Processing of locatives “in,” “on,” and “under” by aphasic patients: An analysis of the regression hypothesis

The present study investigated the comprehension of aphasic subjects as to locative prepositions “in,” “on,” and “under.” Patients had to locate a movable object with reference to a stationary referential object in order to achieve the spatial relations requested under oral instructions. The influence of two types of contextual relations between the objects in each stimulus pair on the subjects' performances was examined. Spatial relations were biased by the conventional knowledge of the most normal relationship between the two elements in everyday life in Experiment 1; in Experiment 2, perceptivomotor constraints constituted the contextual bias. Analyzing the patients' responses in the light of developmental strategies did not lend support to the regression hypothesis. Broca's aphasics were sensitive to the two contextual factors investigated; Wernickes' performances were affected only by the perceptivomotor contextual bias. The results are discussed with reference to earlier studies on the differential syntactical comprehension skills of Broca's and Wernicke's aphasics in sentence-picture matching tasks and production tasks.     

A survey of communicative disorders students' attitudes toward stuttering

Cooper's (1975) Clinician Attitudes Toward Stuttering (CATS) inventories were conpleted by 1,902 speech-language pathology and audiology students from 33 universities, each in a different state. The majority of respondents perceived stutterers as having psychosocial problems and believed that client and parental counseling were essential aspects of treatment. These views were relatively unaffected by student training and clinical exposure. In addition, most of the assumptions of Johnson's diagnosogenic theory of stuttering were held by the majority of the students surveyed. Most of the respondents believed that stuttering was difficult to modify and that speech clinicians were neither adept nor comfortable treating stutterers. These latter attitudes were significantly affected by training, i.e., the more advanced the students' training, the more pessimistic their views on clinician competence. Other professional attitudes and the effect of training on them are also discussed.     

Affective isolation as a coping strategy for persons with low and high amounts of life stress

Previous research has investigated two diverse operational definitions of stress, experimentally induced, short-term stress and long-term, life stress. The purpose of this study was to intersect these two research methodologies and determine the effect of a laboratory-induced stress (failure feedback) on persons with differing levels of life stress. Women with high or low amounts of life stress were given failure feedback, no failure feedback, or a cognitive coping strategy (affective isolation) in addition to failure feedback. Failure feedback increased self-reported anger and anxiety immediately following feedback and also after a follow-up test and decreased expectations about performance for the second test. Affective isolation significantly reduced anger and anxiety but failed to affect expectations. Women with high amounts of life stress reported significantly less anxiety than women with low amounts of life stress in response to failure feedback. These results were interpreted within C. D. Spielberger's (in C. D. Spielberger & R. Diaz-Guerrero (Eds.), Cross-cultural anxiety, New York: Wiley, 1976) cognitive model. It was proposed that differing levels of previous life stress cause people to make varying judgments about the degree of threat in a short-term stressful situation. Persons with high amounts of life stress may not be aroused in response to short-term stress because they perceive the short-term stress as only a “drop in the bucket” compared to the other events which they have experienced.     

Crossed aphasia: analysis of four cases

Data from the Rehabilitation Institute of Chicago was used to contrast a sample of 358 aphasics with data from a Boston aphasia and aging study (L. Obler, M. Albert, H. Goodglass, and F. Benson, Brain and Language, 6, 318–322, 1978). Unlike the females, Chicago males showed remarkable similarity to the Boston male sample for the Broca, Wernicke, and Global groups with ratios of approximately four Broca's to every two Wernicke's and Global aphasics. Similar to the Boston Sample, Wernicke's aphasics were 11.6 years older (p < .001) than Broca's aphasics.     

Cooperative education,career exploration,and occupational concepts for community college students

Super's self-concept theory of career development and Jordaan's construct of vocational exploratory behavior were used to investigate the outcomes of a college cooperative education program. The effects of an internship were compared with those of a classroom experience with regard to change in similarity between self- and occupational pictures (incorporation scores). A measure of incorporation was administered to 85 students who worked during one quarter, and 99 students who were enrolled in classes during the same period. Both groups increased in incorporation for prospective occupation (t = .01, p > .10). For the internship group no difference was found between increase in incorporation for first- and second-choice occupation (t = .24, p > .10), while for the classroom group the increase in incorporation for prospective occupation was significantly greater than for second-choice (t = 2.80, p < .01). This result was discussed in light of the implication that the internship stimulated vocational exploratory behavior. Roe's system of occupational classification revealed an unexpected lack of relationship between first- and second-choice occupations. These findings were discussed in relation to the career development of the working-class community college sample.     

The height of handwriting

An experiment is described that examines the basis of the control of vertical amplitude (height) of handwriting. It is shown that changes in movement duration accompany changes in height whether the latter are associated with instructions to write larger than normal (between words) or because the letters to be written (e, l) differ in height (within words). The proportional differences in movement duration match the proportional differences in amplitude between words but not within words. It is concluded that two different time-based mechanisms are invoked for handwriting height control: interval adjustment for writing size changes between words and duration selection for letters differing in height within a word.     

Cerebral organization in bilinguals : I. Lateralization

There were no differences in lateral dominance indices between first and second languages in English-Hebrew bilinguals tested with a dichotic word test. Lateral dominance was the same for both languages regardless of when the second language was learned, how long it had been used, or how well it was known (according to a self-rating scale). In addition, the “traditional” sex differences were found where females had a significantly better overall recall performance but a significantly smaller difference in performance between the right and left ears.     

The nature of the task-stimulus interaction in the tachistoscopic recognition of kana and kanji words

To investigate the nature of the task-stimulus interaction in tachistoscopic recognition of kana and kanji, right-handed normal subjects performed two phonological tasks and two visual tasks. In the phonological tasks, the subjects compared the members of a pair of kana or kanji appearing in the right or left visual field on the basis of phonological identity; while in the visual tasks, they compared the members of a pair of kana or kanji on the basis of visual identity. The results showed a significant Visual Field × Task interaction as well as a significant Task × Stimulus interaction, indicating that both the type of stimuli and the nature of task demands contribute importantly to the determination of visual field asymmetry and hence the relative participation of each hemisphere.     

The word order problem in agrammatism : II. Production

This study demonstrates that agrammatic aphasics have difficulty describing relations that are signified by the order of noun phrases around verbs or prepositions. The word order deficit is found in a Sentence Order Task, in which written words must be arranged linearly to form a sentence, as well as in oral production. Ordering tendencies reflect factors like animacy or potency, rather than the systematic use of syntactic rules. These results point to a fundamental syntactic disorder in agrammatism.