Primary obsessional slowness: a nursing treatment programme with a 13-year-old male adolescent

A 13-year-old male adolescent inpatient with a 5-year history of primary obsessional slowness was treated using a nursing intervention programme involving prompting, pacing and shaping, or participant modelling of four types of self-care behaviour. The treatments produced an immediate increase in response rate of three of the four behaviour targets. Treatment gains were not maintained during the gradual fading of the intervention programme. Possible reasons for failure to achieve treatment maintenance are discussed in light of the literature on primary obsessional slowness.     

Psychometric and CT scan measurements in a case of crossed aphasia in a dextral

A case of crossed aphasia with lesion deep to the right supramarginal gyrus was studied to determine (1) if this patient behaved similar to patients with the same lesion site in the left hemisphere, (2) if visuospatial deficits were present, and (3) if the CT scan asymmetries were similar to those of other right-handers. Speech and language skills were similar to those patients with similar lesions in the left hemisphere. Visuospatial and arithmetic deficits were similar to those described after right-hemisphere and left-hemisphere damage. CT scan asymmetries were atypical. These results provide behavioral and neuroradiological confirmation of atypical hemispheric dominance.     

Evoked potentials to consonant-vowel syllables

The hypothesis was tested that CV syllables (10 different consonants but the same vowel /?/) would show different evoked potential latencies and amplitudes. Differences were found which were dichotomised between plosives and other consonants. Although one difference between these two groups of consonants is the duration of that consonant, this duration difference did not adequately explain the prolonged evoked potential latencies and the reduced amplitudes for the non-plosives. However, no differences were found within the group of non-plosives, although they varied in consonant duration. It was suggested that N₁ latency and amplitude reflected processing time at an early stage of analysis of both speech and non-speech stimuli. The results show that consunants of long duration are perceived later than plosives, but well before the onset of the vowel.     

Production of narrative and procedural discourse in aphasia

The study described the abilities of a group of 10 aphasics and 10 normals to produce narrative and procedural discourse. The experimental tasks included telling stories, producing summaries, giving morals to the stories, and producing procedures. The variables examined in the investigation included features of sentential grammars, such as amount of embedding, and features of discourse grammars, such as occurrence of elements of superstructure in narrative. Additionally, raters assessed the content and clarity of the discourses. The results showed that aphasics produced well-structured narrative and procedural discourse. Aphasics' discourse errors differed only in degree, not qualitatively, from those of normals. The language of the aphasics' discourses was reduced in both complexity and amount. It was found that the aphasics had difficulties in producing summaries and giving morals for the stories when compared with the normals. Both the content and clarity of the discourses produced by the aphasics were rated lower than those produced by the normals.     

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.     

Stimulus control of spatial behavior on the eight-arm maze in rats

Rats were trained on an eight-arm, elevated radial maze in a large cylindrical chamber where extramaze stimuli could be manipulated. The first experiment indicated that rats could use extramaze stimuli to locate the arms if such stimuli were available, whereas they performed less effectively and tended to employ response chaining if these stimuli were not available. The second experiment demonstrated that maze performance was disrupted by transposition of the stimuli but was relatively unaffected by rotation of the same stimuli. The third experiment suggested that the disruptive effect of stimulus transposition might be due to a “resetting” process elicited by the alteration in the configuration of the stimuli after stimulus transposition. These results suggest that when extramaze stimuli are available, rats tend to use such stimuli in a configurational manner to locate the arms rather than as a list of items processed independently of their spatial relationships to each other.     

Limb apraxia and motor performance

This study was desinged to determine if motor deficits in limb apraxia are task specific. Non-brain-damaged patients and apraxic and nonapraxic patients with left hemisphere damage performed language and limb apraxia tests and six motor tasks with the left hand. Contrary to previous data, no significant group differences occurred on a finger tapping task. Although task complexity or sequencing requirements affected group differences, greatest apraxic impairment was noted on a task of precise steadiness, but only when its response inhibition requirements were increased. This pattern of deficits appears to be associated with greater involvement of the premotor area in the apraxic group.     

Why Mikey's right and my key's wrong: The significance of stress and word boundaries in a child's output system

The systematic errors children make in the course of phonological development, like adult production errors and adult phonological processes, can provide evidence of language production mechanisms. A detailed investigation of the environments in which velar stops are fronted by a phonologically delayed child reveals that fronting is dependent on both word stress and word boundaries; that it shows lexical exceptions; and that it occurs in output only. This distribution suggests that the child has output lexical representations which are independent of input lexical representations, and that the fronting error occurs in these output representations. It also suggests that prosodic features are crucial to the identification of articulatory features within these representations. Such an analysis has implications for theories of lexical access, and for the development of lexical access in children.     

The role of control processes and structural constraints in models of memory and social judgment

Six experiments examining a recent model of memory and social judgment are reported. In particular, the theoretical concept of a Work Space is examined in terms of both its structural properties and a variety of control processes that govern its operation. In Experiment 1, subjects were given information about a stimulus person and told that they would later be asked to recall it as well as possible. The length of the actual delay before recall and the length of the anticipated delay were factorially varied. Under short delay conditions, subjects anticipating a short delay recalled more of the information than those anticipating a long delay. The reverse was true under actual long delay conditions. Other results suggest that the anticipated length of the delay has an effect on processes related to both encoding and storage/retrieval. Experiments 2 and 3 demonstrate that, relative to no delay conditions, a long actual delay or a long anticipated delay produces polarization in social judgments. Both of these results are predicted by the model. Experiments 4–6 examine the effect of interpolated cognitive activity on memory and social judgment. As predicted by the model, relatively complicated cognitive activity leads to lower levels of recall and a greater polarization of judgments than less complicated intervening cognitive activity. It is argued that all of these results can be accounted for by the concept of a Work Space as a temporary repository devoted to the current information processing activities of the subject. It is thought that such a concept must be kept theoretically distinct from long-term memory. Implications of the results for models of memory and social judgment are discussed.