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PubMed2001

Developmental patterns of verbal and visuospatial spans.

This study presents developmental data for verbal and spatial memory tasks: Corsi's block-tapping test and Luria's verbal learning test. Norms have been collected from 275 primary and early secondary school children aged from 5 years, 4 months to 13 years, 6 months. Our results confirm a slow and constant improvement in performances over time, and the advantage of about 1.5 items of the verbal span over the spatial span supports the existence of developmental differences between separate memory systems. No significant sex difference was found even if a slight trend in verbal span favouring female subjects is present.

Adolescent↗

PubMed1992

Phonological error analysis, development and empirical evaluation.

A method of error analysis, designed to examine phonological and nonphonological reading and spelling processes, was developed from preliminary studies and theoretical background, including a linguistic model and the relationships between articulatory features of phonemes. The usefulness of this method as an assessment tool for phonological ability was tested on a group of normal subjects. The results from the error analysis helped clarify similarities and differences in phonological performance among the subjects and helped delineate differences between phonological performance in spelling (oral and written) and reading within the group of subjects. These results support the usefulness of this method of error analysis in assessing phonological ability. Also, these results support the position that phonological approximation of responses is an important diagnostic feature and merely cataloging errors as phonologically accurate or inaccurate is inadequate for assessing phonological ability.

Child↗

PubMed2006

Reading impairment and visual processing deficits in schizophrenia.

Individuals with schizophrenia show magnocellular visual pathway abnormalities similar to those described in dyslexia, predicting that reading disturbance should be a common concomitant of schizophrenia. To date, however, reading deficits have not been well established, and, in fact, reading is often thought to be normal in schizophrenia based upon results of tests such as the WRAT, which evaluate single word reading. This study evaluated "real world" reading ability in schizophrenia, relative to functioning of the magnocellular visual pathway. Standardized psychoeducational reading tests and contrast sensitivity measures were administered to 19 patients and 10 controls. Analyses of between group differences were further refined by classification of participants into reading vs. non-reading impaired groups using a priori and derived theoretical models. Patients with schizophrenia, as a group, showed highly significant impairments in reading (p<0.04-p<0.001), with particular deficits on tests of rate, comprehension and phonological awareness. Between 21% and 63% of patients met criteria for dyslexia depending upon diagnostic model vs. 0-20% of the controls. The degree of deficit correlated significantly with independent measures of magnocellular dysfunction. Reading impairment in schizophrenia reaches the level of dyslexia and is associated with compromised magnocellular processing as hypothesized. Findings related to symptoms, functioning and recommendations for reading ability assessment are discussed.

Adolescent↗

PubMed1981

Response of an agrammatic patient to a syntax stimulation program for aphasia.

A Syntax Stimulation Program (SSP) based on the findings of neurolinguistic studies of agrammatic aphasic patients was used to treat one patient with a three year history of severe agrammatism. The SSP is designed to elicit eight different sentence constructions at two levels of difficulty using a story completion technique. The patient received pre-, mid- and post-treatment testing with the Northwestern Syntax Screening Test (NSST) and the cookie theft picture description of the Boston Diagnostic Aphasia Examination (BDAE). With 10 1/2 weeks of treatment, the patient's NSST expressive scores improved from 0 to 21, and his BDAE picture description showed increased phrase length and use of grammatical constructions. In addition, with this special treatment, the patient was able to produce grammatical speech in spontaneous conversation. Thus, the SSP appears to have therapeutic merit in training syntactic skills in presumably stable agrammatic patients.

Adult↗

PubMed1997

Retrieval of old memories: the temporofrontal hypothesis.

Extensive neuropsychological testing is reported on two chronic patients with combined temporopolar and prefrontal damage, dominantly left-hemispheric, and, as control, one chronic patient with bi-hemispheric prefrontal damage. The principal finding is that combined temporofrontal damage, but not substantial prefrontal damage alone, results in marked retrograde memory deficits while leaving intelligence and new learning relatively unimpaired. Although their general world knowledge was good, the temporopolar patients demonstrated retrograde memory impairments on several tests of past events and faces of previously famous people. With respect to retrograde autobiographical memory, one of the temporopolar patients was severely impaired and the other was judged to be moderately impaired. The control patient appeared to be normal. These results, together with corresponding data from related single case and dynamic imaging studies, strongly support a crucial role of the temporofrontal junction area in the ecphory of old memories.

Adult↗

PubMed1985

Alexithymia. The development of a valid and reliable projective measure (the objectively scored Archetypal9 Test).

The aim of this study was to examine whether the Archetypal9 Test (AT9) could meet the need for a valid and reliable test with which to measure the alexithymic trait cluster. Participants in this study included 61 patients drawn from pain clinics in Montreal (Royal Victoria Hospital) and Detroit (Henry Ford Hospital) and 30 patients undergoing minor surgery at the Royal Victoria Hospital in Montreal. All 91 subjects took both the AT9 Test and the Clarke Vocabulary Scale. The results of the attempts at validation reveal that the objectively scored AT9 Test (SAT9) is a highly internally consistent instrument, that it has demonstrated construct validity, and that it can significantly discriminate between patient groups (pain patients and medical patients). The SAT9 is positively related to age, inversely related to occupational level, and uncorrelated with IQ (as measured by the Clarke Vocabulary Scale). The authors concluded that thus far, the SAT9 has proven to be a valid instrument which can be used to measure a central feature of alexithymia.

Adult↗

PubMed1997

The phonological loop in medicated patients with Parkinson's disease: presence of phonological similarity and word length effects.

OBJECTIVE: To test the verbal subsystem of Baddeley's working memory model (the phonological loop) in patients with Parkinson's disease. METHODS: Fifteen patients with idiopathic Parkinson's disease and 15 controls were tested with a span paradigm to assess the effects reflecting the functioning of the phonological loop: the phonological similarity effect (in verbal and visual presentation), and the word length effect (in visual presentation). RESULTS AND CONCLUSIONS: The patients did not show any dysfunction of the phonological loop, reflected by the presence of phonological similarity and word length effects, but had lower spans than controls. The implications of these results for the working memory model are discussed.

Aged↗

PubMed2006

The case for development of a new test of health literacy.

PURPOSE/OBJECTIVES: To review the need for reading assessments for patients with cancer, review existing reading assessment tools, and make a case for a new tool specific to patients with cancer. DATA SOURCES: Published articles, experiences, and discussions with published authors in the field of literacy. DATA SYNTHESIS: Valid and reliable tools that assess word recognition and comprehension exist for general use in health care. Word-recognition tests do not always predict comprehension, and a commonly used comprehension test has sections assessing only very low, second year of high school, and graduate-level skills. CONCLUSIONS: A new tool, developed specifically for patients with cancer, may better capture reading ability and comprehension. It is being evaluated for use in a clinical setting. IMPLICATIONS FOR NURSING: If nurses know their patients' reading levels, they can plan more effectively for teaching self-care and discussing decision making. Outcomes related to health and satisfaction may improve if poor readers are given materials they can understand.

Decision Making↗

PubMed1996

Development of capacities of communication and socialization in young deaf children: utility of a common assessment protocol for implanted or hearing aid equipped children.

Pediatric cochlear implantation has attracted a growing interest among health professionals, but it has also encountered opposition on the deaf community. It is therefore incumbent upon the medical teams that carry out this procedure to furnish scientific arguments demonstrating the benefits of this technique for the age group 2 to 4 years and its innocuousness for the child's later psychological development. With this in mind, we have elaborated an assessment protocol adapted to very young deaf children, regardless of whether they have implants or hearing aids. The present report describes two tests of the protocol, chosen because they meet needs which until now have been insufficiently, or not, met. The first of these tests aims at assessing, as early as the age of two, oral and gestual production thanks to sequential images. The second test is the most original element of our psychological protocol: analysis of the child's interactional attitudes through filmed game situations. The initial results from a group of children recently implanted and from another group equipped with hearing aids are presented. These children continue to be seen at regular intervals. It is reasonable to hope that this kind of study will afford objective arguments to the debate in progress.

Child↗

PubMed2006

What is the locus of the errorless-learning advantage?

In two experiments involving word-stem completion, an advantage was found for errorless over errorful-learning conditions, for both severely and moderately memory-impaired participants. This advantage did not depend on the implicit/explicit nature of the question asked. Additional tests showed that subsequent recognition of target items was good for both groups, but only in the absence of lures derived from participants' prior errors. Source-memory was shown to be virtually absent in the severely impaired group and only weakly present in the moderately impaired group. This combination of results suggests that preserved implicit memory, in the absence of explicit memory, is sufficient for an errorless-learning advantage to accrue.

Adult↗

PubMed1991

Contrasting subjective judgement and objective tests in the hearing-impaired.

The Hearing Performance Inventory (HPI, Giolas et al., 1979) was used to measure 21 moderately hearing-impaired persons' subjectively experienced problems in everyday listening. The HPI rating data show that the greatest problems are experienced on the dimensions 'understanding speech without visual cues', and 'perceived intensity' of sounds. 'Understanding speech with visual cues' has a high positive correlation with both 'social situation' and 'work situation' dimensions, whereas 'understanding speech without visual cues' correlates with 'social' and 'personal situation'. The correlations between the HPI and actual performance in the speechreading tests, and between the HPI and cognitive abilities that were assumed to be critical for speechreading ability, were also examined. It was found that vocabulary size, highly intercorrelated with guessing, was important to the 'social situation' dimension on the HPI. Guessing also constitutes an important cognitive predictor of speechreading skill. However, none of the HPI dimensions was directly related to objective communicative competence. Given the limitations of speechreading training, the data suggest that vocabulary and social skills should be focused on during communicative training.

Adult↗

PubMed1986

'Inner speech' in conduction aphasia.

It has been suggested by Kurt Goldstein, MD, that conduction aphasia is a disturbance of "inner speech." We tested this hypothesis in five patients who had conduction aphasia with similar speech disturbances. The patients were presented with pictures and were required to perform, without overt vocalization, comparisons of word length and homophonic and rhyming matches. Four patients successfully performed such judgments on words they could not vocalize, but one patient could not. These findings suggest that the hypothesis may have been correct for only a subgroup of conduction aphasics. The findings also provide evidence for heterogeneity within the class of conduction aphasia.

Aged↗

PubMed1994

Sentence comprehension in patients with Alzheimer's disease.

Twenty-three early-stage dementia of the Alzheimer type (DAT) patients and twenty-three control subjects were tested on a sentence-picture matching test containing nine different sentence types representing different levels of syntactic complexity. Subjects chose between drawings depicting a target sentence and a syntactic foil. Results indicated that DAT patients differed from control subjects on four of the nine sentence types. Performance of the patients was not poorer for sentences that were syntactically more complex, but was poorer for sentences that had two propositions as compared to one. Results are discussed in terms of a post-interpretative processing impairment in sentence comprehension in DAT.

Aged↗

PubMedDate not supplied

Two further investigations of autobiographical memory in semantic dementia.

A number of investigations in semantic dementia have documented better retrieval of recent personal events compared to those in the more distant past (Graham and Hodges, 1997). Westmacott et al. (2001) challenged this result, however, finding relative preservation of remote memories in a single case of semantic dementia when he was tested using family photographs. In Experiment 1, we tested two possible explanations for the discrepancy between the published papers: (a) that there is a significant effect of modality in autobiographical retrieval in semantic dementia (e.g., patients will show better, or even preserved, remote memory when tested on nonverbal, compared to verbal, tasks); and (b) that the distinct pattern seen between patients is attributable to the different methods adopted for scoring the episodic quality of the memories. A patient with semantic dementia, AM, produced autobiographical memories to both words and family photographs. These personal events were scored by two raters using the scoring method described by Westmacott et al. (2001) and that reported by Graham and Hodges (1997). It was found that AM showed similar levels of remote memory impairment regardless of whether the cue was verbal or nonverbal. In addition, significant effects of time were revealed in AM's performance on the verbal memory test, regardless of which method was used to score the memories. In Experiment 2, we investigated a related question: whether the relatively better retrieval of memories in semantic dementia could be due to over rehearsal of highly salient recent experiences? Four patients were tested on their ability to remember a recent event (either a trip to London or events from a Formula One Grand Prix race) using specially designed autobiographical questionnaires. It was found that all four were able to perform this task, although one patient showed evidence of some forgetting over three months, and another exhibited difficulty discriminating between two similar events. Together, the two experiments further confirm that patients with semantic dementia show a modality independent autobiographical memory deficit, with better retrieval of recent events.

Aged↗

PubMed1996

Cognitive skills associated with estrogen replacement in women with Alzheimer's disease.

To delineate putative cognitive effects of estrogen in women with Alzheimer's disease, we compared neuropsychological performances in three groups of patients with clinically diagnosed Alzheimer's disease: women receiving estrogen replacement therapy (n = 9), women not receiving replacement therapy (n = 27), and men (n = 26). Untreated women and men were matched by age, education, and duration of dementia symptoms to women receiving estrogen replacement. We hypothesized that treated women would have better scores on neuropsychological tasks. Results showed that women receiving hormonal therapy performed significantly better than other women on some, but not all, tasks; on no task did women receiving estrogen score significantly worse. The largest group difference was on the Boston Naming Test, a semantic memory task previously shown to be more impaired in women with Alzheimer's disease than in men with this diagnosis. Of tests considered in a discriminant analysis, the naming task was the only neuropsychological variable to distinguish between the two women's groups. Mean differences between estrogen-treated women and men were small and were not statistically significant. Findings support the hypothesis that estrogen therapy for women with Alzheimer's disease is associated with better cognitive skills and that previously noted gender-associated differences in Alzheimer's disease may reflect a state of acquired estrogen deficiency among women with this disorder.

Aged↗

PubMed1991

Bias in interpretation of ambiguous sentences related to threat in anxiety.

In the 1st of 2 experiments, currently clinically anxious, recovered clinically anxious, and normal control subjects were presented with a mixture of unambiguous and ambiguous sentences; both threatening and nonthreatening interpretations were possible for the latter. A subsequent recognition-memory test indicated that the currently anxious subjects were more likely than normal control and recovered anxious subjects to interpret the ambiguous sentences in a threatening fashion rather than in a nonthreatening fashion. This suggests that the biased interpretation of ambiguity found in currently anxious subjects reflected their anxious mood state. A 2nd experiment established that the difference in interpretative processes between currently anxious and control subjects was not due to response bias and that the interpretative bias was a reasonably general one.

Anxiety Disorders↗

PubMed2005

Disambiguation and mapping of new word meanings by individuals with intellectual/ developmental disabilities.

Wilkinson and Green (1998) reported that differences in the procedure by which new words were introduced to learners with cognitive impairments significantly affected their accuracy in later tests of receptive understanding of word meanings. However, a limited sample and no control group rendered the data preliminary. Here, I replicated and extended the research. First, a control group of preschool children, matched on receptive vocabulary age, was compared to individuals with intellectual disability of unspecified origin. Second, performance was also evaluated in three matched groups of varying etiology: unspecified, Down syndrome, and autism spectrum disorders. Performance on receptive word matching differed between preschool children and their matched experimental groups as well as among matched etiological groups.

Child↗

PubMedDate not supplied

Changes in number and type of errors on repetition of acoustically distorted sentences as a function of age in normal children.

The intelligibility of recorded sentences, distorted by binaural switching, interruption, and low-pass filtering, was investigated in 53 children ranging in age from five to eleven and in adults. All had normal hearing. The sentence vocabulary was pretested for comprehension, articulation errors were evaluated in a way so as not to influence test results, and length and structure of the sentences were controlled. The results indicated that although the performance of children increased with age, the 11-year-old group had not attained adult performance. Error analyses showed that most errors for all age groups were acoustically unrelated to the distorted message, although adults made more acoustically related errors than did children. When children made errors in sentences, other errors (e.g., substitutions) were made to preserve the syntax or semantic integrity of the message.

Adult↗