Left sidedness and sleep difficulty: the alinormal syndrome

Four indexes of laterality: handedness, footedness, eyedness, and earedness, were assessed in a sample of 1274 subjects. Left- and right-sided groups were compared on two aspects of self-reported sleep difficulty: trouble falling asleep and frequent night wakenings. The incidence of sleep difficulty was found to be elevated in the left-sided groups. The results are discussed in terms of a possible complex of behavioral deviations from the statistical norm, called the alinormal syndrome.     

Accessibility of case and gender contrasts for agent--object assignment in Broca's aphasics and fluent anomics

Yugoslav agrammatic Broca's aphasics, fluent anomics, and control subjects were tested for comprehension of agent-object relations in a series of simple Serbo-Croatian sentences in the conversational past tense, consisting of two nouns and a transitive action verb. The availability of two closed class cues--case contrasts and gender contrasts--as well as the availability of an open class lexical cue--animacy contrasts--was varied across sentences. An analysis of subjects' agent-object assignments yielded the following results: Both Broca's aphasics and fluent anomics showed a selective impairment in sensitivity to closed class morphology, although anomics were considerably less impaired than Broca's aphasics. This finding was interpreted as evidence for a non-syndrome-dependent vulnerability of abilities to process closed class morphology for comprehension. In addition, the pattern of agent-object assignments for Broca's aphasics revealed that the degree to which they were able to access the two closed class cues depended on a convergence of the various cues to agent-object relations. In particular, a convergence of case and gender contrasts had an interactive effect on Broca's responses: Gender agreement cues were accessed only in the presence of convergent case contrasts. Conversely, sensitivity to case contrasts was dramatically heightened in the presence of convergent gender contrasts. These results were consistent with a view that the two cues function as intrasentential "primes" or "retrieval cues" for one another.     

Spatial constraints on attention to speech in the blind

When sighted persons try to identify one of two speech utterances coming from different directions, they display both a frontal position advantage, i.e., better recognition of inputs from the front than of those from the rear, and a right-side advantage, better recognition of inputs from the right than of those from the left. The present study demonstrates a dissociation of the two effects in blind subjects (N = 10) who showed no frontal position advantage together with a right-side advantage superior to that of control sighted subjects (N = 16). There was no systematic difference between congenitally blind subjects and noncongenitals. The absence of frontal position advantage in the blind is consistent with the notion that this effect originates in the habit of sighted listeners to orient toward the source of heard speech. The occurrence of at least normal right-side advantage in the blind does not support recent suggestions of reduced lateralization of language functions in such subjects.     

Teacher ratings of children's problem and competence behaviors: Normative and parametric characteristics

Teacher-rated adjustment differences among young elementary school children from (a) a recent sample and a 1974 cohort, and (b) urban/suburban, male/female, and grade-level subgroups were examined. A problem behavior checklist (Classroom Adjustment Rating Scale) and a school competence measure (Health Resources Inventory) for 974 children from 5 urban and 5 suburban schools were completed by 101 first- to fourth-grade teachers. Children from the more current cohort were rated as significantly more maladjusted than those from the earlier sample on 8 of 10 adjustment variables. In the recent sample, girls and suburban children evidenced a greater number of school competencies and fewer problem behaviors than boys and urban children, respectively. The implications of these findings for the future use of the teacher rating scales are discussed.     

Processing of lexical ambiguities in aphasia

Wernicke's and Broca's aphasics performed a lexical decision task wherein they had to decide whether the third word of an auditorily presented triplet series of words was "real" or not. The first and third words of each triplet were related to one, both, or neither meaning of the second word which was semantically ambiguous. The performance pattern of the Wernicke's aphasics was similar to that of normals. They showed selective access to different meanings of the ambiguous words, as demonstrated by the fact that the context provided by the first word affected semantic facilitation on the third word. In contrast, Broca's aphasics showed no semantic facilitation in any priming condition. These results are consistent with previous findings, suggesting that semantic representations may be largely spared in Wernicke's aphasics. The failure of the Broca's aphasics to demonstrate facilitation is consistent with the view that they have a processing deficit in automatically accessing the lexical representation of words.     

Social learning and collective choice

To be pertinent to democratic practice, collective choice functions need not apply to all possible constellations of individual preference, but only to those that are humanly possible in an appropriate sense. The present paper develops a theory of humanly possible preference within the context of the mathematical theory of learning. The theory of preference is then exploited in an attempt to resolve Arrow's voting paradox through restriction of the domain of majoritarian choice functions.     

Separate verbal memory and naming deficits in attention deficit disorder and reading disability

In this study, verbal memory and naming abilities were investigated in reading disabled (RD) and control children who were characterized according to the presence or absence of attention deficit disorder (ADD). Results indicate that deficits in learning and memory for recently acquired information occur as a function of ADD rather than RD while deficits in naming are specific to RD rather than ADD. We conclude that ADD is a major source of additional and separate cognitive morbidity in RD children.