Psychometric Aspects of Verbal Pragmatic Ratings

This study examined the psychometric aspects of a verbal pragmatic rating scale. The scale contained six pragmatic features (i.e., Conciseness, Lexical Selection, Quantity, Relevancy, Specificity, and Topic Maintenance) based on Grice's cooperative principles. Fifteen right brain-damaged (RBD), 15 left brain-damaged (LBD), and 16 healthy normal control (NC) right-handed adult participants produced narratives while recollecting emotional and nonemotional experiences. Naive raters evaluated each pragmatic feature for appropriateness on a 5-point Likert scale. When reliability was examined, the overall internal consistency of the pragmatic scale was extremely high (alpha =.96). Factor analysis was conducted to examine the theoretical relations among the six pragmatic features. Three meaningful factors involving discourse content, conceptual unity, and parsimony were identified. Findings are discussed in light of Grice's model and the construct validity of the scale.     

Dual Processing of Open- and Closed-Class Words

A series of articles in the past two decades has suggested differential processing of open- and closed-class lexical items by normal adults. Difficulties in replicating a crucial study (Bradley, 1978), however, have weakened the dual route hypothesis. We matched 16 French open-class items to 16 closed-class items for phonological structure, word length, and relative word frequency. Three agrammatic aphasics were asked to read each word in isolation and in a sentence context. Error analysis revealed strikingly more phonological errors on closed-class than open-class items. Dysfluencies were greater on closed-class items and contributed to greater overall reading time for the closed-class words, consistent with a two-route model for the production of closed- and open-class lexical items in Broca's aphasics and, thus, normals.     

Speech monitoring skills in Alzheimer's disease, Parkinson's disease, and normal aging.

We examined the abilities of 15 patients with dementia of the Alzheimer type (DAT), 22 patients with Parkinson's Disease (PD), and 141 healthy subjects (ranging in age from 30 to 79 years) to detect and correct their own speech errors. Each subject was shown the Cookie Theft picture of the BDAE (Goodglass & Kaplan, 1972. The assessment of aphasia and related disorders. Philadelphia: Lea & Febiger.) and instructed to tell the examiner the "...story of what's happening in the picture." Self-monitoring performance was assessed by tabulating the number of uncorrected errors as well as repaired errors. We divided repairs into two types based on the psycholinguistics literature (van Wijk & Kempen, 1987. Cognitive Psychology, 19, 403-440). Speech corrections were judged to be lemma repairs when the reparandum was a single word, and reformulation repairs when a new syntactic constituent was added to the reparandum. Patients with DAT corrected only 24% of their total errors and patients with PD only 25%. Healthy subjects, by contrast, corrected from 72 to 92% of their total errors. Patients with DAT tended to rely on reformulation repairs while patients with PD used both repair types about equally often. While healthy elderly Ss (in the 70s group) utilized lemma repairs more often than the reformulation strategy, all other healthy Ss used both strategies about equally often. Across all groups naming performance correlated negatively with numbers of undetected errors. Results point to a previously unrecognized communication disorder associated with PD and DAT and manifested by an impairment in the ability to correct output errors. This impairment may be related to attentional and frontal dysfunction in the two patient groups.     

Aphasia type and aging

We analyzed the relationship between age and clinical type of aphasia in 167 right-handed men who had suffered cerebrovascular accidents. Patients with unequivocal diagnoses as Broca's, Wernicke's, anomic, conduction, and global aphasics were considered. The median age of the Broca's group (51 years old) was significantly lower than that of the total group (55.8 years old), while the median age of the Wernicke's group was significantly higher (63 years old). Moreover the incidence of Wernicke's aphasia increased steadily with age, while incidence of the other types of aphasia peaked in the sixth decade and then diminished with increasing age.