Unilateral agraphia after section of the posterior half of the truncus of the corpus callosum

Children ranging in age from 3 to 12 tapped on a morse key with their index finger as fast as possible. After a control test, they concurrently tapped and recited a nursery rhyme, recited animal names, and memorized shapes. Previous results suggested that more interference in a motor task results from attempting at the same time to perform another task controlled by the same, than by a different, hemisphere. Right-handed tapping and talking both used left hemisphere space; left-handed tapping and talking were controlled by different hemispheres. Relative to silent tapping concurrent talking caused a greater drop in right-hand tapping rate than in left-hand tapping rate in both the rhyme and animal conditions. Interference by shape memorizing was equal across hands. The differential effect of speaking on right-hand preference indicates the left lateralization of speech output control. The size of this effect did not vary with increasing grade level. The findings support the view that speech output control is fully lateralized at least by age 3 years.     

The communication disorder in dialysis dementia: A case report

The communication disorder in dialysis dementia is an integral feature of the syndrome. This report describes the communication disorder in a 67-year-old man over a period of 4 months from his admission to the hospital to his death. In the early stage of the syndrome, the most prominent feature was a speech problem, the characteristics of which may vary among cases. In the middle stage, it was difficult to distinguish among aphemia, aphasia, or a combination of dysarthria and confusional state. The severity of the problems in these stages was temporally related to the dialysis treatments. The final stage was characterized by constant mutism and was unrelated to the dialysis treatments. Death occurred 10 months after the communication problems emerged. Communication studies of dialysis dementia patients may offer a systematic method to monitor the course of the syndrome, its response to therapeutic trials, and a clinical model for the study of communication disorders in general.     

Verbal and nonverbal recognition memory in aphasic and nonaphasic stroke patients

The ability to retain lists of verbal and nonverbalizable items across recurrent recognition tasks was tested in three groups: (1) stroke patients with a left-brain lesion and aphasia, (2) stroke patients with a right-brain lesion and left hemiplegia, and (3) nonneurologically impaired outpatients. As determined with signal detection measures, aphasics were deficient in discriminating words that were to be remembered from those that were not; their recognition of nonverbal visual (geometric art) or auditory (bird calls) patterns, however, was unimpaired. Left hemiplegics showed the opposite pattern. After a long-term interval (<10 min), correct recognition of words was diminished in all groups whereas recognition of visual patterns increased. Both groups of stroke patients adopted material-specific decision criteria which in part accounted for the dissociation of verbal and nonverbal recognition memory by laterality of lesion. Item analysis indicated that aphasics' verbal memory difficulties were affected by acoustic-semantic confusion of list words.     

Effects of knowledge that attributions will be observed by others

The current study was conducted to determine if attribution statements would be affected by subjects' knowledge that their attributions of success or failure would be observed by an opposite-sex peer. At the time subjects recorded their attributions, half of them anticipated that their attributions would soon be observed in their presence by an opposite-sex peer, while the other half recorded their attributions anonymously. Results indicated that attributions of success and failure were affected by the social context. Observed subjects evidenced less tendency to attribute their failure to low ability than did nonobserved subjects. Subjects who succeeded on an identity-relevant task reported higher ability attributions under observation conditions than under nonobservation conditions. Observed subjects evidenced significantly greater willingness to attribute failure to lack of effort than did nonobserved subjects. For a task intended to be of minimal relevance to subjects' identities, nonobserved subjects attributed failure to task difficulty to a significantly greater degree than did observed subjects. Results were discussed in relation to Bradley's contention that self-serving biases in attribution can usefully be conceptualized as strategic self-presentations.     

Relationship between response to graded exposure and marital satisfaction in agoraphobics

Agoraphobics who were satisfied in their marriage responded well to graded exposure and maintained their improvement to 3-months follow-up. Satisfaction with self and partner remained unchanged in patient and spouse. Agoraphobics who were dissatisfied with their marriage improved initially with graded exposure but later lost most of their gains and reported no change in general neurotic symptoms. Marital dissatisfaction also remained unchanged. Patients' dissatisfaction with their spouses, measured before therapy, predicted outcome in the sample as a whole.     

The ecological approach to perceiving as a foundation for understanding the development of knowing in infancy

The ecological thesis of direct realism is used as a framework for examining the development of knowing in human infancy. When information for perceiving is defined ecologically (i.e., relative to the situational context and to the physical dimensions, capabilities, and needs of the perceiver), knowing need not be construed as the act of using representations to give meaning to acts or percepts. Knowing, alternatively, is the act of noticing affordances, situation and perceiverspecific meanings of objects, according to their value to the perceiver for achieving specific goals. Changes with development in infant sensorimotor functioning may, in this view, be explained by a process of increasing economy in noticing potentially available affordances, rather than a process of constructing a representational system for making present something not present. Studies of three infant skills widely attributed to the onset of representation are examined with regard to this ecological thesis. Results indicate that the noticing of affordances is critically involved in each of these skills.     

Verbal self-correction behaviors of fluent and nonfluent aphasic subjects

This investigation examined the use of six explicitly defined verbal self-correction behaviors by fluent and nonfluent aphasic subjects of high and low verbal ability, and by subjects further classified into six groups according to type of aphasia (Broca's, Anomic, Wernicke's etc.). Aphasic groups, on the average, generated some type of verbal self-correction effort on more than half of their initially erroneous responses, and the proportions of these efforts did not differ between aphasic patient groups. Significant differences in self-correction success were found, however, between groups classified according to fluency and severity, as well as among the six groups based on type of aphasia. In the former case, distinctions in self-correction skill favored high-verbal-ability groups regardless of fluency classification. In the latter instance, the subgroups typically formed by less severely impaired patients (Anomic and Broca's) had significantly higher proportions of successful self-correction behaviors than those comprised of individuals with more severe involvement (Wernicke's and Broca's plus severely limiting apraxia of speech). Between-group differences for specific types of self-correction behaviors occurred rarely, but those which were found could be related to characteristics of the particular aphasic groups under consideration. Verbal self-correction behavior is discussed as a behavioral reaction to an erroneous response or dissatisfaction with the quality of an intended response. These behaviors are viewed as indicators of the intactness of an aphasic individual's self-monitoring system, and of his tolerance for responses that are qualitatively limited by his verbal deficits.     

Deep agraphia

A case of agraphia is documented which resembles in every respect the pattern of results obtained in deep dyslexia. Pronounceable pseudowords could not be written to dictation while concrete nouns were more accurately transcribed than abstract nouns. Verbs and functions words were written very poorly and oral spelling was impaired. In addition, semantic paragraphias were present. In contrast to the deficit observed in writing, no such impairment was found for reading. It is concluded that writing can occur without phoneme-grapheme conversion and that codes generated for reading are functionally distinct from codes generated for writing.     

A study of hyperlexia

Twelve children with early intense reading and superior word recognition skills coupled with disordered language and cognitive behavior are described. Cognitive, linguistic, and reading measures evidenced a generalized cognitive deficit in forming superordinate schemata which was not specific to visual or auditory modalities. Positive family histories for reading problems were present for 11 of the 12 children, suggesting a relationship between hyperlexia and dyslexia.