The occurrence of paraphasias in the spontaneous speech of children with an acquired aphasia

Two children with an acquired aphasia were observed during the recovery process. In the spontaneous speech, paraphasias belonging to different categories, such as neologisms, verbal paraphasias, and literal paraphasias, were found. Especially with regard to neologisms the time of investigation was very important. In addition, one child with a phonemic jargon aphasia and one child with a fluent aphasia and empty speech were observed. These observations implicate a modification of the current clinical picture of childhood aphasia. Some aspects are discussed in relation to adult aphasia.     

Linguistic and other psychological aspects of paroxysmal aphasia

A case of paroxysmal aphasia is reported. Aphasic spells occurred, in this patient, without modification in consciousness and without involvement of behaviors others than those related to oral and written speech and language. Longer spells successively recapitulated the clinical pictures of global, Wernicke's, conduction, and amnestic aphasia. Besides aphasiological evaluations, neurological, psychometrical, electroencephalographical, and CT-scan documents were obtained. The discussion bears on four main points: the linguistic characteristics of paroxysmal aphasia as compared to those of aphasias of other etiologies; Pierre Marie's oneness doctrine of aphasia; the mutual relationships of language and thought (in aphasia); the affective experience lived by one with severe aphasia, with special reference to the notion of anosognosia.     

Sequences of phonemic approximations in aphasia

The trends of sequences of phonemic approximations to a single target were studied in three types of aphasia (Broca's, conduction, and Wernicke's), as gathered in five tasks (spontaneous speech, repetition of meaningful words, repetition of nonsense words, reading aloud, and automatized sequences). A phonemic error ratio was defined in order to quantify the distance between each approximation of a given sequence and its target. The results of a computer analysis based on this ratio were analyzed according to three parameters. A study of three types of patients revealed that conduction aphasics exhibited the most regular trend toward the target in sequences of phonemic approximations; the analysis of the various tasks indicated that sequences produced in repetition by conduction aphasics form an exception to the regularity of this trend, and an examination of the various lengths of sequences indicated that longer sequences showed a less decisive trend toward the target than shorter sequences. The discussion bears on some theoretical aspects of the phonological production mechanism and its control: the initial strength and permanence of the internal representation of the target emerge as important factors required for the good functioning of this mechanism.     

Neologistic jargon aphasia: A case report

This study examined aspects of speech produced by an aphasic subject with neologistic jargon. Grammatical category, syllabic structure, and phonemic characteristics of neologisms, paraphasias, and correct productions were analyzed and compared. Results tended to confirm an anomic component in this type of aphasia and to support a role for the postactivation of phonemic units from prior utterances in the phonemic composition of some neologistic productions. In opposition to prior claims, however, the results also showed a striking similarity between neologisms and paraphasias, suggesting that similar mechanisms may be involved in both types of aphasic error.     

Hesitation and the production of verbal paraphasias and neologisms in jargon aphasia.

Techniques of hesitation analysis taken from studies of normal speakers were applied to the speech of a jargon aphasic. Neologisms were found to follow pauses indicating a word-finding difficulty. Other language functions—phonology, morphology, and syntax—appeared unimpaired, and further analyses of the linguistic and temporal characteristics indicated a single functional disorder in which there is a failure in the mechanisms which associate word-sounds with word-meanings. The patient strategically adapts to this functional impairment by substituting a neologism when lexical search fails. The source of a large class of neologisms, it is hypothesized, is a device which quasirandomly combines English phonemes in a phonotactically regular way. The implications for recovery patterns in jargon aphasia are discussed; and the implications of this case for models of normal language production are explored.     

Language in right-handers with right-hemisphere lesions: A preliminary study including anatomical, genetic, and social factors

A comprehensive test battery was devised to study the effects of right hemisphere lesions on the speech and language of “nonaphasic” dextrals. Data were thus obtained for 62 subjects, 20 of them neurologically healthy and 42 with a focal right hemisphere lesion resulting from a cerebro-vascular accident. A preliminary global analysis of these data is reported. Anomalies were observed in 33 brain-damaged subjects. Although discreet in all cases, these anomalies were shown to have various degrees of severity. Given the population submitted to this study, the subject most likely to show such anomalies was defined, genetically, as a right-handed adult with a family history of ambidextrality or left-handedness and, socially, as one with a relatively limited education. The implications of these findings are discussed together with the problem of the anatomo-clinical correlations of language disorders resulting from right hemisphere lesions in “nonaphasic” dextrals.     

A case of acquired aphasia and convulsive disorder: some linguistic aspects of recovery and breakdown

Among the cases of acquired aphasia and convulsive disorder several children are reported to have experienced more than one aphasic period. We present such a case in more detail, with emphasis on some characteristics of spontaneous speech. The occurrence of paraphasias, and in particular of neologisms, appeared to be associated with language recovery and breakdown. At the beginning of the period of recovery, a rapid and total disappearance of neologisms was observed, while only literal paraphasias remained. A period of language breakdown was preceded by the return of neologisms. The process was not influenced by drug therapy.     

An information processing theory of aspects of the development of weight seriation in children

Children varying in age from six to 12 years were video-tape recorded while trying to seriate seven blocks according to weight with the aid of a scale. The typical behavior patterns that Piaget first described for the stages of intellectual development on this task were observed. Our protocols are analyzed in terms of stage specific base strategies coupled with a mechanism for translating them into task specific production systems. The actual simulation programs, written as production systems in a specially constructed language, BG, are evaluated in terms of how well they regenerate the protocols.     

Differential effectiveness of explicit verbal feedback on children's communication skills

In order to specify by which combination of content and form dimensions the explicit verbal feedback comes to be most effective in enhancing communication skills, a training experiment was designed where both dimensions were factorially manipulated. Forty children (mean age, 5–10) were randomly assigned to one of four treatment conditions: Interrogative Cognitive feedback, Declarative Cognitive feedback, Interrogative Perceptual feedback, and Declarative Perceptual feedback. The Cognitive type of feedback specified the successive cognitive steps underlying the comparison activity whereas the Perceptual type of feedback stressed only the necessity of describing perceptual differences when communicating. These two contents of feedback were either provided by a set of standardized questions or of declarative statements, after each trial of a speaking training task. Subjects were given a pretest, and immediate and delayed posttests comprised of a speaking task and a listening generalization task. A 2 (Contents) × 2 (Forms) × 2 (Tasks) × 2 (Post-tests) analysis of variance showed that all subjects performed significantly better on the speaking task than on the listening generalization task and that subjects in the Interrogative Cognitive condition performed better than subjects in the three other conditions, on both post-test tasks. Results emphasize the mutual facilitating effects of the Interrogative Form and the Cognitive Content of explicit feedback and are discussed in terms of the generalization and stability of the induced learning.     

Does language shape thought? Mandarin and English speakers' conceptions of time

Does the language you speak affect how you think about the world? This question is taken up in three experiments. English and Mandarin talk about time differently--English predominantly talks about time as if it were horizontal, while Mandarin also commonly describes time as vertical. This difference between the two languages is reflected in the way their speakers think about time. In one study, Mandarin speakers tended to think about time vertically even when they were thinking for English (Mandarin speakers were faster to confirm that March comes earlier than April if they had just seen a vertical array of objects than if they had just seen a horizontal array, and the reverse was true for English speakers). Another study showed that the extent to which Mandarin-English bilinguals think about time vertically is related to how old they were when they first began to learn English. In another experiment native English speakers were taught to talk about time using vertical spatial terms in a way similar to Mandarin. On a subsequent test, this group of English speakers showed the same bias to think about time vertically as was observed with Mandarin speakers. It is concluded that (1) language is a powerful tool in shaping thought about abstract domains and (2) one's native language plays an important role in shaping habitual thought (e.g., how one tends to think about time) but does not entirely determine one's thinking in the strong Whorfian sense.     

Perception and production of tone in aphasia

An acoustical and perceptual study of lexical tone was conducted to evaluate the extent and nature of tonal disruption in aphasia. The language under investigation was Thai, a tone language which has five lexical tones--mid, low, falling, high, and rising. Subjects included six left brain-damaged aphasics (two Broca's, one transcortical motor, one global, one conduction, one Wernicke), one right brain-damaged nonaphasic, one cerebellar dysarthric, and five normals. High-quality tape recordings of each subject's productions of a minimal set of five, monosyllabic Thai words were presented to 10 adult Thai listeners for identification. Results from the phonemic identification tests indicated that tone production is relatively spared in aphasic patients with unilateral left hemisphere lesions. The performance of the global aphasic, however, was considerably below normal. Patterns of tonal confusions further revealed that the performance of all aphasics, except the global, differed from that of normal speakers primarily in degree rather than in kind. Tonal contrasts were signaled at a high level of proficiency by the right brain-damaged and dysarthric patients. Acoustical analysis revealed that F0 contours associated with the five tones for all aphasics, except the global, were similar in overall shape as well as position in the tone space to those of normals. F0 contours for the right brain-damaged patient and the dysarthric also generally agreed with those of normals in terms of shape and position. F0 ranges of both aphasic and nonaphasic brain-damaged speakers were generally larger than those of normals for all five tones. The relationship between tone and vowel duration was generally similar to that of normals for all brain-damaged speakers. A comparison of aphasics' performance on tone perception (J. Gandour & R. Dardarananda, 1983, Brain and Language, 18, 94-114) and tone production indicated that, for the normal and right brain-damaged subjects, performance on the perception task was higher than on production, whereas the opposite was true for the aphasics. These data are brought to bear on issues related to tone production in aphasia, consonant and vowel production in aphasia, hemispheric specialization for tone production, intonation production in aphasia, relationship between speech perception and speech production, and tone production in dysarthria with cerebellar disease.     

Use of vocalic cues to consonant voicing and native language background: The influence of experimental design

For native speakers of English and several other languages, preceding vocalic duration andFi offset frequency are two of the cues that convey the stop consonant voicing distinction in wordfinal position. For speakers learning English as a second language, there are indications that use of vocalic duration, but notFl offset frequency, may be hindered by a lack of experience with phonemic (i.e., lexical) vowel length (the “phonemic vowel length account”: Crowther & Mann, 1992). In this study, native speakers of Arabic, a language that includes a phonemic vowel length distinction, were tested for their use of vocalic duration andF1 offset in production and perception of the English consonant-vowel-consonant forms pod and pot. The phonemic vowel length hypothesis predicts that Arabic speakers should use vocalic duration extensively in production and perception. On the contrary, experiment l repealed that, consistent with Flege and Port’s (1981) findings, they produced only slightly (but significantly) longer vocalic segments in their pod tokens. It further indicated that their productions showed a significant variation inFl offset as a function of final stop voicing. Perceptual sensitivity to vocalic duration andFl offset as voicing cues was tested in two experiments. In experiment 2, we employed a factorial combination of these two cues and a finely spaced vocalic duration continuum. Arabic speakers did not appear to be very sensitive to vocalic duration, but they were abort as sensitive as native English speakers toF1 offset frequency. In Experiment 3, we employed a one-dimensional continuum of more widely spaced stimuli that varied only vocalic duration. Arabic speakers showed native-English-like sensitivity to vocalic duration- Anexplanation based on tie perceptual anchor theory of context coding (Braida et al., 1984; Macmillan, 1987; Macmillan, Braida, & Goldberg, 1987) and phoneme perception theory (Schouten & Van Hessen, 2992) is offered to reconcile the apparently contradictory perceptual findings. The explanation does not attribute native-English-like voicing perception to the Ambit subjects. The findings in this study call fox a modification of the phonemic vowel length hypothesis.     

Dysarthric symptomatology of Friedreich's ataxia

Subjective judgments of 16 speech dimensions were used to rate the speech of 22 Friedreich's ataxics. The study attempted to determine what groupings of speech dimensions describe the ataxic speech and if the subjects could be grouped by their speech symptoms. The results indicated that two speech factors were present, a general dysarthric factor and a phonatory stenosis factor. Subject groupings revealed three groups, the first characterized by a general dysarthria without vocal stenosis, the second characterized by phonatory stenosis and mild general dysarthric symptoms, and the third characterized by mild symptoms on both speech factors. Evidence was presented to show that more than one pattern of dysarthria could occur in one family.     

Phonology: A Review and Proposals from a Connectionist Perspective

A parallel distributed processing (PDP) model of phonological processing is developed, including components to support repetition, auditory processing, comprehension, and language production. From the performance of the PDP reading model of Plaut, McClelland, Seidenberg, and Patterson (1996), it is inferred that the acoustic-articulatory motor pattern associator that supports repetition provides the basis for phonological sequence knowledge. From the observation that many patients make phonemic paraphasic errors in language production, as in repetition, it is argued that there must be a direct link between distributed concept representations (lexical semantic knowledge) and this network representation of sequence knowledge. In this way, both lexical semantic and phonotactic constraints are brought to bear on language production. The literature on phonological function in normal subjects (slip-of-the-tongue corpora) and in patients with aphasia is critically reviewed from this perspective. The relationship between acoustic and articulatory motor representations in the process of phonetic perception is considered. Repetition and reproduction conduction aphasia are reviewed in detail and extended consideration is given to the representation of auditory verbal short-term memory in the model. Finally, the PDP model is reconciled with information processing models of phonological processing, including that of Lichtheim, and with current knowledge of the anatomic localization of phonological processing. Although no simulations of the model were run, a number of simulation studies are proposed.     

Language skills in developmentally disabled children

Language measures of receptive and expressive vocabulary, story telling, and immediate verbal memory, as well as two perceptual tests, were administered to a group of developmentally disabled children, and three groups of normal children, one matched for chronological age, one for mean length of utterance, and one for performance on one of the perceptual tests. When diagnostic subgroups of “autism,” “childhood schizophrenia,” and “other severe disturbance” were formed using standard diagnostic tools, no language differences were found between diagnostic subgroups. When compared with the normal control groups, many of the language skills of the entire group of disabled children, and of the autistic children alone, were rather evenly delayed, showing only a relative sparing of the naming function, and a relative deficit on immediate verbal memory. Furthermore, a high correlation was found in a small subsample between the difficulty levels of morphemes in the disabled children and those reported for young normal children. Experienced special-education and early-childhood teachers could not discriminate the stories of the disabled children from those of young normal children. Analysis of the disabled children's error strategies, however, revealed features of their language not found in normal children's language: (1) extreme perseveration in test answers and stories, (2) attention to minor features of test stimuli, and (3) failure to adopt alternate, flexible communicative strategies. We conclude that the language acquisition of the developmentally disabled children is delayed but not deviant in its semantic and syntactic competence, and that current diagnostic practice does not differentiate linguistically distinct subgroups. We further argue that where developmentally disabled children do exhibit aberrant features of language, such deviance parallels similar features in other cognitive skills, and is not unique to language.     

An evaluation of the effects of supplemental “fluency” training during maintenance

The voice onset time (VOT) of two groups of treated stutterers and a normal-speaking group was assessed by spectrographic analysis. Both groups of stutterers had significantly slower VOT than the normal speakers. The experimental group of stutterers was given 8 wk of “fluency” training designed to remediate characteristics of speech identified as related to “tenuous” fluency. The control group of stutterers received ongoing maintenance therapy. Posttreatment VOT was assessed. The experimental stuttering group had significantly decreased their VOT in the direction of the normal-speaking group, whereas the control group of stutterers had a greater VOT between pre- and posttreatment. The implication of these results for the maintenance of fluency are discussed.     

The production and understanding of utterances in dyadic communication

Verbal communication in four dyads was analyzed with respect to syntactic form and cognitive and affective functions. Quantitative and qualitative methods were proposed to study these aspects of language behaviour. Utterances which conveyed a negative affective evaluation tended to be syntactically and cognitively complex. The cognitive and affective functions of a speaker's utterance tended to influence the syntactic quality of the listener's following utterance more than what the listener said in his own previous utterance. An investigation of the relationships between the personality characteristics flexibility, intelligence and verbal competence, and language variables suggested that flexible subjects often used utterances which expressed a positive evaluation. Furthermore, flexible subjects tended to influence the listener more by what they said than intelligent and verbally competent subjects did. It was concluded that this kind of functional analysis of language should be more adequate for psychological inquiry than in particular that of the transformational generative theory of language.     

On the universality of language dissolution: The case of a Turkish aphasic

The case of a Turkish aphasic suffering from motor aphasia is described. The transitional phonemic systems which could be observed in this patient in the course of speech rehabilitation are compared to the so-called “phonemic disintegration,” whereas the errors of his graphic performance are compared to the so-called “agrammatism” of Indo-European languages. It is found that there exists a strong parallelism between this agglutinative language and the inflecting Indo-European languages insofar as aphasic language dissolution is concerned.     

Morphemes, spelling and development: Comments on “The timing and mechanisms of children's use of morphological information in spelling” by S. Pacton and H. Deacon

In our comments on Pacton and Deacon's discussion of children's spelling of morphemes we raise four issues: (1) whether the “timing” question should be about children's ages or about their psychological processes; (2) the crucial importance of individual differences in the study of the connections that people make between morphemes and spelling; (3) the conclusions that can be drawn from evidence for the use of non-morphemic spelling strategies; (4) the need to consider the results of intervention studies in any account of children's understanding and use of morphemic spelling rules.