Token test performance by dyslexic adolescents

An abbreviated form of the Token Test was administered to 42 normal readers and 42 dyslexic adolescent males. The greatest divergence between the two groups was seen on Part V where syntactic complexity varies. An error analysis also supported the hypothesis that some, but not all, dyslexics have an impaired ability to process syntactic information. The Token Test, particularly Part V, would be a useful aid in the evaluation of dyslexic individuals.     

Closed- and open-class lexical access in agrammatic and fluent aphasics

Bradley, Garrett, and Zurif (Bradley, Computational distinctions of vocabulary type. Unpublished doctoral dissertation, MIT Press; Cambridge, MA, 1978; Biological studies of mental processes, MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, 1980) have suggested that closed-class word access is normally mediated by a different route than the open-class one, and that the loss of this closed-class route might account for agrammatism. However, in an earlier study ( Gordon & Caramazza, Brain and Language, 15, 143–160, 1982) we were not able to confirm a meaningful difference between closed- and open-class word frequency responsiveness of the type Bradley (unpublished dissertation, 1978) had seemed to find in normal subjects. We have now done a direct comparison of closed-class frequency sensitivity in agrammatic and nonagrammatic aphasics, to directly test Bradley and colleagues' hypotheses and to avoid some of the experimental problems with between-class frequency comparisons. We find that closed-class words behave similarly whether or not the subject is agrammatic. Therefore, the differences between agrammatic and nonagrammatic aphasics must arise at a deeper level (or levels) of lexical processing than the one probed by the frequency sensitivity effect.     

Assortative marriage and the familiality of cognitive abilities in families of extremely gifted students

The top 1% of the extremely bright students identified by the Study of Mathematically Precocious Youth (Benbow & Stanley, 1980b) were tested along with their parents, using a battery of specifically designed cognitive tests. These students represented the top 0.03% of their age group in intellectual ability. The results showed that the parents were extremely able and resembled one another significantly more than parents in the general population. In addition, the intellectually precocious children resembled their parents to a lesser extent than children of average ability resemble their parents. These results suggest that considerable assortative mating has occurred among the parents of these extremely gifted youth, but that extreme giftedness cannot be predicted reliably solely as a result of the mating of bright parents.     

The selective impairment of phonological processing: A case study

A case study is reported of an aphasic patient with fluent speech and markedly superior comprehension of written vs. spoken words. Results of extensive testing supported the hypothesis that the patient suffers from a phonological processing deficit that affects performance in all tasks that require the generation of a phonological code. This selective deficit is interpreted as the underlying cause of diverse symptoms such as asyntactic comprehension of written sentences, the commission of spelling errors in writing, and the production of literal paraphasias and neologisms in spontaneous speech. Alternative possibilities for the classification of this patient are discussed.     

Scrutinizing application: An agenda for applied developmental psychology

This paper dissects two views of application. The first is associated with an ontogenetic, general skills perspective which assumes that applications involve bringing to bear general concepts and principles on practical problems, deviant populations and the match between developing individuals and the environment they inhabit and use. However, that ontogenetic view and its associated applications may be flawed. A second functionalist view of application is described which suggests a need to examine the meaning of application and the contexts where applications are appropriate. Two questions might profitably be evaluated simultaneously: How does the developing individual gain access to relevant competencies and adapt them to new circumstances?, and How does the developmentalist decide what is relevant and usable for practice? A particular developmental curriculum fitting these views is described.     

The semantic deficit hypothesis: Perceptual parsing and object classification by aphasic patients

Many aphasic patients are impaired in their ability to provide or to recognize the names of objects, but little is known about the processing deficits that underlie these difficulties. In this report, a model of object naming/name recognition is proposed, and a prediction is tested concerning one possible functional locus of impairment in name-recognition and object-naming disorders. A subgroup of aphasic patients is found to be impaired in the ability to perform perceptual similarity judgments for pairs of stimulus objects, and to be unable to classify the objects into one of two lexical categories. It is concluded that the classification disorder suffered by these patients results from an impairment at the level of the semantically guided perceptual parsing of objects.