Word-finding abilities of three types of aphasic subjects

Word-finding difficulties are often observed among different types of aphasic patients. This investigation analyzed the word-finding abilities of 30 aphasic subjects (10 Broca's, 10 Wernicke's, and 10 anomic). Forty nouns counterbalanced according to word length and frequency of occurrence in English language usage were used as stimuli and presented through four modalities (oral expression, writing, auditory comprehension, and reading comprehension). It was expected that patterns of word finding abilities would help in the classification of the different types of aphasia. In addition, long words and less frequently occurring words in English language usage should prove more difficult in word-finding ability, regardless of modality. The results of this study found long words and less frequent words were more difficult for aphasic subjects. Among the modalities, long words were significantly harder than short words for the writing modality only. It was also found that semantic errors were the most common errors for all types of aphasic subjects. Broca's subjects produced significantly moreno response errors in oral expression; Wernicke's subjects produced significantly more semantic and phonemic errors in reading comprehension; and, Wernicke's subjects produced significantly more unrelated errors in both oral expression and reading comprehension. Clinical implications were also discussed.The present study was based on a doctoral dissertation completed at the City University of New York in partial fulfillment of the requirements of the doctoral degree in Speech and Hearing Sciences by the first author under the direction of the second author. The authors wish to thank Dr. Louis J. Gerstman for his assistance with the statistical analysis of this research and Dr. Robert Goldfarb for all his helpful suggestions and editorial comments.     

Research on black women college administrators: Descriptive and interview data

The article summarizes the results of a survey and follow-up interview of black women college administrators, at predominantly white colleges, in selected positions, such as president, vice-president, dean, director, department chairperson, and the assistants and/or associates to the aforementioned positions. The author gives a profile of a middle-management group of women who are at different colleges in the City University of New York system. Also included are a review of the literature and recommendations for both the University and black women seeking careers in college administration.     

Mary McLeod bethune and the education of black girls

Traditional definitions of feminism do not hold for some black women like Mary McLeod Bethune who had to overcome the dual burdens of race and sex in order to build a school for black girls in the racially tense South during the early part of the 20th century. Ever a pragmatist, Bethune seized the opportunity offered by the rhetoric of domesticity and certain stereotypical views of blacks in order to advance the higher cause of uplift and self-sufficiency for black women through education.     

Perception of structure in novel music

Two experiments demonstrated the way in which musicians and nonmusicians process realistic music encountered for the first time. A set of tunes whose members were related to each other by a number of specific musical relationships was constructed. In Experiment 1, subjects gave similarity judgments of all pairs of tunes, which were analyzed by the ADDTREE clustering program. Musicians and nonmusicians gave essentially equivalent results: Tunes with different rhythms were rated as being very dissimilar, whereas tunes identical except for being in a major versus a minor mode were rated as being highly similar. In Experiment 2, subjects learned to identify the tunes, and their errors formed a confusion matrix. The matrix was submitted to a clustering analysis. Results from the two experiments corresponded better for the nonmusicians than for the musicians. Musicians presumably exceed nonmusicians in the ability to categorize music in multiple ways, but even nonmusicians extract considerable information from newly heard music.     

False recognition of associates: How robust is the effect?

False recognition of nonpresented words that were strong associates of 12 words in a study list was examined. Six lists were read to subjects; each list contained the 12 strongest associates to a critical nonpresented word. False-alarm rates to the 6 critical nonpresented words were obtained under several different conditions. The manipulations included varying the level of processing done to the study lists, varying the recognition-test procedure, repeating each of the study lists three times, and mixing the words from the six study lists together. A reliable false-recognition effect for critical nonpresented words was obtained in all conditions. However, the effect was not impervious to all of the manipulations. Significantly lower false recognition was obtained when learning was incidental as well as when the words on the six lists were mixed together. Neither level of processing nor repetition significantly influenced false recognition. This last result is inconsistent with Hintzman’s (1988) MINERVA 2 global memory model, but agrees with predictions from Shiffrin, Ratcliff, and Clark’s (1990) SAM model.     

Knowing,interconnecting, and fulfilling the four faces and the source of our being

This essay is part of a work in progress concerned with trying to discover, explain and evaluate the most crucial choices of our life and how to free ourselves to make fundamentally better choices. Our theoretical analysis focuses on the practice of the core drama of life, the archetypal drama of transformation. Why is that our core drama? Because by moving through its three Acts again and again, we free our capacity to participate with the deepest source of our being and with our neighbors in creating fundamentally new and better solutions to concrete problems. The living underlying pattern of this drama is always the same; its concrete experience, always different. It is also the core drama of life because we have only four fundamentally different choices for organizing a way of life in the service of which we live the stories of our lives, a way of life which provides us with ultimate meaning and purpose in life. And three of these four ways of life are only fragments of the core drama of transformation.     

Rhythmic motor behavior of preambulatory motor impaired,down syndrome and nondisabled children: A comparative analysis

The developmental course of rhythmic motor behavior was followed longitudinally for three groups of preambulatory children — normally developing, Down syndrome, and those with profound motor impairment. The groups differed in chronological age but were comparable with respect to motor age. The motor impaired subjects displayed significantly less rhythmic motor behavior than the nondisabled and Down syndrome groups. In comparing particular subtypes of rhythmic motor behavior, differences were found in both the average number of bouts and duration of subtypes among the groups. Longitudinal analyses of the data over the entire observation period revealed that the rhythmic motor behavior of the children with Down syndrome was more similar to that exhibited by the nondisabled children than was the rhythmic motor behavior of the children with motor impairment. However, there was considerable variability among the groups in several particular subtypes.This research was supported by grants from the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (HD 17650 and HD 07226).The authors acknowledge the assistance of Robert E. Arendt, Grant Youngquist, Michael Hohn, and Charles Lowitzer in obtaining the observational data and thank the families of the subjects for their enthusiasm and dedication to the project.This study was presented at the 23rd Annual Gatlinburg Conference on Research and Theory in Mental Retardation and Developmental Disabilities, April 21, 1990.     

Duration discrimination in a series of rhythmic events

Duration discrimination of the last of a series of four clicks was investigated. Examination of psychophysical functions from eight subjects revealed evidence for a Weber’s law model relating discrimination to base interclick interval. Also, the point of subjective equality was seen to change reliably as a function of base rate.