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The phonologic-deep dyslexia continuum and its relation to concomitant speech and language symptoms in aphasia
Get PDFIndividuals with aphasia demonstrate a wide range of reading and writing deficits, including impaired letter and word recognition, difficulty repeating words and text, difficulty reading aloud, poor reading comprehension, and spelling impairments (Basso, 2003; Roth & Worthington, 2005). One theory used to explain the nature of reading and writing impairments in aphasia is based on a “modularity assumption,” where domain-specific modules make up complex cognitive functions including language processing (Basso, 2003, p. 108). Depending on which modules of this system are impaired due to brain injury, and which modules are functioning, patients with aphasia will have different impairments of their reading and writing skills, often leading to a specific type of dyslexia (Beeson, Maglorire, & Robey, R., 2005; Cherney, 2005; Whitworth, et al., 2005). Damage to the non-lexical route results in “phonological dyslexia” in which case individuals cannot perform grapheme to phoneme conversion and thus must rely on whole word recognition to access meaning. The hallmark of phonological dyslexia is that reading of non-words is significantly more impaired than real word reading. Individuals who suffer from “deep dyslexia” have a disruption not only in the non-lexical route but also in the lexical route, and therefore cannot use whole word recognition to access meaning. Deep dyslexia is characterized by semantic errors, substitution of visually similar words for target words, and difficulty reading function words compared to nouns and verbs (Coltheart et al., 1980, Basso, 2003; Brookshire, 2007)
Measuring Lexical Diversity in Adults with Aphasia
Get PDFThe cardinal deficit of people with aphasia (PWA) is anomia (Goodglass & Wingfield, 1997). This deficit is believed to be indicative of disruption of two cognitive processes: (i) accessing a semantic description of the target concept, and/or (ii) retrieval of a fully phonologically specified representation (e.g., Dell, 1986). During discourse, in addition to these core processes that serve word retrieval, production also depends on “…factors external to the lexicon…” (p. 169, Wilshire & McCarthy, 2002). The latter processes might influence the selection of lexical items based on syntactic, structural, and/or pragmatic criteria that can be either automatic or meta-cognitive
Attentive Reading and Constrained Summarization (ARCS) in two women with moderate-severe Wernicke’s Type Aphasia
Get PDFWord-finding difficulty, a hallmark of aphasia, can substantially affect communication. Individuals with Wernicke’s type aphasia exhibit discourse characterized by word-retrieval impairments including neologisms and paraphasias (M. Nicholas, Obler, Albert, & Helm-Estabrooks, 1985; Silver & Halpern, 1992). Recently, evidence suggests that discourse level treatments improve word-retrieval processing in people with aphasia (for a review, see Boyle, 2011). The current feasibility study examined the use of a cognitive-linguistic discourse therapy, Attentive Reading and Constrained Summarization (ARCS) (Rogalski & Edmonds, 2008), as a means of improving word retrieval in two women with Wernicke’s type aphasia
Intensive phonomotor rehabilitaiton of anomia in seventeen individuals with aphasia
Get PDFThe purpose of this Phase II clinical rehabilitation research is to investigate whether a phonological treatment, which uses real- and non-words comprised of low phonotactic probability and high neighborhood density phoneme sequences, will improve word retrieval in 30 subjects with left hemisphere lesion and aphasia. The short term objective, and purpose of this CAC presentation, is to present data from the large scale trial from 17 individuals who have completed the intensive treatment program. The treatment program is a logical advance on existing Phase I and Phase II clinical rehabilitation work (Kendall et al 2003, Kendall et al 2006a, Kendall et al 2006b, Kendall et al 2006c, Kendall et al 2008) and is motivated by an interactive activation model (Dell, 1986) and parallel distributed processing model of phonology (Nadeau, 2001)
Thematic Role Priming of Related Verbs: Effects of Multiple Primes
No full textPrime-prime-target priming has been used to examine the effects of multiple influences on processing of target words. The present study aims to investigate automatic and attentional factors in previous findings, using noun-noun-verb triads filling agent, patient, and action roles in situation schemas (e.g. thief, money, steal) in a continuous priming paradigm in which targets of interest are unknown to participants. Results replicate priming of paired nouns preceding related verbs but do not suggest an additive effect for two nouns versus one. The absence of additive facilitation suggests that attentional processes may have been a component of effects in previous research
Knowledge of Aphasia: Results of a Survey
No full textKnowledge of aphasia was assessed for 113 adults living in a stroke belt state who had indicated they had heard about aphasia with a 13-item aphasia knowledge quiz. Results indicated respondents knew aphasia was a communication problem caused by stroke that affected verbal functions, but less than half the respondents were aware of the multimodal impact of the disorder. Scores on the aphasia knowledge quiz suggested hearing about aphasia does not translate to knowledge about aphasia, its symptoms, or its causes. Results of the study provide helpful guidelines for increasing public awareness of aphasia through education and training
The time-course of lexical activation during sentence comprehension in aphasia
Get PDFWe present a cross-modal priming study using simple active sentence constructions to map out the time-course of lexical activation throughout a sentence. Preliminary findings suggest that in contrast to our unimpaired listeners who demonstrated immediate initial activation of a lexical item and a linear, relatively gradual decay, our participants with agrammatic aphasia demonstrated a pattern of late initial activation, and then immediate decay. We surmise that this delayed lexical access coupled with the accelerated time-course of decay contributes to what appears to be a disrupted integration process
Use of semantic feature analysis in group aphasia treatment: extension and expansion
Get PDFFour participants with varying etiologies and severities of aphasia (all chronic phase) received group therapy using semantic feature analysis (SFA) during discourse. Pre- to post-treatment analyses examined lexical retrieval and discourse changes with associated effect sizes. We hypothesized that lexical retrieval and/or overall communicative effectiveness would improve. Results provide support for these hypotheses and suggest that individuals with differing types of aphasia derive different benefits from this protocol. One participant, also involved in a previous study of group SFA, enabled comparison of treatment effects with and without homework
The Effects of Sample Size and Guessing on Parameter Recovery in IRT Modeling of Aphasia Test Data
No full textIn this simulation study we sought to identify the most appropriate IRT measurement model for aphasia tests requiring 2-alternative forced-choice responses, exemplified by the Pyramids and Palm Trees Test. We also sought to estimate the minimum sample size necessary for estimating these models, under assumptions based on relevant empirical data. The results suggest that incorporating the assumption of correct guessing into the model improves performance. However, none of the models tested performed particularly well in any of the sample size conditions, likely because the test was very easy for most respondents, and guessing had a very large influence on performance
Developing a standardized measure of short-term memory and syntactic complexity: results from subtests of the CRTT-R
No full textShort-term memory (STM) effects have shown to be distinguishable from other working memory components supporting complex computations/central executive functions. To develop a measure capable of assessing the effects of STM and linguistic computations on sentence processing, effects of syntactic complexity and padding were investigated with the Computerized Revised Token Test –Revised in individuals with aphasia and control participants. Off-line measures revealed clear effects of both factors. The expected interaction of complexity and padding and overadditive effects for individuals with aphasia were not found. An effect of complexity on word errors in passive sentences for individuals was shown