Modelling picture naming in aphasia: The relationship between consistency and predictability of responses.

Objective: Two aspects of aphasic picture naming were examined: that is, the extent to which the accuracy of the response to the same stimulus is replicated in a successive examination, and , that is, the extent to which accuracy depends on the characteristics of each stimulus.

Methods: Thirty-eight aphasic participants were examined twice. The response pattern was the same across the 2 presentations (response stability) for 36 participants, who were classified into 3 groups according to the prevailing error-type (lexical-semantic, phonological, or a balance between the two error-types): Their item-consistency was quantified with Cohen's kappa.

A case of impaired naming and knowledge of body parts. Are limbs a separate sub-category?

A left hemisphere stroke patient presented a disproportionate difficulty for body parts knowledge without autotopagnosia. The deficit concerned the lexical-semantic representation of body parts and was most severe for limbs. The ability to gesture was spared and action naming was not more impaired than object naming.

Mental representation of prepositional compounds: evidence from Italian agrammatic patients.

The processing of Prepositional compounds (typical Neo-latin noun--noun modifications where a head noun is modified by a prepositional phrase, e.g., mulino a vento, windmill) was preliminarily studied with a group of six agrammatic aphasic patients, and, in more detail, with a further agrammatic patient (MB).

Pattern span: a tool for unwelding visuo-spatial memory.

Evidence showing that non-verbal short-term memory has distinct visual and spatial/sequential components is reviewed. A new test, The Visual Patterns Test (VPT), which was designed to measure short-term visual memory largely shorn of its spatio-sequential component, is described. Correlational studies of the VPT and the Corsi Blocks Test with healthy subjects and brain-damaged patients indicate a separation between visual and sequential abilities.

Writing disorders in Italian aphasic patients. A multiple single-case study of dysgraphia in a language with shallow orthography.

We report results of a writing task given to 53 mildly to moderately aphasic Italian subjects. The task was designed to test the writing performance along the subword-level routine for the spelling of regular words and non-words, and along the lexical routine for the spelling of irregular words. The aim of the study was to identify the incidence of different dysgraphic subtypes in Italian, a language that is considered to have shallow orthography.