The peculiar successes of community psychology: Service delivery to ethnic minorities and the poor

The 20-year history of community psychology is considered with respect to activities on behalf of ethnic minority participation in psychotherapy, increasing cultural diversity, and to a considerably lesser extent, enhancing community systems. A discrepancy was found between community psychology in principle and community psychology in practice. For the future, community psychologists are advised to identify and seek to strengthen (a) indigenous resources for solving personal and community problems; and (b) pathways of help seeking followed by community members. Community psychology is encouraged to reclaim and enact more vigorously its own legacy. To do otherwise, it is argued, forfeits development of potentially significant research and practice and risks continued ambivalence and dissatisfaction despite worthwhile contribution--suffering the peculiar successes of community psychology.     

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.     

Electromagnetic articulography: use of alternating magnetic fields for tracking movements of multiple points inside and outside the vocal tract

The purpose of this paper is to present a new electromagnetic device which uses alternating magnetic fields for tracking movements of multiple points inside and outside the vocal tract. It is biologically safe, noninvasive, it does not interfere with speech movements, allows for multiple recording in the same subject, and for easy collection of large amounts of data. It is especially suitable for evaluation of patients with speech motor impairments.     

Lay conceptions of personality: Eliciting tiers of a scientific conception of personality

Two studies are reported which examine the availability of scientific propositions of personality in lay conceptions of personality. It is argued from a social constructivist perspective that models of personality must derive from and refer to lay conceptions of persons. Eysenck's trait-type model of introversion-extraversion, containing specific propositions about phenotypic and genotypic differences between extraverts and introverts, was utilized as the scientific model of personality and its availability in lay conceptions of personality was examined in two studies. In the first study, subjects were presented with a genotypic characterization of either an introvert or an extravert target person and asked to infer corresponding phenotypic differences. In the second study, the inference process was reversed with subjects being asked to infer genotypic characteristics of introverts versus extraverts on the basis of phenotypic target person desecrations of the two types. Results from both studies show a high degree of accuracy in subjects' inferences, suggesting that laypersons have well-formed conceptions about personality containing ‘higher-order’ psychogenetic propositions corresponding to Eysenck's trait-type model. The implications of the findings for theory construction are discussed.     

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.     

Unilateral brain lesions in childhood: performance on the Revised Token Test

Comprehension of connected language as assessed by the Revised Token Test (RTT) was studied in 17 children with left hemisphere lesions (LL) and 11 with right hemisphere lesions (RL). LL children's significantly lower performance on several subtests than left controls (LC) matched by age, sex, race, and social class appeared to be related to the memory demands of these subtests rather than the limited syntactic elements assessed by the RTT. LL subjects requested significantly more command repetitions than control or RL subjects and when a repetition was not requested LL subjects often responded with immediacy. Although RL children tended to perform lower than right matched controls (RC), these differences were not significant nor readily related to either the memory or specific linguistic structures assessed. RL subjects required fewer command repetitions than LL subjects and exhibited a significantly greater frequency of immediate responses than controls or LL subjects. While based on few children, a trend for LL children with retrorolandic lesions to perform more poorly than those with left prerolandic lesions was suggested. No systematic difference in performance was apparent for children with left cortical vs. left subcortical lesions or among discrete sites of lesions within the right hemisphere. Children with left lesions prior to 1 year of age performed no better and, in several instances, significantly poorer than LL patients sustaining lesions after 1 year of age. Among RL subjects, those sustaining lesions after 1 year of age had greater difficulty than those with lesion onset before 1 year of age, especially on linguistic elements which seemed to be dependent upon visual spatial properties. Further studies are needed to evaluate the comprehension of more complex linguistic structures among children with unilateral brain lesions as well as to study the role of more basic factors such as memory and attention in explaining the present findings.     

Specific language impairment in children: A cross-linguistic study

A common profile in English-speaking specifically language-impaired children is a moderate deficit across a broad range of linguistic features and a more marked, selective impairment in using bound morphemes and components of the verb system. To gain a clearer understanding of the nature of these more serious problems, we examined the speech of monolingual Italian-speaking as well as English-speaking children with specific language impairment. The evidence suggested that phonological factors contributed significantly to these children's extraordinary problems with particular linguistic features. Contrary to expectations, other marked deficits seemed more related to the opacity of the rules involved and homonymity with other morphemes than to problems with formal grammatical devices in general or components of the verb system in particular.     

The effects of continuous phonation on Xenon-inhalation air curves (of the kind used in deriving regional cerebral blood flow)

Regional cerebral blood flow (rCBF) may be measured with inhalation techniques that use end-expired values of radioactivity to estimate the isotope concentration in arterial blood. These end-expired data are used as an input function in a mathematical equation to derive rCBF. End-expired air is assumed normally to be in equilibrium with the arterial blood at the alveolar surface of the lung during regular (passive) breathing; this assumption may not be valid during continuous phonation. We therefore have analyzed breathing (inhalation/exhalation) patterns and end-expired radioactivity (¹³³Xe) during (1) speaking, (2) singing, and (3) humming of the national anthem, and also during (4) passive breathing. Statistically significant differences in breathing patterns were measured between a group of nonmusicians and two groups of musicians (singers) during the phonation tasks: The nonmusicians breathed more often (and more rapidly) and exhibited less variability in their breathing patterns than did the musicians. Notwithstanding these differences, the shapes of smoothed functions derived from the end-expired values were not influenced appreciably during phonation (except possibly during talking). The latter finding suggests that estimates of rCBF derived with these data should not be confounded seriously because of the continuous phonation.