Coping in Families with a Retarded Child

The impact of a retarded child on a family has previously been described by individual family members' reports. This study of 40 families, 10 in each of four critical periods during the life of the retarded child, utilized videotaped interviews with whole families, with subsequent clinical observation and analysis based on the Beavers family assessment model. Healthy and problematic adaptations are delineated, with specific attention to systems concepts such as family structure and power, member individuation, feeling expression, and values. The report includes data analysis and a summary of pattern differences in family functioning.     

A new empirical angle on the variability debate: quantitative neurosyntactic analyses of a large data set from Broca's aphasia

Behavioral variation in Broca's aphasia has been characterized as boundless, calling into question the validity of the syndrome-based schema and related diagnostic methods of acquired language disorders. More generally, this putative variability has cast serious doubts on the feasibility of localizing linguistic operations in cortex. We present a new approach to the quantitative analysis of deficient linguistic performance, and apply it to a large data set, constructed from the published literature: Comprehension data of 69 carefully selected Broca's aphasic patients, tested on nearly 6000 stimulus sentences, were partitioned in different ways, and subjected to a series of analyses. While a certain amount of variability is indeed evident in the data, our quantitative analyses reveal a highly robust selective impairment pattern for the group: the patients' ability to analyze syntactic movement is severely compromised, in line with the Trace-Deletion Hypothesis. Further analyses suggest that patients' performance on no-movement sentence types exhibits less variation than on sentences that contain movement. We discuss the clinical and theoretical implications of our results.     

The Cognitive Underpinnings of Continuous Identity: Higher Episodic Memory Recall and Lower Heuristic Usage Predicts Highest Levels of Self-Continuity

Continuous identity (CI) is a sense of persistent identity wherein the present self is seen as overlapping with the past and future selves. This study addressed the hypothesis that judgments of CI require successful retrieval of information by examining the relationship between varying levels of CI and two forms of memory recall. The pattern of findings indicated that high levels of cued memory recall combined with low levels of heuristic usage were associated with higher levels of CI, and this occurred for both past-to-present CI and present-to-future CI. We propose that to achieve high levels of CI, individuals need to access and analyze a fund of stored autobiographical information.     

The battle for Broca's region

The intense effort to characterize Broca's region has produced many views on its anatomy and function. Here, we present the leading approaches and consider ways to adjudicate among them empirically. Anatomically, we focus on the cytoarchitecture of Brodmann areas 44 and 45, which constitute Broca's region. Functionally, we discuss four views: action perception, working memory, syntactic complexity and syntactic movement. We compare these views, reflect on how they can be distinguished experimentally and review relevant aphasia and functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) studies. Although no single hypothesis accounts for all of the data, the role of Broca's region in language comprehension is best explained by the syntactic movement account. This conclusion opens the door for an attempt to define general principles for the neural representation of linguistic knowledge.     

The On-Line Processing of Verb-Phrase Ellipsis in Aphasia

We investigate the on-line processing of verb-phrase ellipsis (VPE) constructions in two brain injured populations: Broca’s and Anomic aphasics. VPE constructions are built from two simple clauses; the first is the antecedent clause and the second is the ellipsis clause. The ellipsis clause is missing its verb and object (i.e., its verb phrase (VP)), which receives its reference from the fully specified VP in the antecedent clause. VPE constructions are unlike other sentence types that require displacement of an argument NP; these latter constructions (e.g., object-relatives, wh-questions) yield either on-time or delayed antecedent reactivation. Our results demonstrate that Anomics, like unimpaired individuals, evince reactivation of the direct object NP (within the VP) at the elided position. Broca’s patients, on the other hand, do not show reactivation of the antecedent. We consider several interpretations for our data, including explanations focusing on the larger ‘grain size’ of the reconstructed material in the ellipsis clause, the properties of the auxiliary that carries tense and agreement features, and the possibility that the cost-free syntactic copy procedure claimed to underlie VPE may be modulated by the functional deficit in Broca’s aphasia.     

Neurolinguistics and neuroimaging: forward to the future,or is it back?

Books reviewed in this article:
Michael Gazzaniga (ed.), Cognitive Neuroscience: A Reader
Alec Marantz, Yasushi Miyashita, and Wayne O'Neil (ed.), Image, Language, Brain: Papers From the First Mind Articulation Project Symposium
Colin Brown and Peter Hagoort, The Neurocognition of Language