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PubMed1980

Reliability and validity characteristics of the Western Aphasia Battery (WAB).

The reliability and validity characteristics of the Western Aphasia Battery (WAB) are described. High internal consistency measures and high test-retest reliability argue for stability of the test both because its parts contribute to the composite index and because of its temporal reliability. Inter- and intrajudge reliability are both very high, suggesting consistent scoring within and between scorers. The WAB satisfies face- and content-validity criteria. Results from the WAB and the Neurosensory Center Comprehensive Examination for Aphasia (NCCEA) highly correlate, indicating good construct validity. WAB AQ scores and Raven's Coloured Progressive Matrices scores significantly correlate, suggesting that the language portions of the WAB are not totally independent from nonverbal functioning. WAB AQ scores reliably differentiate between aphasic and control groups, with only a small overlap for high functioning anomic aphasic subjects.

Adolescent↗
PubMed1990

Valine, isoleucine, and leucine. A new treatment for phenylketonuria.

Early treatment of phenylketonuria by dietary phenylalanine restriction prevents brain damage. Behavioral and cognitive deficits occur when serum phenylalanine levels increase. Administration of valine, isoleucine, and leucine to patients with phenylketonuria may inhibit entry of phenylalanine into the brain and reduce its toxic effects on the central nervous system. Sixteen adolescents and young adults with phenylketonuria participated in double-blind trials in which a valine, isoleucine, and leucine mixture or a control mixture was given for four 3-month periods. Biochemical and neuropsychologic tests were carried out before and at the end of each period. Time to completion of a test that required substantial attention with mental processing (Attention Diagnostic Method) was faster during the valine, isoleucine, and leucine periods than during the control mixture periods. Improvement with valine, isoleucine, and leucine on a less demanding task (Continuous Performance Test) approached significance. These data lent support to the hypothesis that a regimen of valine, isoleucine, and leucine may help individuals unable to maintain low serum phenylalanine levels.

Adolescent↗
PubMedDate not supplied

Acquisition, recall, and forgetting of verbal information in long-term memory by young, middle-aged, and elderly individuals.

Memory performance by four age groups (30-45 years, 46-60 years, 61-75 years, and 76-90 years) was compared on a multi-trial verbal recall task with 20-minute and 1-day delay free recall and recognition trials. The rate of acquisition across 5 learning trials was similar for all ages except the youngest group whose performance was constrained by a ceiling effect. The level of acquisition achieved was less in the two oldest groups. Words gained across trials and words lost across trials made similar contributions to the shape of the learning curve for the acquisition trials. Subjective organization decreased with age, but remained strongly related to the number of words recalled during acquisition for all age groups. The two oldest age groups demonstrated significant declines in words recalled on the 20-minute and 1-day delay trials. A subset of the oldest group demonstrated more rapid forgetting at the 1-day delay when participants from all age conditions were matched on acquisition. Thus, many aspects of free recall were impaired with age, and variance measurement of recall showed greater inter-individual differences with increasing age. This increase in individual differences could reflect a single form of age-related memory impairment, or it could indicate that memory impairment in the elderly is due to multiple processes. The importance of testing across the life span and using tests that examine a variety of memory components and processes for establishing norms and clarifying age-related deficits are discussed.

Adult↗
PubMed1978

Presentation by order of difficulty of test tasks to persons with aphasia.

To determine the effects of arranging test tasks by order of difficulty, two test forms were administered to each of 20 patients with aphasia. The two test forms were split halves of the Porch Index of Communicative Ability. One of the test forms, Form EH, was presented to each patient with the subtests arranged for the individual subject in an order from easy to hard. The other test form, Form HE, was administered to each subject in the hard-to-easy order. There was no significant difference between the performance of the subjects on the Form EH and their performance on Form HE.

Adult↗
PubMed1973

Language after dominant hemispherectomy.

Linguistic and related cognitive abilities were investigated two years after dominant left hemispherectomy for cerebral malignancy in a 12 year old female. Auditory comprehension of speech was superior to other modes of language abilities with expressive speech being the least developed. Findings suggested an isolation or non-communication between the systems for speaking and for writing and visual perception. It was concluded that language mechanisms in the right hemisphere were not just at a low level of development of the functions found in the dominant hemisphere but were modified as a result of interference by preexistent spatioperceptual systems.

Auditory Perception↗
PubMed1980

Testing for nominal dysphasia.

In this paper we have described the construction of a graded naming test that makes the distinction between object and proper names. This distinction was prompted by a single case study of a patient who showed a specific naming impairment for a particular class of proper names. Naming vocabulary was found to be highly correlated with other measures of verbal intelligence and we have discussed the use of the graded naming test as a tool for clinical assessment and diagnosis. The results of the naming test of the left hemisphere group showed that category-specific naming impairment along the object/proper name distinction is relatively uncommon in any gross form. Object naming was most impaired in patients with lesions of the temporal lobe.

Adolescent↗
PubMed1975

Development of praxis in children.

Praxis was defined as the ability to perform skilled movements on command or demonstration. The performances of 87 normal male children, ages 1 to 6 yr., were assessed on four measures of praxis: oral praxis command, oral praxis demonstration, limb praxis command, and limb praxis demonstration. These measures were also correlated with measures of language and articulation development for the entire group across ages and for yearly age intervals. Results showed an orderly emergence of praxis in all measures beginning about age 1 and reaching nearly perfect performance by age 6. Predictably, ability to follow demonstration emerged earlier than ability to follow spoken commands. Praxis correlated somewhat with articulation and language skills at age 2 but the magnitude of the correlations decreased with increasing age intervals. Normative data are provided for clinical researchers interested in studying "apraxic" children.

Acoustic Stimulation↗
PubMed1998

A reaching test reveals weak hand preference in specific language impairment and developmental co-ordination disorder.

A reaching test for quantifying hand preference (QHP task) was given to 7- to 11- year-old children with specific language impairment (SLI) or developmental coordination disorder (DCD). The performance of these clinical children was compared to both an age-matched and younger control group. The four groups did not differ in terms of preferred writing hand or preference on a handedness questionnaire. The QHP measure discriminated the clinical and younger control groups from the age-matched controls, but not from each other. Right-handed children with SLI, DCD, and the younger controls reached predominantly with the right hand to spatial positions located to the right of their body's midline and with the left hand to positions situated to its left. Right-handers in the age-matched control group showed a significantly greater tendency to use their right hand to reach to all spatial positions. The increased tendency of the children with SLI to use the non-preferred hand was particularly striking because it was seen both in those with and without recognised motor difficulties. The QHP task appears to be a sensitive, but non-specific, indicator of developmental disorders.

Journal Article↗
PubMed2005

Disambiguation of homonyms in real-time Japanese sentence processing: case-markings and thematic constraint.

This paper experimentally examines the effects of the case-markings and the constraint on the assignments and the receptions of thematic roles in Japanese sentence processing. A self-paced reading experiment was carried out with syntactically well-controlled Japanese sentences including homonyms locally ambiguous between nouns and verbs. The results showed that the homonyms were preferably disambiguated as verbs. We interpret this disambiguation as the result of the application of the thematic constraint to the input items on the basis of the correspondence between the case-markings and the grammatical functions in Japanese. We further examined the effect of pragmatic plausibility on the interpretation of the homonyms by questionnaire, and claim that the thematic constraint is still the chief determinant for their disambiguation even with the possible plausibility effects. We also examined the effect of the verbal working memory capacity estimated by the Japanese Reading Span Test, and we demonstrate that a reader with a high score in the test comprehends sentences more accurately but spends relatively longer time for reanalyses than a reader with a low score. We discuss the relevances of our results to the parsing models for real-time Japanese sentence processing and to the studies of verbal working memory in English.

Cognition↗
PubMed1994

Forgetting of verbatim information in discourse.

In three experiments, the causes of forgetting of verbatim information in discourse were investigated. In Experiment 1, we tested the view that the surface form of a sentence decays when linguistic elements are integrated into larger discourse structures. Contrary to such a view, the results showed that when text could be integrated, both content and verbatim memory improved. In Experiment 2, we examined the possibility that task instructions could influence the level of memory for exact wording and content. The results showed that although task did influence the amount of verbatim memory, it did not affect memory for content. Experiment 3 was an investigation of the degree to which subjects would spontaneously encode surface information on the basis of the social interactiveness of the sentences. Past research has shown that verbatim memory for insults, jokes, and other personal utterances is quite good. In this experiment, identical sentences were tested in texts that had high versus low interactiveness. Verbatim memory was much higher for the same sentences in the highly interactive context. A pragmatic account of verbatim memory is given to explain how content and instructions influence the encoding of surface form.

Communication↗
PubMed2005

New semantic learning and generalization in a patient with amnesia.

New learning of semantic information is impaired in amnesia. Several reports have demonstrated that "errorless" learning techniques have allowed patients with amnesia to acquire at least some form of new semantic information, although this information appears to be relatively inflexible. Using insights and principles from connectionist modeling of cortical and medial temporal lobe memory systems, the authors describe why errorless learning procedures act as a poor proxy for the medial temporal lobe, suggesting that they artificially eliminate the variability that defines semantic information. The authors trained a patient with severe amnesia on new semantic sentences both with and without variance and then tested him on both repeated and related novel sentences to assess generalization. He successfully learned new semantic information in both conditions but demonstrated better generalization of semantic concepts following training with variance.

Aged↗
PubMed1990

Developmental dysmnesia in a poor reader.

A 22-yr-old subject with moderate developmental dyslexia experienced poor memory from an early age. In spite of normal intelligence he had great difficulty in learning historical and geographical names, mathematical formulae, poems and songs, and verbal series such as the letters of the alphabet and the months of the year. His recognition of familiar faces was also faulty at times. A battery of memory tests confirmed a moderate deficit of verbal as well as visual memory, whereas spatial memory was preserved. Other cognitive functions were intact, except for a mild reading disability. No evidence of brain pathology was provided by his history, neurological examination and CT scanning.

Adult↗
PubMed2006

Building up linguistic context in schizophrenia: evidence from self-paced reading.

An impairment in the build-up and use of context has been proposed as a core feature of schizophrenia. The current study tested the hypothesis that schizophrenia patients show impairments in building up context within sentences because of abnormalities in combining semantic with syntactic information. Schizophrenia patients and healthy controls read and made acceptability judgments about sentences containing verbs that were semantically associated with individual preceding words but that violated either the meaning (animacy/semantic constraints) or the syntactic structure (morphosyntactic constraints) of their preceding contexts. To override these semantic associations and determine that such sentences are unacceptable, participants must integrate semantic with syntactic information. These sentences were compared with congruous and pragmatically/semantically violated sentences that imposed fewer semantic-syntactic integration demands. At sentence-final words and decisions, patients showed smaller reaction time differences than controls to animacy/semantically violated or morphosyntactically violated sentences relative to pragmatically/semantically violated or nonviolated sentences. The relative insensitivity to these violations in patients with schizophrenia may arise from impairments in combining semantic and syntactic information to build up sentence context.

Adult↗
PubMed1992

Analysis of pronominal errors: a case-study.

The present paper reports a case-study of a normally developing boy who made pronominal errors for about ten months. Comprehension and production of first- and second-person pronouns were longitudinally examined from 1;7 to 2;10 to test three hypotheses concerning pronominal errors: pronominal errors are a result of either (a) semantic confusion, (b) simple imitation, or (c) confusion between self and others. The results showed that the child began using first- and second-person pronouns at about 1;8 and mastered the correct usage by 2;10. Consistent errors for the first- and the second-person pronouns were observed from 1;11 to 2;4, but proportions of errors occurring in his imitative language were low. The comprehension and production data clearly indicated that the child persistently made pronominal errors due to semantic confusion. That is, first-person pronouns referred to a person with whom the child conversed and second-person pronouns referred to himself.

Child Language↗
PubMed2000

Behavior phenotype of FG syndrome: cognition, personality, and behavior in eleven affected boys.

In this study we examined several behavioral, personality, and cognitive characteristics of boys with FG syndrome. We confirmed high rates of attention and activity level problems, which were described previously. Nine of the 11 patients met criteria for attention deficit/hyperactivity disorder. The boys did not manifest autistic behavior, and none met criteria for an autism spectrum disorder, though their parents reported substantial repetitive behavior. The personalities of the participants often were described as friendly, good-natured, and cheerful, but they did not differ empirically on a standardized measure of personality structure from typically developing comparison children, even after controlling for the effects of IQ. Specifically, higher rates of agreeableness and extraversion were not confirmed, though these constructs do not correspond perfectly with the traits of affability and gregariousness described in earlier published case studies of FG syndrome. In terms of neuropsychological assessment, the boys had relatively less developed language, fine motor, and executive function skills, and visual-spatial abilities were a relative strength. Limitations and suggestions for future research are discussed.

Adolescent↗
PubMed2005

Phonological specificity in children at 1;2.

The specificity of infants' phonological representations is examined by comparing their sensitivity to mispronunciations of novel and familiar words, using the preferential looking task. 29 children at 1; 2 were trained and tested on familiar and novel word-object pairs. Children showed evidence of sensitivity to mispronunciations of novel and familiar words, indicating detailed phonological representations. Discrepancies between this study and earlier investigations are discussed with reference to differences between habituation and preferential looking tasks.

Analysis of Variance↗
PubMed1994

Speech sample size and test-retest stability of connected speech measures for adults with aphasia.

The effect of speech sample size on the test-retest stability of two measures of connected speech--words per minute (WPM) and percent of words that are correct information units (Percent CIUs)--was evaluated. A standard set of 10 stimuli was used to elicit connected speech from 20 non-brain-damaged adults and 20 adults with aphasia. Each subject's responses to the 10 stimuli were transcribed and scored for WPM and Percent CIUs. Then each subject's responses to the 10 stimuli were randomly divided to produce smaller speech samples representing his or her responses to 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, and 7 stimuli. The test-retest stability of the WPM and Percent CIUs measures was then evaluated for each of the smaller sample sizes and for the complete 10-stimulus sample. For both groups, the test-retest stability of the two measures increased as sample size increased, with the greatest increases occurring as samples increased in size from those representing 1 stimulus to those representing 4 or 5 stimuli, with smaller increases in stability thereafter. In general, these results suggest that the best balance between high test-retest stability and the time and effort required to transcribe and score speech samples can be achieved with samples representing 4 or 5 stimuli (an average of 300 to 400 words for aphasic subjects), although this will vary across individuals.

Aged↗
PubMed2000

Normative data for clustering and switching on verbal fluency tasks.

Normative data for clustering and switching on verbal fluency tasks are provided. Four hundred and eleven healthy adults between the ages of 18 and 91 were given tests of phonemic fluency (FAS or CFL) and semantic fluency (Animals and Supermarket). Raw scores were corrected for demographic (i.e., age, education, and sex) and test (i.e., fluency form) variables that were determined to make sizable contributions to fluency performance. These normative data should be useful for clinicians and researchers in determining the nature of the fluency impairment in any given individual.

Adult↗