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PubMed1989

Nonverbal recognition and recency discrimination deficits in Parkinson's disease and Alzheimer's disease.

In a study of verbal temporal ordering, patients with Parkinson's disease (PD) were impaired in making judgements of the relative recency of serially-presented words but were normal in word recognition; by contrast, patients with Alzheimer's disease (AD) were impaired on both verbal tasks (Sagar et al., 1985, 1988b). The present study used a nonverbal analogue of the verbal temporal ordering task to examine whether the deficit in recency discrimination of the PD patients transcended material-specific bounds or was specific to verbal material. The nonverbal task was administered to the patients with PD, patients with AD and normal control subjects studied with the verbal task. The results showed that the retention functions for the recognition of verbal and nonverbal material differed qualitatively from each other and this difference was present in all three subject groups. For verbal and nonverbal recency discrimination and verbal content recognition, performance declined with increasing retention intervals; for nonverbal content recognition, however, performance was essentially unchanging across retention intervals. As on the verbal test, recency discrimination on the nonverbal test was impaired in both patient groups. In contrast to the results with the verbal task, both groups were impaired on content recognition. The patterns of impairment, however, differed between the two patient groups in a parallel way to those of the verbal task: performance of the AD group was impaired at the longest retention intervals but not at the shortest intervals, whereas the performance of the PD group was impaired at the shortest but not at the longest intervals. This deficit in nonverbal short-term recognition memory was present even in PD patients who scored within the normal range on a quantitative test of dementia. These results show that deficits in recency discrimination and short-term memory processing in PD extend to nonverbal as well as verbal material and imply bilateral frontal lobe dysfunction in the genesis of these deficits.

Aged↗

PubMedDate not supplied

Long-term intellectual prognosis of hydrocephalus with reference to 77 children.

The long-term intellectual prognosis of nontumoral hydrocephalus is described: 75% of the population have a full intellectual quotient greater than 70. But often, there is a heterogeneous pattern of the intellectual quotient with a great difference between verbal and performance results because of poor visuospatial skills. Disabilities of syntactical comprehension of language are also encountered. Sex, age, delay before shunting and frequency of shunt complications are not related to intelligence level or pattern. Meningitis and toxoplasmosis often result in a poor intelligence level, but other etiologies do not influence intelligence level or pattern. Visuospatial deficits, attention disorders and language disabilities are independent of the degree of hydrocephalus but are especially encountered when ventricular dilatation persists in spite of the operation.

Attention↗

PubMedDate not supplied

[Evaluation of a German questionnaire version of the Lequesne cox- and gonarthrosis indices].

The Lequesne algofunctional indices for the knee and the hip require a physician interview. We adapted the Lequesne indices for the German language and tested the metric properties, test-retest reliability and validity of a self-report questionnaire-format in 51 patients with hip or knee OA. The symptom and function components as well as the global indices had a high test-retest reliability (intraclass correlation coefficient knee: 0.87/0.92 and 0.86, hip: 0.96/0.85 and 0.94). The symptom component showed an insufficient internal consistency (Cronbach's coefficient alpha knee: 0.55; hip: 0.63). Also, the symptom component was not or only weakly associated with radiological OA-severity and the limitations of range-of-motion. The most likely explanation is the grading of the Lequesne symptom questions which addresses such different concepts as pain presence, pain on movement, duration of pain and appearance of pain after a certain period of time. Because of the insufficient internal consistency and questionable validity the tested self-report German-version of the Lequesne algofunctional indices may not be recommended for use in clinical research and practice.

Activities of Daily Living↗

PubMed1990

Traumatic aphasia in children and adults: a comparison of clinical features and evolution.

We compared the performance on test of language, apraxia, acalculia and intelligence of 32 children--age 5 to 16 years--and 31 adults, seen at our Aphasia Unit for the sequelae of a brain trauma. Logorrhea was never present among children who had nonfluent aphasia more frequently than adults. Apraxia and acalculia were equally present in the two groups. Twelve children and 15 adults of the first study were retested at variable distance from trauma. No group difference was found in the recovery of auditory comprehension (Token Test) or oral expression (oral confrontation naming and telling-of-an-event). On a battery of verbal and spatial memory tests 6 of the 12 children had pathological scores in one or more tests. Scholastic achievements were compared with those of the nearest kin. We conclude that while aphasia profiles are different in children and adults, the incidence of apraxia and acalculia and the recovery rate do not discriminate the two groups.

Achievement↗

PubMed1999

Recruiting comparative crosslinguistic evidence to address competing accounts of agrammatic aphasia.

Several hypotheses have been advanced whose aim has been to provide a descriptive generalization of comprehension patterns in agrammatic aphasia in terms of current linguistic theory, most notably, the Trace-Deletion Hypothesis. The basic insight of these syntactic accounts of aphasia is that chains are disrupted. In this paper, we seek to confront the Trace-Deletion Hypothesis (TDH) and one of its variants, the Double-Dependency Hypothesis (DDH), with discriminating, crosslinguistic data. We adduce evidence that on raising constructions both hypotheses are able to derive Spanish agrammatic data correctly. However, neither the TDH nor the DDH are able to account for above-chance performance on SV or VS truncated passives. Finally, only the DDH explains the observed data on passive constructions in which a postverbal subject follows the by phrase (V-by phrase-S). The VS word order data are the critical cases because focusing simply on English would not allow these structures to be tested and, in the case of the V-by phrase-S passive, both hypotheses make different predictions. While the data on raising constructions extend the range of both the TDH and the DDH, the VS data suggest that modifications are required.

Aphasia, Broca↗

PubMed1992

Whole words and decoding for short-term learning: comparisons on a "talking-computer" system.

Low-and average-ability readers in first and second grade studied a list of 36 words using a "talking-computer" system. The system highlighted and simultaneously pronounced orthographic units in the words when the children touched the words with a light pen. During two training sessions, the computer presented four groups of 9 words each, one group as whole words, one in syllabic units, one in subsyllabic units, and one as single grapheme-phoneme units. All children learned the least words with single grapheme-phoneme units, having had the greatest difficulty blending the units into words during training. The other presentation units did not differ significantly from each other for most students on post-testing. However, the low first-grade readers learned fewer words segmented and presented by subsyllables than by syllable or word units, but only for multisyllabic words. Monosyllabic words were blended and learned as easily with onset-rime segmentation as with whole word units, for all children.

Achievement↗

PubMed2005

Simultaneous development of the Pediatric GERD Caregiver Impact Questionnaire (PGCIQ) in American English and American Spanish.

BACKGROUND: The objective of this study was to develop simultaneously a new questionnaire, the Pediatric GERD Caregiver Impact Questionnaire (PGCIQ), in American English and American Spanish in order to elucidate the impact of caring for a child with GERD. METHODS: Two focus group discussions were conducted in American English and American Spanish to develop a relevant conceptual model. Focus group participants were the primary caregivers of children with GERD (newborn through 12 years of age). Participant responses were qualitatively analyzed to identify potential differences in caregiver perspectives by the caregiver's language, socio-economic status and demographic profile as well as the child's age and disease severity level. Items in the PGCIQ were generated simultaneously in English and Spanish by reviewing results of qualitative analysis from focus groups in each language. The PGCIQ was finalized in both languages after testing content validity and conducting an in-depth translatability assessment. RESULTS: Analysis of focus group comments resulted in the development of a first draft questionnaire consisting of 58 items in 10 domains. Content validity testing and an in-depth translatability assessment resulted in wording modification of 37 items, deletion of 14 items and the addition of a domain with five items. Feedback from the content validity testing interviews indicated that the instrument is conceptually relevant in both American English and American Spanish, clear, comprehensive and easy to complete within 10 minutes. The final version of the PGCIQ contains 49 items assessing ten domains. An optional module with nine items is available for investigative research purposes and for use only at baseline. CONCLUSION: The PGCIQ was developed using simultaneous item generation, a process that allows for consideration of concept relevance in all stages of development and in all languages being developed. The PGCIQ is the first questionnaire to document the multidimensional impact of caring for an infant or young child with GERD. Linguistic adaptation of the PGCIQ in multiple languages is ongoing. A validation study of the PGCIQ is needed to examine its psychometric properties, further refine the items and develop an appropriate scoring model.

Adult↗

PubMed1987

Huntington's disease in Colombia: a neuropsychological analysis.

This is the first publication of the presence of Huntington's disease (HD) in Colombia. We studied four families comprising nine adult HD patients and 45 high risk adult offspring; all received complete physical, neurological and neuropsychological examinations. Among affected individuals, intensity of mental involvement varied in direct proportion with duration of the symptoms. The HD patients and some of the asymptomatic offspring displayed similar low scores on standardized tests of memory, language and constructive abilities. Prolonged follow-up of the latter group will allow assessment of the potential value of such tests for early diagnosis. The sequence followed by mental deterioration is discussed.

Adolescent↗

PubMed1989

Auditory agnosia with relative sparing of speech perception.

We report a case of auditory agnosia in which the initial clinical picture began with generalized auditory agnosia for verbal and non verbal sounds, but rapidly changed to a selective auditory agnosia confined to the perception of non verbal sounds. CT scanning and MRI did not demonstrate cortical or subcortical damage, except for bilateral ventricular enlargement. The patient was submitted to audiological investigations including physical and psychoacoustic studies. Deficits were revealed during the decay and loudness discrimination test, but no temporal auditory acuity deficit was observed. The results of these studies are discussed in relation to the clinical picture. Also the dissociation between verbal perception and non verbal perception is discussed.

Adult↗

PubMed1993

Typography manipulations can affect priming of word stem completion in older and younger adults.

The experiments reported here investigated whether changes of typography affected priming of word stem completion performance in older and younger adults. Across all experiments, the typeface in which a word appeared at presentation either did or did not match that of its 3-letter stem at test. In Experiment 1, no significant evidence of a typography effect was found when words were presented with a sentence judgment or letter judgment task. However, subsequent experiments revealed that, in both older and younger adults, only words presented with a syllable judgment task gave rise to the typography effect (Experiments 2-4). Specifically, performance was greater, when the presentation and test typeface matched than when they did not. Experiment 5, which used stem-cued recall, did not reveal a difference between syllable and letter judgment tasks. These findings highlight the complex nature of word stem completion performance.

Age Factors↗

PubMed1996

Recurrent otitis media during infancy and linguistic skills at the age of nine years.

OBJECTIVE: To assess the effects of early recurrent otitis media on linguistic development in children. We especially wanted to determine the possible significant consequences of early recurrent otitis media at school age. METHODS: We collected data retrospectively on recurrent otitis media episodes from the parents of 394 children in 18 school classes selected at random in a middle-sized city in Finland. Auditory comprehension was tested with a subtest of the Illinois Test of Psycholinguistic Ability, picture vocabulary with the Peabody Picture Vocabulary Test (revised test version), morphologic competence with a Finnish Morphological Test and reading comprehension with a test designed for this purpose. RESULTS: Children with more than four otitis episodes before the age of 3 years performed less well in the reading comprehension test (P = 0.01 to 0.02) than children with fewer otitis media episodes. Multiple regression analysis adjusted for the confounding variables showed early otitis media to be associated with impaired reading comprehension test scores (regression coefficient -0.1245, 95% confidence interval -0.2245 to -0.0245, P = 0.01), which also correlated significantly with the teachers' evaluation of the student's reading comprehension (Spearman rank correlation r = 0.5, P < 0.01). Otitis episodes after the age of 3 years were not associated with abnormal test results. CONCLUSION: Middle ear disease in infancy had a significant adverse effect on reading comprehension as late as 9 years of age, even among children whose acute episodes were effectively treated.

Age of Onset↗

PubMed1997

Expression of game-related and generic knowledge by dementia patients who retain skill at playing dominoes.

Patients with dementia who remain skilled at musical performance or playing bridge fail explicit memory tests for information related to their skills, suggesting that implicit memory mediates their preserved skills. To reexamine this issue, 23 dementia patients and 15 elderly controls of comparable domino-playing skill were compared on tests of naming, verbal fluency, and domino knowledge. On an explicit test of domino knowledge, the patients scored well below the elderly controls, performing no better than students who were unfamiliar with the game. But when game-like situations were created with real dominoes, both the skilled controls and the patients with dementia chose optimal moves and verbally explained their choices equally well. On naming and fluency tests, the skilled patients showed no advantage over patients of comparable dementia severity who had no retained skill. In dementia, some complex knowledge seems intact but is accessible only in particular contexts.

Aged↗

PubMed1985

The Word Retrieval Fluency Test: what does it assess?

The term fluency in aphasia is ambiguous. It can relate to the rate of speech--normal vs. laborious or the ability to retrieve words. In this report, to avoid confusion we refer to fluency in a word retrieval task. Different authors have ascribed defective performance on these tasks to Frontal Lobe Syndrome or Aphasia. Our patient material adds dementia as a causative condition. To determine whether subnormal test performance is due to generalized brain dysfunction or only to left hemisphere disorders, we tested left hemisphere damaged patients, without aphasia as well as right hemisphere damaged patients, obtaining non-significant differences between the two groups. This supports our experience that such a test is highly sensitive to generalized brain dysfunction i.e. to a variety of cerebral disorders and therefore seems not to be highly pathognomonic of aphasia.

Adolescent↗

PubMed1993

Factors of the Wisconsin Card Sorting Test as measures of frontal-lobe function in schizophrenia and in chronic alcoholism.

The purpose of this study was to examine the factor structure of the Wisconsin Card Sorting Test (WCST). The scores of 22 patients with schizophrenia, 20 patients with chronic alcoholism, and 16 normal control subjects were entered into a principal components analysis, which yielded three factors: Perseveration, Inefficient Sorting, and Nonperseverative Errors. WCST performance of seven patients with lesions invading the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, available from another study, provided criterion validity for the Perseveration factor and, less strongly, for the Inefficient Sorting factor. Two patterns of performance characterized the three patient groups: the schizophrenic group and frontal lobe group had the highest Perseveration factor scores, whereas the alcoholic group had the highest Inefficient Sorting scores; the Nonperseverative Errors factor showed no significant group differences. Construct validity of these factors involved assessing, in all but the frontal group, the degree of overlap (convergent validity) and separation (discriminant validity) of each WCST factor with scores from tests of other cognitive functions. The convergent and discriminant validity of the Perseveration factor, but not the remaining two factors, received support only within the group of schizophrenic patients.

Adult↗

PubMed1989

Dynamic aphasia: the selective impairment of verbal planning.

A single case study of a patient, ROH, who had a space occupying lesion in the left frontal lobe is reported. His selective speech disorder had all the hallmarks of a dynamic aphasia. Tests of sentence completion, phrase generation and sentence generation were administered. His ability to generate sentences was significantly better given a pictorial context than a verbal context. Although he could order a sequence of pictures, he had the greatest difficulty in ordering the constituent words of a sentence. Luria's hypothesis that dynamic aphasia is due to an impairment of inner speech which provides "the linear scheme of a sentence" is discussed. It is concluded that dynamic aphasia does not reflect a deficit of language processing but rather the selective impairment of verbal planning.

Adult↗

PubMed1986

The relationship between articulation disorders and motor coordination in children.

This study was designed to examine the relationship between articulation disorders, soft neurological signs, and motor abilities. Fifteen children with articulation problems, as measured by the Templin-Darley Articulation Screening Test and a connected speech sample, were compared with a normal control group (matched for sex and age) on the Quick Neurological Screening Test, the Imitation of Postures test (from the Southern California Sensory Integration Tests), and the 1984 version of the Stott Test of Motor Impairment that has been revised by Henderson. A significant difference was found between the groups on the Motor Impairment Test and the Quick Neurological Screening Test, supporting the hypothesis that the articulation disorder children would have more motor coordination problems and soft neurological signs than the normal children in the control group. There was no between-group difference on the Imitation of Postures test, suggesting that as a group, children with articulation deficits are not dyspraxic. This study supports other research findings stating a relationship between articulation problems and motor impairment, but it also indicates that this motor impairment is not necessarily dyspraxia.

Articulation Disorders↗

PubMed2002

A cross-linguistic comparison of verbal fluency tests.

The aim of this study was to compare oral fluency strategies of Spanish-English bilinguals in Spanish and English with Spanish and English monolinguals when given either phonemic (alphabetical) or semantic categorical cues. The use of grammatical words (words that play a grammatical function relating words within a sentence) or content words (words that have a meaning such as nouns, verbs, and adjectives) in the alphabetical categories is analyzed. This study also addresses the relation between productivity and the use of a semantic strategy to organize responses. Eighty-two right-handed participants (28 males and 54 females) with a mean age of 61.76 (SD = 9.30; range 50-84) and a mean educational level of 14.8 years (SD = 3.6; range 2-23) were selected. Forty-five of the subjects were English monolinguals, 18 were Spanish monolinguals, and 19 were Spanish-English bilinguals. Oral verbal fluency was tested asking subjects to generate words within phonemic (F, A, and S) and semantic (animals) categories. In the phonemic condition, performance of English and Spanish monolinguals was similar. Bilinguals produced significantly fewer words than English monolinguals in the categorical semantic condition but not in the phonological condition. In the phonological condition, English monolinguals generated significantly more grammatical words than Spanish monolinguals, and bilinguals produced a significantly higher number of grammatical words in English than in Spanish. Animal subcategories and semantic associations were similar in both languages for all groups. Results were discussed in terms of crosslinguistic differences in the recall of alphabetical words.

Aged↗

PubMed2000

The clinical utility of the Hopkins Verbal Learning Test as a screening test for mild dementia.

OBJECTIVE: The purpose of this study was to determine whether the Hopkins Verbal Learning Test (HVLT) could be used as a valid and reliable screening test for mild dementia in older people, and to compare its performance to that of the Mini-Mental State Examination (MMSE). METHOD: Using a cross-sectional design, we studied three groups of older subjects recruited from a district geriatric psychiatry service: (1) 26 patients with DSM-IV dementia and MMSE scores of 18 or better; (2) 15 patients with psychiatric diagnoses other than dementia; and (3) 15 normal controls. The relationship of each potential cutting point on the HVLT and the MMSE was examined against the independently ascertained DSM-IV diagnoses of dementia using a Receiver Operating Characteristic (ROC) analysis. RESULTS: The subjects consisted of 21 (37.5%) males and 35 (62.5%) females with a mean age of 74.7 (SD 6.1) years and a mean of 8.5 (SD 1.8) years of formal education. ROC analysis indicated that the optimal cutting point for detecting mild dementia in this group of subjects using the HVLT was 18/19 (sensitivity=0.96, specificity=0.80) and using the MMSE was 25/26 (sensitivity=0.88, specificity=0.93). CONCLUSIONS: The HVLT can be recommended as a valid and reliable screening test for mild dementia and as an adjunct in the clinical assessment of older people. The HVLT had better sensitivity than the MMSE in detecting patients with mild dementia, whereas the MMSE had better specificity.

Aged↗