PubMed1991

An auditory cue-depreciation effect.

An experiment is reported in which subjects first heard a list of words and then tried to identify these same words from degraded utterances. Paralleling previous findings in the visual modality, the probability of identifying a given utterance was reduced when the utterance was immediately preceded by other, more degraded, utterances of the same word. A second experiment replicated this "cue-depreciation effect" and in addition found the effect to be weakened, if not eliminated, when the target word was not included in the initial list or when the test was delayed by two days.

Acoustic Stimulation↗
PubMed2005

Prefrontal activation during verbal fluency tests in schizophrenia--a near-infrared spectroscopy (NIRS) study.

Letter- or semantically-cued verbal fluency tests (VFT) induce different, but overlapping activities in the prefrontal cortex (PFC) in healthy subjects. Functional differences between letter and semantic VFT may be important in elucidating the nature of language-related problems in schizophrenia since more profound impairment in semantically-cued retrieval may be suggestive of semantic system dysfunction specific to this disorder. However, the functional differences between the letter vs. semantic VFT on prefrontal metabolism in the subjects with schizophrenia have not been described. In the present study, we used near-infrared spectroscopy (NIRS) to assess hemoglobin concentration changes in the bilateral PFCs in subjects and controls. Sixteen subjects with schizophrenia and 19 healthy controls performed letter and semantic VFTs. Prefrontal hemodynamic changes were simultaneously monitored by NIRS. While healthy subjects performed both tasks equivalently, the subjects with schizophrenia showed more compromised performance in the semantic VFTs compared to the letter VFTs. NIRS measurement revealed that the pattern of PFC activation was greater during the letter VFT when compared to the semantic VFT in the healthy subjects, suggesting more prominent PFC involvement in letter-cued retrieval. In contrast, the subjects with schizophrenia showed the opposite pattern of activation, implying that the semantic mode of lexical access might impose greater cognitive demands on the PFC. The present study is the first to detect abnormal patterns of PFC activation in adults with schizophrenia in response to the distinct cognitive demands associated with letter and semantic VFT.

Adult↗
PubMed2006

The index of narrative microstructure: a clinical tool for analyzing school-age children's narrative performances.

PURPOSE: This research was conducted to develop a clinical tool-the Index of Narrative Microstructure (INMIS)-that would parsimoniously account for important microstructural aspects of narrative production for school-age children. The study provides field test age- and grade-based INMIS values to aid clinicians in making normative judgments about microstructural aspects of pupils' narrative performance. METHOD: Narrative samples using a single-picture elicitation context were collected from 250 children age 5-12 years and then transcribed and segmented into T-units. A T-unit consists of a single main clause and any dependent constituents. The narrative transcripts were then coded and analyzed to document a comprehensive set of microstructural indices. RESULTS: Factor analysis indicated that narrative microstructure consisted of 2 moderately related factors. The Productivity factor primarily comprised measures of word output, lexical diversity, and T-unit output. The Complexity factor comprised measures of syntactic organization, with mean length of T-units in words and proportion of complex T-units loading most strongly. Principal components analysis was used to provide a linear combination of 8 variables to approximate the 2 factors. Formulas for calculating a student's performance on the 2 factors using 8 narrative measures are provided. CONCLUSIONS: This study provided a method for professionals to calculate INMIS scores for narrative Productivity and Complexity for comparison against field test data for age (5- to 12-year-old) or grade (kindergarten to Grade 6) groupings. INMIS scores complement other tools in evaluating a child's narrative performance specifically and language abilities more generally.

Age Factors↗
PubMed2002

Cognitive dysfunction in patients with mildly disabling relapsing-remitting multiple sclerosis: an exploratory study with diffusion tensor MR imaging.

Previous studies assessing the magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) correlates of cognitive dysfunction in multiple sclerosis (MS) achieved conflicting results. Diffusion tensor (DT)-MRI provides metrics that are sensitive to the macro- and microscopic MS lesion load with increased specificity to the more destructive aspects of MS pathology than conventional imaging. We performed an exploratory study to assess the magnitude of the correlation between quantities derived from DT-MRI and measures of cognitive impairment in patients with relapsing-remitting (RR) MS.T2, T1, DT-MRI scans of the brain and an extensive battery of neuropsychological tests (exploring language, complex reasoning, attention and memory) were obtained from 34 RRMS patients. We measured T2 and T1 lesion volumes (LV) and brain volume. Average lesion mean diffusivity (D) and fractional anisotropy (FA) were calculated. D and FA histograms from the brain tissue (BT), the normal-appearing brain tissue (NABT), the normal-appearing white matter (NAWM) and the normal-appearing gray matter (NAGM) were also obtained. Nine patients (26.5%) were found to be cognitively impaired. Moderate correlations were found between symbol digit modalities test, verbal fluency test and 10/36 spatial recall test scores and T2 LV, T1 LV and average lesion, WBT, NABT, NAWM and NAGM values (r values ranging from -0.30 to -0.53). No correlations were found between any of the neuropsychological test scores and brain volume, average lesion FA and WBT FA.DT-MRI provides quantitative metrics that seem to reflect the severity of language, attention and memory deficits in patients with RRMS. This study also suggests that the extent and the intrinsic nature of the macroscopic lesions as well as the damage of the NAWM and NAGM all contribute to the neuropsychological deficits of RRMS patients.

Adult↗