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PubMed2005

Increase in epinephrine excretion is associated with cognitive decline in elderly men: MacArthur studies of successful aging.

BACKGROUND: High stress hormone levels are associated with increased risk of cognitive decline in elderly individuals. However, the effect of late-life changes in stress hormone levels on cognitive decline risk has not been examined. Our objective was to investigate whether increase over time in urinary epinephrine excretion in older adults was associated with subsequent cognitive decline. METHODS: Measurements were made on 154 high-functioning men and women, 70-79 years of age, in 1988, 1991, and 1995. Twelve-hour overnight urinary excretion of epinephrine (normalized by creatinine excretion to adjust for body size) was recorded in 1988 and 1991. Cognitive functioning was assessed in 1991 and 1995 by summary scores based on standard tests of language, memory, abstraction, spatial recognition, and spatial construction. RESULTS: Compared to individuals whose epinephrine excretion decreased between 1988 and 1991, the individuals whose epinephrine excretion increased over the same period had greater subsequent declines in summary cognitive scores between 1991 and 1995. After adjusting for baseline epinephrine, baseline cognitive function, and relevant covariates, and stratifying by gender, increases in urine epinephrine were positively associated with cognitive decline only in men. CONCLUSIONS: We conclude that increase in urinary excretion of epinephrine predicts subsequent cognitive decline in older men.

Aged↗
PubMed2005

Discrepancies between the California Verbal Learning Test: Children's Version and the Children's Category Test after pediatric traumatic brain injury.

One hundred 9-16-year-old children with traumatic brain injury (TBI) completed the California Verbal Learning Test-Children's Version (CVLT-C) and the Children's Category Test (CCT) within 1 year after injury. Performance contrasts between these two instruments that were unusually large (> 16 T score points) were about as common in this clinical sample as in the standardization sample of both instruments. However, relatively poor performance on the CVLT-C as compared to the CCT was associated with prolonged coma and lower scores on the Processing Speed index of the Wechsler Intelligence Scale for Children-Third Edition. It is concluded that a relative weakness on the CVLT-C is more likely to reflect cerebral compromise after pediatric TBI than is a relative weakness on the CCT.

Adolescent↗
PubMed1980

Patterns of perceptual and academic deficits related to early chronic otitis media.

The effects of chronic otitis media during the first three years of life on developing auditory processing skills were examined. Two groups of children with auditory processing deficits were compared in areas of language development, intellectual factors, auditory processing skills, and academic capabilities. One group of children with auditory processing deficits had a history of severe chronic otitis media during the first three years of life, whereas a second group had auditory processing deficits but no history of early middle ear infections. The results indicate that subjects who had a history of chronic otitis media were slower in developing word combinations, had depressed verbal intelligence scores, manifested pervasive auditory processing deficits, and were significantly poorer in reading. A profile has been constructed that permits early detection of the child at risk.

Achievement↗
PubMed1988

Effects of prism-induced, accommodative convergence stress on reading comprehension test scores.

Forty-eight binocular, non-presbyopic optometry students, unfamiliar with the purposes of the study, were provided with several matched passages of material to read in a given time sequence. Multiple choice questions were to be answered at the completion of each reading passage. These were administered in a randomly counterbalanced presentation (a b b a) utilizing either base-in prism or plano lenses in spectacle form. The results of this experiment showed a statistically significant lower comprehension rate with the base-in prism lenses in place as evidenced by fewer correct answers to the questions following the reading passages. This effect was found to be greater for the longer reading passages followed by a greater number of questions to be answered.

Accommodation, Ocular↗
PubMed1994

Attention mechanisms mediate the syntactic priming effect in auditory word identification.

The syntactic priming effect and the involvement of attention in that process were investigated by testing identification of white noise-masked Hebrew words. Targets were either syntactically congruent or syntactically incongruent with the structure of the sentence. Relative to a neutral condition, similar facilitation and inhibition was found for congruent and incongruent targets, respectively. When syntactic congruency was blocked, the inhibition was attenuated, whereas the facilitation remained the same. A 350-ms silent interstimulus interval between context and target increased inhibition without affecting facilitation. We suggest that both the facilitation and the inhibition effects of syntactic priming are based on a veiled controlled process of generating expectations. The inhibition results from a controlled process of reevaluation that requires additional attention resources.

Acoustic Stimulation↗
PubMed2005

Safety and cognitive effect of frontal DC brain polarization in healthy individuals.

BACKGROUND: Data from the human motor cortex suggest that, depending on polarity, direct current (DC) brain polarization can depress or activate cortical neurons. Activating effects on the frontal lobe might be beneficial for patients with frontal lobe disorders. This phase 1 study tested the safety of frontal DC, including its effects on frontal and other brain functions. METHODS: The authors applied 20 minutes of anodal, cathodal, or sham DC to the left prefrontal cortex in three groups of right-handed subjects and looked for effects on global measures of processing and psychomotor speed, emotion, and verbal fluency, a measure of local cortical function. In one experiment (n = 30), the authors tested before and after 1 mA DC and monitored EEG in 9 subjects. In two other experiments using 1 mA (n = 43) and 2 mA (n = 30), the authors tested before and then starting 5 minutes after the onset of DC. RESULTS: All subjects tolerated DC well. There were no significant effects on performance with 1 mA DC. At 2 mA, verbal fluency improved significantly with anodal and decreased mildly with cathodal DC. There were no clinically significant effects on the other measures. CONCLUSIONS: Limited exposure to direct current polarization of the prefrontal cortex is safe and can enhance verbal fluency selectively in healthy subjects. As such, it deserves consideration as a procedure to improve frontal lobe function in patients.

Adult↗
PubMed2005

Paralinguistic processing in children with callosal agenesis: emergence of neurolinguistic deficits.

Recent research revealed impaired processing of both nonliteral meaning and affective prosody in adults with agenesis of the corpus callosum (ACC) and normal intelligence. Since normal children have incomplete myelination of the corpus callosum, it was hypothesized that paralanguage deficits in children with ACC would be less apparent relative to their peers. The Familiar and Novel Language Comprehension Test (FANL-C) and Prosody Test were given to 18 children with ACC and normal intelligence and 17 controls matched for age (7-13 years), education, and IQ (83-122). When controlling for age, children with ACC were significantly poorer in comprehension of the precise meaning of both literal and nonliteral items on the FANL-C. Adults with ACC had previously been shown to have difficulty only on nonliteral items. The effect size for nonliteral comprehension in children with ACC was smaller than that seen in adults. There was only a trend for the child ACC group to perform worse on the recognition of affective prosody. Thus, while deficits in paralinguistic processing were apparent, children with ACC were not as clearly different from age peers as adults, and were equally deficient at comprehending literal and nonliteral expressions. The differences in results between adults and children with ACC are thought to reflect incomplete callosal development in normal children, and the importance of the corpus callosum in the early stages of the development of the ability to process literal language.

Adolescent↗
PubMed2004

Autistic children's use of semantic common sense and theory of mind: a comparison with typical and mentally retarded children.

To compare Japanese autistic children's use of semantic knowledge and theory of mind with mentally retarded and typically developing children's, they were tested on their comprehension of active and passive sentences and false belief understanding. Autistic children were sensitive to plausibility levels of semantic bias as were 4-year-olds with typical development when comprehending sentences, although impaired in belief understanding as compared with mentally retarded children and typically developing 5-year-olds. Children's sentence comprehension had no association with belief understanding. Results suggest that autistic children with certain verbal intelligence can utilize semantic common sense to comprehend sentences as can typically developing children and that the ability to comprehend sentences is relatively independent of theory of mind.

Adolescent↗
PubMedDate not supplied

[Working memory abilities and the severity of phonological disorders].

BACKGROUND: Working memory. AIM: To verify the performance of working memory abilities and their relation with the severity of phonological disorders. METHOD: 45 children, with ages between 5.0 and 7.11 years, with evolutional phonological disorders (EFD), 17 female and 18 male, were evaluated. All subjects were assessed using the Child Phonological Evaluation proposed by Yavas et al. (1991). The severity of the disorder was determined by the Percentage of Correct Consonants (PCC) proposed by Shriberg and Kwiatkowski (1982), classifying the phonological disorder as severe, moderate-severe, average-moderate and average. After that, subtest 5 of the Psycholinguistic Abilities Test (ITPA--Bogossian & Santos, 1977) and the non-word repetition test (Kessler, 1997) were applied. RESULTS: After analyzing the data according the statistical tests of Kruskal Wallis and Duncan, it was verified that the performance of moderate-severe and severe individuals in the non-word repetition test was inferior to that of average-moderate and average individuals. However, performance results in the digit repetition test did not present a positive correlation with severity. CONCLUSION: The performance of phonological memory has a relation with the severity of phonological disorders. This allows us to accept the idea that the phonologic memory is related to speech production. Regarding the central executor, the results indicate that the performance in digit repetition, used to assess the central executor, did not present a correlation with the severity of the disorder. This can be justified by the fact that the central executor is more directly related to vocabulary acquisition and is responsible for processing and storing information.

Analysis of Variance↗
PubMedDate not supplied

[Boston Naming Test: performance of Brazilian population from São Paulo].

BACKGROUND: The Boston Naming Test is frequently used to evaluate naming deficits. The scores used in Brazil have been the same as those used in the American version. In the case of individuals with poor schooling associated to cerebral lesions, a frequent situation in our country, one runs the risk of considering a poor performance as a deficit, what in fact is a consequence of lack of knowledge and cultural deprivation. AIM: to evaluate the influence of age and schooling in the naming ability of normal individuals, from São Paulo city, in a visual confrontation task. METHOD: 133 normal volunteers, aged between 28 and 70 years. RESULTS: the scores obtained in spontaneous naming were [mean (SD)]: [39.4 (9.8)]; per age group: 28 - 50 years [39.5 (10.5)], 51 - 70 years [39.1 (9.1)]; per schooling: 1 - 4 years [33.7 (9.6)], 5 - 8 years [36.6 (7.9)], 9 or more [47.4 (6)]. The comparison between the performances of the two age groups did not reveal any significant differences. Higher educational level determined a better performance both in spontaneous and facilitated naming. Cues of stimuli were necessary for the individuals to access the correct name, especially for the group with lower educational level. Phonemic cues, on the other hand, benefited individuals with more than eight years of formal education. The suggested cut-off score for the test to be use in Brazil was calculated by the ROC curve analysis and based on the comparison between normal and aphasic individuals. CONCLUSION: schooling was the variable that had the greatest influence on performance. Although the level of difficulty of a few items may, to some extent, differ between English and Portuguese, the translated version of the BNT can be used without any adaptations for the Brazilian population, provided that the level of education is taken in consideration when interpreting the results.

Adult↗
PubMed2003

Memory in children with temporal or extra-temporal excisions.

Memory was assessed before and after surgery in 44 children and adolescents with focal epilepsy who underwent either right temporal, left temporal or extra-temporal excisions. Measures included tests of verbal (story recall, and verbal list learning) and visually mediated (recall of a complex design, face recognition) memory. Changes in children's memory from pre- to post-operative assessment were examined and individual differences in outcome were evaluated. Although substantial variability existed in performance, no group differences or post-operative changes were found for measures of verbal memory or design recall. For face recognition, all groups improved after surgery, although children with right temporal resections performed more poorly than the other groups. Finally, with the exception of face recognition, no material-specific effects were observed before or after surgery.

Adolescent↗
PubMed2006

Performance of African American preschool and kindergarten students on the expressive vocabulary test.

PURPOSE: To examine the validity of the Expressive Vocabulary Test (EVT; K. Williams, 1997) for assessing the expressive vocabulary skills of African American students. METHOD/RESULTS: One hundred sixty-five African American preschool and kindergarten students were administered the EVT. The mean EVT score for these African American students was 96.44 (SD = 11.42), which is not appreciably lower than the standardized mean of 100 (SD=15). CLINICAL IMPLICATIONS: Scores were normally distributed, indicating that the EVT is culturally fair and appropriate for use with some African American preschool and kindergarten children as part of an early screening battery. The importance of culturally fair vocabulary measures is discussed relative to this population.

Black or African American↗
PubMed1987

Understanding: a function of short-term memory?

We describe our investigations of the sentence comprehension abilities of 2 patients with a severe impairment in their auditory verbal short-term memory (conduction aphasia). Both were capable of comprehending a range of sentences, even when adequate comprehension was dependent upon the processing of order-dependent syntactic information rather than the utilization of semantic knowledge. Thus they performed satisfactorily on tests using plausibly reversible subject and object constituents with either active or passive verb phrases or prepositional phrases. Both, however, were impaired on sentences which departed from normal conversational conventions in terms of their reference to the order of event occurrence, or to the subject and object of an array. They were also very poor at performing comparative judgements, even when these involved a simple intrinsic attribute such as colour. These findings are discussed in terms of the role of auditory verbal short-term memory in backing up and back-tracking over spoken information when conditions preclude the immediate understanding of auditory-verbal information.

Adult↗
PubMed1993

Alexia in dementia of the Alzheimer's type.

The reading aloud of single words in 16 subjects with dementia of the Alzheimer's type (DAT) was compared with the performance of control subjects. The assessment included a computerised test-battery designed to assess word recognition ability and the efficiency of the two underlying reading strategies; the lexical and the non-lexical strategy. The DAT patients had severe difficulties in word recognition ability. Both accuracy score and reaction time were significantly impaired compared with the results in the control group. Furthermore, the results demonstrated that both the lexical and the non-lexical reading strategies were impaired. There was a significant correlation between reading performance and severity of dementia. However, no significant association between reading performance and age of onset or family history of dementia could be observed.

Age of Onset↗
PubMed2003

Do the reading disabilities of children with cleft fit into current models of developmental dyslexia?

OBJECTIVE: The purpose of this study was to determine whether the reading problems of children with cleft fit models of developmental dyslexia. DESIGN: The study compared children with nonsyndromic cleft lip and palate who had reading disability (n = 46) with those who did not have reading disability (n = 46). The children were matched for age, sex, and grade. The two groups were compared (t tests) on measures of verbal expression, phonemic awareness, and rapid naming. Also, regression analyses compared the relative relationships of these variables to reading disability. PARTICIPANTS: Children were selected from 154 patients originally screened. RESULTS: Children with reading disability scored significantly lower on rapid naming and verbal expression, with no differences found on phonemic awareness. Rapid naming was shown to have the most significant association with reading disability. CONCLUSION: Children with nonsyndromic cleft lip and palate show symptoms similar to a naming-memory deficit model of developmental dyslexia. Reading treatment should avoid sight word approaches and focus on oral phonics treatment.

Anomia↗
PubMed2006

Distinguishing source memory and item memory: brain potentials at encoding and retrieval.

Vivid memory for an episode generally includes memory for a central object or event plus memory for background context or source information. To assess neural differences between source and item memory, we used event-related potentials (ERPs) to monitor relevant memory processes at both encoding and retrieval. Participants fluent in Chinese studied Chinese words superimposed on a square or circular background during the study phase, followed by a 1-min delay. Then, memory was tested for both the words (items) and the corresponding background (source), or, in other blocks, tested for the words alone. ERPs to study-phase words differed as a function of whether the word was later remembered. These Dm effects in the interval from 400 to 600 ms, however, did not differ according to whether or not source was remembered. In contrast, ERPs to test-phase words showed clear old/new effects that did differ across conditions. When both item and source were remembered accurately, old/new effects emerged earlier and were larger in amplitude than when source memory was either incorrect or not queried. These results demonstrate that encoding processes indexed by ERPs may have primarily reflected encoding of the visual and semantic properties of these words, stressing item memory over source memory. Retrieval processes indexed by ERPs, in contrast, likely reflected a combination of item retrieval, source retrieval, and related processing engaged when people were remembering words seen earlier.

Adolescent↗
PubMed1995

Phonological errors in aphasic naming: comprehension, monitoring and lexicality.

This paper investigates the production of phonological errors in aphasic naming, examining the relationship between these errors and deficits in comprehension. The predictions of Dell and O'Seaghda's (1991) computational model of speech production were tested by lesioning. The set of lesioned models demonstrated a strong correlation between proportion of phonologically related errors in naming and comprehension accuracy. In contrast, no correlation between proportion of phonological errors in naming and comprehension accuracy was found for a group of fifteen aphasics. This paper also examines monitoring behaviours, such as the presence of self-corrections and interrupted responses, again finding no relationship with auditory comprehension. There was also no evidence for a lexical bias in the phonological errors for these aphasic subjects. Phonologically related errors were argued to be words only by chance; this was supported by the fact that they occurred more frequently on short words than long words, and that the proportion of real word errors was not significantly different to that observed in a pseudocorpus of errors. We conclude that a production-based monitor would be compatible with these results but that any comprehension-based monitor is not reliably employed by some or all of the aphasic subjects examined here. Additionally, these data are incompatible with models of language processing where speech input and output share the same processing components.

Adult↗
PubMed1990

Younger and older adults' use of mental models as representations for text materials.

Recent work suggests that formation and use of mental model (representations of situations described) is an integral part of discourse comprehension. In an experiment comparing younger and older adults on this aspect of text comprehension, subjects heard readings of a list of sentences and took a forced-choice recognition test. The test contained 2 types of distractors with an equal degree of verbatim similarity to the target sentences. One type described the same situation as the corresponding target sentence; the other did not. If mental models are an integral part of text representation formed at encoding, then a large number of confusions of the first, but not the second, type of distractor with the target sentence would be obtained. Younger and older adults showed this pattern to equal degrees. These data are consistent with those indicating that linguistic competence remains stable over the adult years (cf. Light, 1988).

Adolescent↗