Using informative verbal exchanges to promote verb retrieval in nonfluent aphasia.

Purpose: The goal of this study was to determine whether positive treatment effects of a modified constraint-induced language therapy focused on verb production would generalize to unpracticed items and tasks.

Method: Four individuals participated in a single-subject treatment design protocol. The treatment involved intensive practice producing verbs in sentences in an informative communicative exchange.

Effects of Noun-Verb Conceptual/ Phonological Relatedness on Verb Production Changes in Broca's Aphasia.

Background: Individuals with Broca's aphasia show better performance on nouns than on verbs, but distinction between nouns and verbs is not always clear; some verbs are conceptually and/ or phonologically related to nouns, while others are not. Inconsistent results on effects of noun-verb relatedness on verb production have been reported in the literature.

Aims: We investigated (1) whether verb instrumentality (a conceptual relationship to nouns) or homonymy (a phonological relationship to nouns) would affect verb production in individuals with Broca's aphasia and (2) whether conceptual/ phonological noun-verb relationship would affect responsiveness to aphasia therapy that focused on verb production.

The common objects memory test (COMT): a simple test with cross-cultural applicability.

The Common Objects Memory Test (COMT) was developed to assess age-related memory impairments in individuals with a range of educational, language and cultural backgrounds. The COMT is a list-learning protocol that uses photographs of common objects to bypass difficulties posed by written words for individuals who are illiterate or have limited education. Preliminary data are presented for 336 healthy adults and 90 patients with dementia.

Prosodic changes in aphasic speech: timing.

Controversy remains about the impairment of prosody in aphasia, particularly with regard to speech timing. This paper addresses this topic through an analysis of timing in four sets of a common morphological paradigm. The paradigm consisted of a basic form (stem) and two longer derived forms (e.

TRAINING VERB PRODUCTION IN COMMUNICATIVE CONTEXT: EVIDENCE FROM A PERSON WITH CHRONIC NON-FLUENT APHASIA.

BACKGROUND: The use of constraint-induced treatment in aphasia therapy has yielded promising but mixed results. AIMS: We conducted a treatment study with an individual with chronic non-fluent aphasia. The goal of the treatment was to improve verb production in sentence- and narrative- contexts.

A common mechanism in verb and noun naming deficits in Alzheimer's patients.

We tested the ability of Alzheimer's patients and elderly controls to name living and non-living nouns, and manner and instrument verbs. Patients' error patterns and relative performance with different categories showed evidence of graceful degradation for both nouns and verbs, with particular domain-specific impairments for living nouns and instrument verbs. Our results support feature-based, semantic representations for nouns and verbs and support the role of inter-correlated features in noun impairment, and the role of noun knowledge in instrument verb impairment.

Language and Dementia: Neuropsychological Aspects.

This article reviews recent evidence for the relationship between extralinguistic cognitive and language abilities in dementia. A survey of data from investigations of three dementia syndromes (Alzheimer's disease, semantic dementia and progressive nonfluent aphasia) reveals that, more often than not, deterioration of conceptual organization appears associated with lexical impairments, whereas impairments in executive function are associated with sentence- and discourse-level deficits. These connections between extralinguistic functions and language ability also emerge from the literature on cognitive reserve and bilingualism that investigates factors that delay the onset and possibly the progression of neuropsychological manifestation of dementia.

Information content versus relational knowledge: semantic deficits in patients with Alzheimer's disease.

Studies of semantic impairment in Alzheimer's disease (AD) have yielded conflicting results, some finding evidence of considerable deficits, others finding that semantic knowledge is relatively intact. How do we reconcile findings from picture naming tasks that seem to indicate semantic impairment in AD with results from certain sorting tasks that suggest intact semantics? To investigate the basis of the contradictory results described above, we conducted a study using two types of tasks: (1) picture naming; and (2) board sorting. The board sorting task we used is a simultaneous similarity judgment task, in which participants are asked to place more similar concepts closer together and less similar ones farther apart.

Effect of speech task on intelligibility in dysarthria: a case study of Parkinson's disease.

This study assessed intelligibility in a dysarthric patient with Parkinson's disease (PD) across five speech production tasks: spontaneous speech, repetition, reading, repeated singing, and spontaneous singing, using the same phrases for all but spontaneous singing. The results show that this speaker was significantly less intelligible when speaking spontaneously than in the other tasks. Acoustic analysis suggested that relative intensity and word duration were not independently linked to intelligibility, but dysfluencies (from perceptual analysis) and articulatory/resonance patterns (from acoustic records) were related to intelligibility in predictable ways.

Speech errors in Alzheimer's disease: reevaluating morphosyntactic preservation.

Researchers studying the speech of individuals with probable Alzheimer's disease (PAD) report that morphosyntax is preserved relative to lexical aspects of speech. The current study questions whether dividing all errors into only two categories, morphosyntactic and lexical, is warranted, given the theoretical controversies concerning the production and representation of pronouns and closed-class words in particular. Two experiments compare the speech output of 10 individuals with Alzheimer's disease to that of 15 healthy age- and education-matched speakers.

Assessing working memory and language comprehension in Alzheimer's disease.

Studies of language impairments in patients with Alzheimer's disease have often assumed that impairments in linguistic working memory underlie comprehension deficits. Assessment of this hypothesis has been hindered both by vagueness of key terms such as "working memory" and by limitations of available working memory tasks, in that many such tasks either seem to have little relationship to language comprehension or are too confusing or difficult for Alzheimer's patients. Four experiments investigated the usefulness of digit ordering, a new task assessing linguistic working memory and/or language processing skill, in normal adults and patients with probable Alzheimer's disease.

Why do Alzheimer patients have difficulty with pronouns? Working memory, semantics, and reference in comprehension and production in Alzheimer's disease.

Three experiments investigated the extent to which semantic and working-memory deficits contribute to Alzheimer patients' impairments in producing and comprehending referring expressions. In Experiment 1, the spontaneous speech of 11 patients with Alzheimer's disease (AD) contained a greater ratio of pronouns to full noun phrases than did the spontaneous speech produced by 9 healthy controls. Experiments 2 and 3 used a cross-modal naming methodology to compare reference comprehension in another group of 10 patients and 10 age-matched controls.

The effects of age, education, and ethnicity on verbal fluency.

A group of 317 healthy participants between 54 and 99 years of age performed a verbal fluency task. The participants included Chinese, Hispanic, and Vietnamese immigrants, as well as White and African American English speakers. They were given 1 min to name as many animals as possible in their native language.

Sentence comprehension deficits in Alzheimer's disease: a comparison of off-line vs. on-line sentence processing.

Two studies explored whether sentence comprehension impairments in Alzheimer's disease (AD) are due to deficits in syntactic processing or memory. Study 1 used a picture-pointing sentence comprehension task to measure the final outcome of comprehension in an off-line fashion. It showed the comprehension of 30 patients with AD to be impaired, but suggested that the deficits could not be attributed solely to syntactic impairments.

The effect of endodontic medicaments on the sealing ability of provisional restorative materials.

The purpose of this study was to determine the effect of intracanal medicaments on the sealing ability of commonly used provisional filling materials. Ninety extracted, unrestored human molars were prepared. The contents of the pulp chamber were removed, and distal and mesial root canal systems were cleansed to a size 25 file.

Effect of nonvital tooth bleaching on microleakage of resin composite restorations.

Thirty-six extracted, noncarious, nonfractured human incisors were divided into four groups of nine teeth. Endodontic access cavities were prepared, the pulp chamber was debrided, the root canals were cleansed, and root canal treatment was completed. Pulp cavities of teeth in group 1 received a cotton pellet and were sealed with Cavit.

Double dissociation of semantic categories in Alzheimer's disease.

Data that demonstrate distinct patterns of semantic impairment in Alzheimer's disease (AD) are presented. Findings suggest that while groups of mild-moderate patients may not display category specific impairments, some individual patients do show selective impairment of either natural kinds or artifacts. We present a model of semantic organization in which category specific impairments arise from damage to distributed features underlying different types of categories.

Microleakage of endodontic access cavities restored with composites.

A proper seal of restorative composites in endodontic access cavities is mandatory to prevent ingress of microorganisms and debris into the tooth-restoration interface. Chemically cured composites tend to have less polymerization shrinkage than photopolymerization composites. This study compared in vitro sealing performance of a chemically cured and a photopolymerization composite for access cavity restorations in endodontically treated teeth.

Temporoparietal cortex in aphasia. Evidence from positron emission tomography.

Forty-four aphasic patients were examined with (F18)-fluorodeoxyglucose positron emission tomography in a resting state to determine whether consistent glucose metabolic abnormalities were present. Ninety-seven percent of subjects showed metabolic abnormalities in the angular gyrus, 89% in the supramarginal gyrus, and 87% in the lateral and transverse superior temporal gyrus. Pearson product moment correlations were calculated between regional metabolic measures and performance on the Western Aphasia Battery.

Naming consistency in Alzheimer's disease.

Although lexical semantic deficits are postulated to play a prominent role in the anomia of Alzheimer's disease, it is unclear whether the primary disturbance is one of lexical access or one of lexical semantic loss. Response consistency on a naming task is one means of evaluating the underlying source of naming impairment. Access dysfunction usually implies variable word-finding difficulty, while a theory of lexical loss predicts that many word names would be consistently unavailable.

Slowly progressive aphasia: three cases with language, memory, CT and PET data.

Three cases of slowly progressive speech and language disturbance were studied at various points post onset (three, five and 15 years respectively). Language, neuropsychological and brain imaging (computer tomography and positron emission tomography) evaluations were completed on all three patients. The data suggest that the syndrome of "progressive aphasia": 1) does not involve a uniform symptom complex; 2) does not necessarily develop into a full blown dementia syndrome; 3) varies greatly in rate of progression from case to case; 4) is associated with normal brain structure (on computer tomography); and 5) is associated with abnormal left temporal lobe metabolism as measured by fluorodeoxyglucose (FDG) positron emission tomography (PET).

Technical note: antimicrobial action of glass-ionomer lining cement on S. sanguis and S. mutans.

There are a number of glass-ionomer lining cements available to the profession. It is generally agreed that the glass-ionomer cements demonstrate reasonably good biocompatibility. The purpose of this study was to evaluate the antimicrobial activity of six glass-ionomer cements on S.

Antimicrobial activity of calcium hydroxide liners on Streptococcus sanguis and S. mutans.

The antimicrobial activity of 10 calcium hydroxide liners on Streptococcus sanguis and S. mutans was studied. One hundred plates of tryticose soy agar-sheep red blood cells (10%), each with four distinct 3 mm diameter wells, were divided into two groups of 50.

Cerebral glucose metabolism in Wernicke's, Broca's, and conduction aphasia.

Cerebral glucose metabolism was evaluated in patients with either Wernicke's (N = 7), Broca's (N = 11), or conduction (N = 10) aphasia using 18F-2-fluoro-2-deoxy-D-glucose with positron emission tomography. The three aphasic syndromes differed in the degree of left-to-right frontal metabolic asymmetry, with Broca's aphasia showing severe asymmetry and Wernicke's aphasia mild-to-moderate metabolic asymmetry, while patients with conduction aphasia were metabolically symmetric. On the other hand, the three syndromes showed the same degree of metabolic decline in the left temporal region.