A case of literal alexia: evidence for a disconnection syndrome

We describe a patient with literal alexia, agraphia, and only minimal aphasia, resulting from a left occipito-parietal ischemic infarction. Neither impaired visual processing nor impaired oral output could explain the patient's letter reading deficit, since he retained the ability to match letters of mixed case, and remained able to spell aloud and to pronounce and comprehend orally spelled words. His residual word reading was characterized by better performance for nouns and highly imageable words than for functors , poorly imageable words, and nonwords. We propose that this patient's letter reading deficit was due to a partial disconnection of his visual from his linguistic systems, with residual word reading accomplished by a semantically mediated compensatory mechanism. We suggest, further, that the dissociations between word and letter reading observed in some alexic individuals may be attributed, in part, to a difference in the relative contributions of dorsal and ventral occipital structures to the reading process.     

Determinants of spelling ability in deaf and hearing adults: Access to linguistic structure

The extent to which ability to access linguistic regularities of the orthography is dependent on spoken language was investigated in a two-part spelling test administered to both hearing and profoundly deaf college students. The spelling test examined ability to spell words varying in the degree to which their correct orthographic representation could be derived from the linguistic structure of English. Both groups of subjects were found to be sensitive to the underlying regularities of the orthography as indicated by greater accuracy on linguistically-derivable words than on irregular words. Comparison of accuracy on a production task and on a multiple-choice recognition task showed that the performance of both deaf and hearing subjects benefited from the recognition format, but especially so in the spelling of irregular words. Differences in the underlying spelling process for deaf and hearing spellers were revealed in an analysis of their misspellings: Deaf subjects produced fewer phonetically accurate misspellings than did the hearing subjects. Nonetheless, the deaf spellers tended to observe the formational constraints of English phonology and morphology in their misspellings. Together, these results suggest that deaf subjects are able to develop an appreciation for the structural properties of the orthography, but that their spelling may be guided by an accurate representation of the phonetic structure of words to a lesser degree than it is for hearing spellers.     

Interference effects in an auditory Stroop task: congruence and correspondence

Two auditory Stroop experiments are reported in which subjects responded vocally to the gender of the speaker of stimulus words. The interference effects found were broadly similar to those of a manual-response auditory Stroop paradigm although response-set effects appeared to operate in the data. In all experimental conditions responses were slower to stimulus words which named potential responses than to those words which did not. Such effects have not been found in previous manual-response experiments and it is suggested that the relatively high degree of S-R and of ideomotor compatibility in the vocal response task, compared with the manual task, may be responsible for this difference between the paradigms.The second experiment enabled a comparison to be made between the effects of congruence between relevant and irrelevant elements of the Stroop stimulus and the effects of correspondence between the response and the irrelevant aspect of the stimulus. A predominant influence of congruence was found when the subject responded using words semantically related to speaker gender, but an effect of correspondence was obtained when an arbitrary pairing of response word and speaker gender was required.     

Holland's theory and college-degreed working black and white women

The main concern of this study was to investigate differences between black and white women employed in traditional male occupations who took the Vocational Preference Inventory (VPI) and the Self-Directed Search (SDS). The VPI and the SDS were administered to 155 black and white college-degreed workers in three occupations (engineering, medicine, and law) corresponding to three of Holland's environmental categories (Realistic Investigative, and Enterprising). In general, the findings for the three VPI and SDS scales for these occupational groups indicate that white women when compared to black women in the same occupation tend to report similar mean raw scores.     

Alcoholics treated by individualized behavior therapy: One year treatment outcome

One-year treatment outcome results are reported for 70 male alcoholics who, while hospitalized at Patton State Hospital, served as subjects in an experiment evaluating ‘Individualized Behavior Therapy (IBT)’ techniques. Initially, subjects had been assigned to a controlled drinking or non-drinking (abstinence) treatment goal, and then were randomly assigned to either an experimental group receiving IBT or a control group receiving conventional state hospital treatment. One year follow-up results demonstrated that IBT treated subjects had functioned significantly better than control subjects. Dependent variable measures included daily drinking disposition, general emotional adjustment, vocational satisfaction, occupational status, driving status and an index of residential status and stability. The results support the view that some ‘alcoholics’ can acquire and maintain controlled drinking behavior over at least a 1-yr follow-up interval. The difficulties of designing and applying sophisticated follow-up procedures and measures are discussed.     

Judgments of recency for long sequences of pictures: the absence of a developmental trend

Recency judgments were examined for four groups (N = 40 per group) aged 7, 8, 10, and 18 years. The Ss were required to choose either the near or far item on a series of test pairs embedded within a long sequence of single inspection items. No age effects were found. Performance was more accurate the longer the separation between the original presentation of the two test items and the shorter the lag from the most recently presented item to the test. Implications for general and developmental theories of memory were discussed. The data supported the hypothesis that tasks, which do not require deliberate mnemonic strategies, are not developmentally sensitive.     

Individual differences in procedures for knowledge acquisition from maps

This study investigated the procedures subjects use to acquire knowledge from maps. In Experiment 1, three experienced and five novice map users provided verbal protocols while attempting to learn a map. The protocols suggested four categories of processes that subjects invoked during learning: attention, encoding, evaluation, and control. Good learners differed from poor learners primarily in their techniques for and success at encoding spatial information, their ability to accurately evaluate their learning progress, and their ability to focus attention on unlearned information. An analysis of the performance of experienced map users suggested that learning depended on particular procedures and not on familiarity with the task. In Experiment 2, subjects were instructed to use (a) six of the effective learning procedures from Experiment 1, (b) six procedures unrelated to learning success, or (c) their own techniques. The effective procedures set comprised three techniques for learning spatial information, two techniques for using self-generated feedback to guide subsequent study behaviors, and a procedure for partitioning the map into sections. Subjects using these procedures performed better than subjects in the other groups. In addition, subjects' visual memory ability predicted the magnitude of the performance differential.