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PubMed1977

Auditory word discrimination in male children diagnosed as having minimal brain dysfunction.

Investigated auditory word discrimination skill in children diagnosed as having minimal brain dysfunction (MBD), a heretofore unexplored topic in the study of MBD. A lack of auditory discrimination skill seems relevant to learning deficiency in language acquisition, a typical sign of MBD. The present study tested the hypothesis that phonemic aural discriminations would be difficult to make for boys diagnosed as having MBD. Errors and nonresponses made while Ss performed an extended auditory word discrimination task were compared between a group of 26 boys diagnosed as having MBD and a matched normal group. As expected, the MBD group had a significantly higher error rate than the normal group even when Ss were discriminating easy word pairs composed of dissimilar items (e.g., reading, math). These and other results suggested that the MBD group was very susceptible to fatigue even while motivated to perform well and while able to improve with practice. The relatively inferior performance of the MBD group was interpreted as resulting directly from a lack of auditory discrimination skill and indirectly from fatigue and its accompanying attention loss.

Attention↗
PubMed1983

Cognition in cerebral gigantism: are the estimates of mental retardation too high?

The psychological findings on 10 children with cerebral gigantism are reviewed. Infants with cerebral gigantism showed a consistent pattern of psychomotor delay. Preschool age children demonstrated signs of a primary language disorder, and school-age patients had learning disabilities. The incidence of mental retardation was significantly lower than previously reported in the literature. The possibility that some children with cerebral gigantism can be easily misdiagnosed as mentally retarded is discussed.

Child↗
PubMed1993

New Alzheimer's drug expands your options in symptom management.

Gradually progressive memory loss is the keystone of Alzheimer's disease (AD). Other diagnostic signs include deterioration of language and perception, judgment losses, and behavioral problems such as agitation and paranoia. The clock drawing test is a simple in-office measure of spatial orientation. CT or MRI is recommended to rule out vascular injury; blood tests can exclude other types of dementia. Serial mental status exams can document disease progression. Drug therapy is appropriate for managing mental symptoms, including early depression and anxiety. Some patients may derive benefit from tacrine. Management must also include education and support of the AD patient's caregivers.

Alzheimer Disease↗
PubMed2000

Multisign combinations by children with intellectual impairments: an analysis of language skills.

Research suggests that people with intellectual impairments who use manual signs to augment or substitute for speech rarely progress beyond the stage of single signs and that word order is particularly problematic. However, the majority of studies have focused on experimental tasks, and relatively little is known about spontaneous sign production in naturalistic settings. The present study explored the linguistic development in sign and speech of 10 children who relied on manual signs (the Makaton vocabulary) as their main means of communication. Mean utterance length in sign ranged from 1.0 to 2.5, and analysis of semantic relations, lexical development, and word order suggested that the children had not developed their language beyond MLU Stage I. Examination of their abilities within the modality of sign indicated that some children were able to manipulate features of sign at a sublexical level. The results are discussed in relation to the language input by teachers, and inferences are drawn regarding the underlying modality of linguistic representation in children who use manual signs.

Adolescent↗
PubMed1983

Comprehension of English syntax by profoundly deaf children.

Seventy-nine profoundly deaf 8 to 12-year-olds were tested for comprehension of spoken, written and signed (Paget-Gorman Sign System, PGSS) English grammatical contrasts. Understanding of spoken language was below the 4-year-old level, with few deaf children understanding enough vocabulary to attempt the test. On written and signed forms, many children responded to content words with little understanding of grammar. Others would interpret word order sequentially, producing characteristic errors. PGSS can provide a viable communication channel and does not hinder oral or written language acquisition, but it does not overcome the grammatical problems of deaf children.

Child↗
PubMed1999

Articulatory consequences of Parkinson's disease: perspectives from two modalities.

Language production involves complex yet productively varying motor behavior. Rule-governed combinations yield a finite set of formational units combined in an infinite number of ways. The creativity of language ensures that no particular articulation will be highly automatized. Linguistic articulation is highly complex and varied. As such, it differs from the other more automatized motor behaviors typically studied such as learned movements in apraxia studies or repetitive behavior as occurs in walking or other everyday activities. Language also strives to maintain a balance between ease of articulation and ease of perception, while maintaining linguistically relevant distinctions. We report here a number of studies on the articulatory consequences of Parkinson's disease (PD) in the spoken and signed modalities. Our goal is to highlight the commonalities and distinctions between the two modalities of speech and sign that will allow us to better understand the impingements of PD on language production in general.

Aged↗
PubMed1997

The effects of discourse genre on English language complexity in school-age deaf students.

This study explored the effects of discourse genre on the complexity of English language produced by school-age deaf students. Subjects were 13 profoundly deaf students, ages 7;1 to 14;8, who had been educated using only an English-based sign system in public schools. Language samples were elicited in three conditions: a traditional spontaneous interaction, a narrative elicitation using pictures, and an interview in which the examiner asked cognitively and linguistically challenging questions. The results show that students produced the most complex English language during the interview, as measured by the use of embedded clauses, conjunctions, and modals. In contrast to previous studies, utterance length in this one did not vary as a function of sample type, likely because segmentation of the samples was based on the T-unit, not sentences. The results have implications for language sampling with school-age students, both in terms of efficacy and ecological validity.

Journal Article↗
PubMed1981

The relative efficiency of two orders for training autistic children in the expressive and receptive use of manual signs.

Using simultaneous communication (speech plus gesture), each of four nonverbal autistic children were taught the receptive and expressive use of eight signed words. In a within-subject comparison, each child was taught four words expressively (signing) first and then receptively, and four other words receptively first and then expressively (signing). The results indicated (1) that it took fewer trials to teach expressive and receptive use when teaching was done in the order expressive then receptive; (2) the teaching of expressive use facilitated the learning of receptive use; (3) the teaching of receptive use interfered with the learning of expressive use; and (4) by the end of training, good receptive control by the spoken word alone, had developed.

Adolescent↗
PubMed1978

Comprehension of inflectional morphemes by deaf children exposed to a visual English sign system.

A test of morpheme-based concepts was administered to 67 deaf children who were exposed to Seeing Essential English (SEE). Results indicated that these children show the following order of acquisition for the inflectional morphemes tested: plural -s, past tense -ed, present progressive -ing, possessive -'s, third person present indicative -s, comparative -er, superlative -est, and present perfect -en. There were no effects of sex, age, or school from which the subjects were selected. The main contribution to the subjects' performances were their lengths of exposure to SEE.

Age Factors↗
PubMed1979

Can an ape create a sentence?

More than 19,000 multisign utterances of an infant chimpanzee (Nim) were analyzed for syntactic and semantic regularities. Lexical regularities were observed in the case of two-sign combinations: particular signs (for example, more) tended to occur in a particular position. These regularities could not be attributed to memorization or to position habits, suggesting that they were structurally constrained. That conclusion, however, was invalidated by videotape analyses, which showed that most of Nim's utterances were prompted by his teacher's prior utterance, and that Nim interrupted his teachers to a much larger extent than a child interrupts an adult's speech. Signed utterances of other apes (as shown on films) revealed similar non-human patterns of discourse.

Animal Communication↗
PubMed2003

Age constraints on first versus second language acquisition: evidence for linguistic plasticity and epigenesis.

Does age constrain the outcome of all language acquisition equally regardless of whether the language is a first or second one? To test this hypothesis, the English grammatical abilities of deaf and hearing adults who either did or did not have linguistic experience (spoken or signed) during early childhood were investigated with two tasks, timed grammatical judgement and untimed sentence to picture matching. Findings showed that adults who acquired a language in early life performed at near-native levels on a second language regardless of whether they were hearing or deaf or whether the early language was spoken or signed. By contrast, deaf adults who experienced little or no accessible language in early life performed poorly. These results indicate that the onset of language acquisition in early human development dramatically alters the capacity to learn language throughout life, independent of the sensory-motor form of the early experience.

Adolescent↗
PubMed2001

XML and the VITAL standard: the document-oriented approach for open telemedicine applications.

This paper describes an effort to create a common, document-oriented architecture for the interchange of medical data in healthcare telemedicine applications. Key components are: The VITAL standard specifying a common (medical device independent) representation of Vital Signs Information and the Extensible Markup Language (XML) specifying the document specifications form, an architecture that, in aggregate, define the semantics and structural constraints necessary for the exchange of vital signs and related medical data. The modelling and design technique for the described application has been the Unified Modelling Language (UML). The XMI (XML Metadata Interchange Format) of the Object Management Group (OMG) provided the meta-model for this application, for sharing objects using XML, via the transfer of the application's UML model to XML documents and DTDs.

Humans↗
PubMed1998

Medial temporal lobe epilepsy: videotape analysis of objective clinical seizure characteristics.

PURPOSE: The syndrome of temporal lobe epilepsy has been described in great detail. Here we focus specifically on the clinical manifestations of seizures originating in the hippocampus and surrounding mesial temporal structures. METHODS: Seizure origin was confirmed in 67 cases by depth EEG recording and surgical cure after mesial temporal resection. RESULTS: Among nonlateralized manifestations, we commonly found oral automatisms, pupillary dilatation, impaired consciousness, and generalized rigidity. Appendicular automatisms were often ipsilateral to the seizure focus, whereas dystonia and postictal hemiparesis were usually contralateral. Head deviation, when it occurred early in the seizure, was an ipsilateral finding, but was contralateral to the seizure focus when it occurred late. Clear ictal speech and quick recovery were found when seizures originated in the non-language-dominant hemisphere, but postictal aphasia and prolonged recovery time were characteristic of seizure origin in the language-dominant hemisphere. CONCLUSIONS: These signs help to define the mesial temporal lobe epilepsy (MTLE) syndrome and often provide information as to the side of seizure origin.

Automatism↗
PubMed2006

Do you see what I mean? Shared reference in non-native, early signing deaf children.

A group of non-native, early signing deaf children between the ages of 7 and 11 years were tested on a referential communication task. A group of hearing children matched for sex and mental and chronological age were also included in the study. The aim was to study the deaf children's ability to take another persons perspective in a task that resembled a real-life communicative situation to a higher extent than the standard theory of mind (ToM) tasks. A further aim was to investigate the possible importance of a number of background variables such as mental and chronological age, working memory, and false-belief attribution. Results show that the hearing children outperformed the deaf children on the referential communication task and that results were highly correlated with both chronological and mental age, as well as with working memory. There was a positive, but not significant, correlation between false belief and success on the referential communication task. This is an indication that the two tasks tap different abilities and that false belief might be necessary, but not sufficient in order to be skilled in the art of referential communication. The possible role of working memory in the referential communication task is also discussed. The results support the hypothesis of the importance of early talk about mental states for the later development of ToM abilities.

Analysis of Variance↗
PubMed1999

The development of communication and language in deaf and severely hard of hearing children: implications for the future.

Severe hearing impairment is seldom detected in children before the age of 6-12 months as parent-infant interaction is similar to that of a normal parent-child interaction. This is probably due to an innate capacity of infants to take information in one sensory modality and translate it into another, called amodal perception. The roots of language are traced to early proto-conversations, as well as to early pretend play. Relationships are viewed as the context in which socialisation takes place, basic competences emerge, regulations of emotions develop and communication skills are acquired. If habilitation after diagnosis of a severe hearing impairment primarily is focused on an oral-aural approach, natural patterns of communication between parent and child will gradually disappear, which will have negative implications on the development of these children. If, instead, they are allowed to develop those means of communication that are easy for them to produce and to perceive, positive consequences have been registered on the development of communication and language, as well as on their socio-emotional and cognitive development. When these children have been given opportunities to become bilingual with a signed and a written and/or spoken language, it has enabled them to attend higher education, to have a qualified job and thereby a good life in the future.

Child↗
PubMed2003

[Living donor liver transplantation treatment of Wilson's disease complicated with neuropathy].

OBJECTIVE: To investigate living donor liver transplantation for Wilson disease with neurologic features. METHODS: From Jan 2001 to Mar 2003, fifteen cases of living donor liver transplantation were performed for Wilson Disease (WD), five of those were complicated with neurologic features. A retrospective analysis was given for cooper metabolism and neurologic features. RESULTS: All operation were living related liver transplantation and donors were mothers. Four left lobes with hepatic middle vein and one right lobe without hepatic middle vein were harvested from donors, and graft volume to recipient body weight ratio was 0.79 approximately 1.08. One patient occurred hepatic artery thrombosis and performed retransplantation later, the other recipients recovered satisfactorily. All patients showed Extrapyramidal sign and three patients companying with language handicap and dyskinesia alleviated postoperation follow-up between 2 and 16 months. All recipients are alive and remain well, and none have developed signs of recurrent WD. CONCLUSION: Living donor liver transplantation is effective treatment for WD complicated with nervous system symptom, ceruloplasmin is normal and Kayser-Fleischer ring and nervous system symptom are to various extents.

Adolescent↗
PubMed2005

"Diffusion-clinical mismatch" is associated with potential for early recovery of aphasia.

BACKGROUND: Diffusion-perfusion mismatch (perfusion-weighted imaging [PWI] abnormality minus diffusion-weighted imaging [DWI] abnormality) can identify candidates for acute stroke intervention, but PWI is often not obtainable. The authors hypothesized that language tests can predict volume of hypoperfusion, and thus mismatch, in acute left hemisphere stroke, and that the estimated mismatch can predict potential for early recovery of language. METHODS: A consecutive series of 81 patients with acute left hemisphere ischemic stroke underwent language testing within 1 day of MRI scans. Volumes of abnormality on PWI and DWI were measured without knowledge of language scores. Using tests that correlated well with PWI abnormality (oral naming and repetition), the authors computed an estimated PWI abnormality (ePWI) for each patient from a linear regression model and derived a diffusion-clinical percent mismatch ([ePWI-DWI/ePWI] x 100). The authors then tested the hypothesis that patients with > or =20% diffusion-clinical mismatch have a greater chance of short-term improvement in language by examining scores of the 23 patients with repeat testing within 1 week. RESULTS: Within-group comparisons: patients with > or =20% diffusion-clinical mismatch showed improvement in total language score within 1 week (Wilcoxon signed rank: p < 0.02), whereas patients without mismatch did not. Across-group comparison: patients with > or =20% mismatch showed more short-term improvement in language scores than those without mismatch (Mann-Whitney U: p < 0.05). CONCLUSIONS: Tests of oral naming or repetition can be used in patients with acute left hemisphere stroke to estimate perfusion-weighted imaging abnormality and compute a diffusion-clinical mismatch that may predict potential for short-term language improvement.

Adult↗