Repetition and verbal STM in transcortical sensory aphasia: a case study

The repetition performance of a patient (S.T.) with transcortical sensory aphasia is examined in four experiments with particular emphasis on the STM capacities underlying her performance. S.T.'s repetition of word strings exceeding her span (two words) is characterized by good recall of the final items and a strong tendency to lose the initial items in the input string. This pattern contrasts with the serial position effects observed in a phonologically based STM impairment, and it is suggested that a lexical-semantic impairment, also evident in S.T.'s naming and lexical comprehension, contributes to her inability to retain the primacy portions of the input string. Lexical effects obtained in her reproduction of words and nonwords, as well as word strings (Experiments 1 and 2), indicate that under conditions of impaired semantics S.T. is relying on lexical phonological information to repeat. Priming by repeated exposure (Experiment 3) failed to improve her repetition performance, indicating that access to lexical information is brief and dependent on recent phonological input. In Experiment 4, the role of syntactic structure in S.T.'s sentence repetition was examined, and it was shown that syntactic structure affects the recall of order information, but not the number of items recalled. The repetition and verbal STM abilities of this patient, in light of her total language profile, are then evaluated in the context of a language-based view of verbal STM.     

Language and cognitive shifting: evidence from young monolingual and bilingual children

The relationship between language and cognitive shifting in young children was examined. Specifically, second language experiences from infancy as well as individual differences in monolingual language experience may affect performances on the Dimensional Change Card Sort Task. 54 Japanese-French bilingual children and two groups of Japanese monolingual children participated (ns = 18). One monolingual group was matched to the bilingual group on verbal ability and chronological age (VC monolingual group) and the other group was matched by chronological age but had higher verbal ability (C monolingual group). The results showed that the groups of children who were bilingual and monolingual with higher verbal ability performed the task significantly better than matched monolingual children. Language experiences may affect cognitive set shifting in young children.     

Impaired short temporal interval discrimination in a dyslexic adult

The ability to discriminate short temporal intervals was examined in a dyslexic adult (E.C.) and six matched controls. Listeners had to decide whether the second interval was shorter or longer than a standard (target) interval. Each interval was defined as the silent duration between two successive brief tones. Eight target intervals were used, ranging from 100 to 1,200 ms in duration. At each target interval, the differential threshold (DL) for duration was assessed, with the use of an adaptive psychophysical procedure. The results show that E.C.'s differential threshold values were much larger than those of controls. Moreover, the slope estimates covering the duration range from 100 to 800 ms indicated that in comparison to controls, E.C.'s differential threshold increased dramatically as the target duration increased. Thus her timing impairment becomes more pronounced with increasing duration. This timing deficit is consistent with other studies that have found temporal processing deficits associated with dyslexia.     

Thalamic Amnesia Following Venous Infarction: Evidence from a Single Case Study

The present paper describes the case of a right-handed Italian–English bilingual male patient suffering from amnesia following a bilateral thalamic lesion due to venous infarction. Within a few months from the onset, the lesion gradually shrank and was finally confined to the left thalamus only, in particular to the antero-medial portion and the pulvinar. The mammillary bodies and the cortical areas of both hemispheres were spared. After the regression of a series of generalized cognitive deficits implying slow psychic activity, confusion, and spatial and temporal disorientation, the patient presented a persistent amnesic syndrome with mild language disorders, both in Italian and in English. Major disorders of memory included a dissociation between verbal memory, which was severely impaired, and spatial memory, which was largely preserved.     

"Pulling Teeth and Torture" : Musical Memory and Problem Solving

A concert pianist the second author videotaped herself learning J.S. Bach's Italian Concerto Presto, and commented on the problems she encountered as she practised. Approximately two years later the pianist wrote out the first page of the score from memory. The pianist's verbal reports indicated that in the early sessions she identified and memorised the formal structure of the piece, and in the later sessions she practised using this organisation to retrieve the memory cues that controlled her playing. The practice and recall data supported this account. Both were organised by the formal structure of the music. Practice segments were more likely to start and stop at boundaries of the formal structure than at other locations, and recall was higher for the beginnings of sections than for later portions. Like other forms of expert memory, pianistic memory appears to be based on use of a highly practised retrieval scheme which permits rapid retrieval of information from long-term memory.     

Long-lasting perceptual priming and semantic learning in amnesia: a case experiment.

An investigation of perceptual priming and semantic learning in the severely amnesic subject K.C. is reported. He was taught 64 three-word sentences and tested for his ability to produce the final word of each sentence. Despite a total lack of episodic memory, he exhibited (a) strong perceptual priming effects in word-fragment completion, which were retained essentially in full strength for 12 months, and (b) independent of perceptual priming, learning of new semantic facts, many of which were also retained for 12 months. K.C.'s semantic learning may be at least partly attributable to repeated study trials and minimal interference during learning. The findings suggest that perceptual priming and semantic learning are subserved by two memory systems different from episodic memory and that both systems (perceptual representation and semantic memory) are at least partially preserved in some amnesic subjects.     

Should a school honor a student's DNR order? A lawyer responds: a student's right to forgo CPR.

...Instead of and certainly before advising the school or S.A. to go into court, I would urge them to try to resolve the question where it arises -- in the classroom, not the courtroom. And I would ask school officials to try to place themselves in S.A.'s shoes, and to imagine how she feels about her situation; and to ask themselves how they will feel if they administer CPR against her and her parents' wishes. Is there no way that they can do more than nothing, but less than CPR? Which image would we prefer to attach to S.A.'s case, that of some lawyers giving a press conference on the courthouse steps or of a story about a school that made it possible for one of its students to spend her precious time with her friends, classmates, and teachers, as they learn together that death does not need to separate the living from the dying?     

MEMORY PROCESSES IN CLASSIFICATION LEARNING:

Abstract— The role of conscious memory retrieval in category learning was investigated, using amnesic patients and matched control subjects ort two classification tasks. Subjects attempted to learn to categorize both dot patterns and the paintings of three Italian Renaissance artists. The amnesic patients were capable of normal classification performance on the dot-pattern stimuli, but were severely impaired at learning to categorize the paintings. On tests of recognition of the classification stimuli, the control subjects were very accurate on the paintings, and only moderately accurate on the dot patterns; the amnesic patients were poorer than the control subjects on both item types, though they were above chance in their recognition of the paintings. These data suggest that amnesic patients are capable of simple, perceptually based category learning, but that richer, more complex stimuli may demand memory retrieval processes that they lack.     

Word length effect in early reading and in developmental dyslexia

Vocal reaction times were measured in Italian dyslexics and in proficient readers while they read single words. Three groups of control participants (for a total of 79) were tested. All were in the first, second or third grade of elementary school. Nine third graders with a low level of reading ability when assessed by standard reading procedures were also tested. Results indicated that vocal RTs of control participants were faster and less sensitive to word length as a function of age; also, there was a particularly marked change between first and second graders. Dyslexics' vocal RTs and errors were much worse than those of peer control participants and resembled those of first grade controls. It is suggested that normal readers in an orthographically transparent language (Italian) adopt a lexical strategy quite early in their learning. On the contrary, dyslexics seem unable to learn this mode of processing and continue to use a sub-lexical reading procedure.     

Reconstructive retrieval deficits in Broca's aphasia

Anterior aphasic patients' ability to utilize the phonemic and/or semantic features of verbal material for retention purposes was investigated. In the first experiment, patients were asked to either detect word repetitions, phoneme repetitions, or rhymes in a list of items. The aphasics performed well on word and phoneme repetition detection but below both normals and amnesic Korsakoffs on rhyme detection. In the second experiment the patients were instructed to analyze either the physical, phonemic, or semantic features of words they were later asked to recognize. Aphasics were differentially affected (as were normals) by these instructions: semantic feature analysis resulted in the best performance, followed by phonemic feature analysis. It was concluded that anterior aphasics can analyze, recirculate, and even store the phonemic features of words, but find difficulty in reconstructing the originally presented item from these features.     

Immediate memory for faces: Long- or short-term memory?

Immediate recognition memory span and short-term forgetting for non-verbal stimuli (“unfamiliar faces”) were investigated in normal subjects and amnesic patients. Surnames were used as a verbal control. It was found that normal subjects had a reliable immediate recognition span of one for faces and that there was no decrement in performance in the retention of three faces over a 30-s interval. Amnesic subjects were impaired on both the immediate memory span task and on the short-term forgetting task. This pattern of results contrasts with those obtained using surnames on which the results were comparable to other verbal S.T.M. tasks. It is suggested that performance on these tasks of recognition memory for faces is determined by L.T.M. processes. The implications for the interpretation of S.T.M. are discussed.     

Frontal amnesia and the dysexecutive syndrome

This study analyzes the memory deficits shown by an amnesic patient with bilateral frontal damage and a dysexecutive syndrome. He resembles a classic amnesic patient in showing grossly impaired episodic memory for both verbal and nonverbal material, together with normal digit span, and on occasion normal recency in free recall. He differs from the classic amnesic pattern however in showing an impairment in both the speed and accuracy of performance on tests of semantic memory, and in clear evidence for impaired performance on some though not all procedural learning tasks. Finally, his autobiographical memory was poor and subject to substantial confabulation. It is suggested that the pattern of deficits is consistent with a combination of a classic amnesic syndrome with the additional problems associated with the frontal dysexecutive syndrome, rather than exhibiting a qualitatively different form of amnesia.     

Semantic information is used by a deep dyslexic to parse compounds

We report a case study of a 48 year-old patient, J.O., who was tested 20 years after the removal of a tumor in the left temporal-parietal region. This surgery and subsequent radiation resulted in right side paralysis and numerous language problems. Tests of J.O.'s single word reading abilities indicate that she could be classified as a deep dyslexic with over 16% of her errors in word naming having a clear semantic relationship with the target word (Coltheart, 1980). We examined her ability to read compound words aloud and following Libben (1993) we provide evidence that J.O. is a second case in which there is obligatory access of morphological constituents of compound words. These data are discussed within the context of Libben's (1998) compound word processing model.     

Nonverbal priming in amnesia

In this experiment, we examined whether a group of well-characterized amnesic patients would exhibit normal priming for novel nonverbal materials after a single exposure. Both amnesic patients and normal control subjects studied line figures and were then given a priming test in which they were asked to reproduce both old (studied) and new (unstudied) figures after a brief exposure. The measure of priming was the number of old patterns drawn correctly relative to the number of new patterns drawn correctly. Both subject groups reproduced more old patterns than new patterns, and the effect was similar in the two groups. In contrast, amnesic patients were significantly impaired on a recognition memory test for the items that had been presented. This study contributes to recent evidence that implicit memory can support the rapid acquisition of novel verbal and nonverbal information. Perceptual priming for such material is independent of the structures damaged in amnesia.     

Visual Field asymmetries for verbal and dot localization tasks in monolingual and bilingual subjects

Visual Field asymmetries for verbal and dot localization tasks were examined in monolingual and bilingual subjects. Consistent right-visual-field advantages were found for verbal material in all groups, although bilingual subjects showed a reduced laterality for their second language in comparison with their native language, Monolingual subjects displayed left-visual-field advantages on the dot localization task, but no consistent asymmetries were shown by the bilingual subjects. The overall pattern of results is consistent with left-hemisphere involvement for the processing of verbal material, but the heterogeneity of performance on the dot localization task suggests that processing of such a task may be influenced by subjects' linguistic backgrounds.     

Toddlers' traumatic memories

Three cases will be presented in which remote, accurate verbal and visual memories were present in, and from, toddlerhood for which the earliest age was 16 months. The age at which memories can be verbalized depends on the age of onset of speech phrases and cognitive ability. The memory may remain for over 30 years. Toddlers spontaneously report traumatic memories. The earlier the trauma occurs, the less the child is able to organize the material into a narrative form. The child is only able to relate the parts that are within his or her verbal repertoire and significant to him or her.     

Poetics in the shadow of the other's language: The melancholic discourse of the trilingual poet Amelia Rosselli

In this paper, I propose a psychoanalytic reading of some of the writings of Amelia Rosselli, a trilingual poet who, at the age of seven, lost her father Carlo, who was persecuted and murdered by Mussolini's regime. History and her history conflate into personal and collective trauma which defies human possibilities to work through and mourn. Rosselli's work testifies to such predicament of the human subject of the 20th century, his/her dislocation, alienation and internal irreconcilable divisions. In particular I examine Diary in three tongues, which is the most autobiographical of her works and a self‐analytic piece, written after the conclusion of her second analysis. In the Diary, Rosselli employs textual strategies which convey the fragmentation and destructuring of language, where her traumatic experience resides as a wound inflicted to the symbolic order. I propose that her writings contain her unconscious memories in an estranged and melancholic language which becomes the crucible to express her impossible mourning, in a complex mixture of Eros and Thanatos which allowed her to survive psychically and to create a very personal experimental poetic discourse which made her a literary figure of international acclaim. My primary engagement will be with Freud's theory of mourning and melancholia and its successive elaboration by Kristeva, who maintains that the melancholic discourse finds its expression in the pre‐verbal and infra‐verbal aspects of language, which she calls ‘semiotics’, in dialectic articulation with its symbolic components. Drawing on literary texts, significant inferences can be made on the psychoanalytic listening to the prosodic aspects of language as the carrier of inchoate forms of representation of that which exceeds language: trauma, raw affects, mnemic traces, that is, the unrepresented and/or unrepresentable.     

Syntactic awareness and verbal performance from preschool to fifth grade

Children from preschool to fifth grade were given two independent series of language tasks. The first tested aural sentence memory and was designed to assess children's ability to exploit syntactic structure and semantic cohesion to facilitate sentence recall. The second tested children's syntactic awareness, as reflected in their ability to correct grammatically deviant sentences. Results showed increases with grade level both in children's syntactic awareness and in their use of linguistic structure in sentence recall. Further, syntactic awareness increased with age, independently of vocabulary age. Syntactic awareness was significantly related both to reading achievement and to the use of syntactic structure and semantic structure to facilitate sentence recall, even with the effects of vocabulary age and grade statistically controlled. Although strongly correlated with verbal ability, syntactic awareness appears to constitute a higher-order language skill that is associated with other aspects of verbal performance.This research was carried out at the University of Melbourne and was supported by a University of Melbourne Research Development Grant.     

Analytic,synthetic, abstracting,and word-class-defining aspects of verbal mother-child interactions

Phenomena of language teaching and learning in the course of verbal interactions between one mother and her daughter were analyzed. The daughter was between 18 and 27 months old during the recordings, and her utterance length ranged from 1,5 to 4,0 morphemes. Twenty hours of interactions were analyzed and the emphasis was placed upon sequential aspects and mathemagenic features of the conversations. It was demonstrated that the mother performs much analytic, synthetic, abstracting, and word-class-defining work during these verbal interactions. These maternal instructional activities seem to lead not only to the child's learning of language rules but also to her employment of the abstracting, analytical, and synthetic methodology. It is concluded that the main explanatory focus has to be on the mother in the attempts to explain language transmission and acquisition. Basic similarities to other instructional/skill training situations are suggested. Neither extraordinary complex cognitive nor innate linguistic capacities need to be assumed to explain the phenomena in question.     

A neuropsychological study of fact memory and source amnesia

We investigated the ability of amnesic patients to learn new facts (e.g., Angel Falls is located in Venezuela) and also to remember where and when the facts were learned (i.e., source memory). To assess the susceptibility of fact and source memory to retrograde amnesia, patients prescribed electroconvulsive therapy were presented facts prior to the first treatment and were tested after their second treatment. All amnesic patients exhibited marked fact memory impairment. In addition, some amnesic patients exhibited source amnesia (i.e., they recalled a few facts but then could not remember where or when those facts had been learned). Source amnesia was unrelated to the severity of the memory deficit itself, because patients who exhibited source amnesia recalled as many facts as the patients who did not. These results show that the deficit in amnesia includes an impairment in acquiring and retaining new facts. Source amnesia can also occur, but it is dissociable from impaired recall and recognition and appears to reflect difficulty in remembering the specific context in which information is acquired. The findings are discussed in terms of their significance for how memory is organized.