Overprotection in couples with aphasia.

PURPOSE: The study aimed to measure the perception of overprotection in 21 couples living with aphasia, relative to controls. METHOD: The 'Questionnaire on Resources and Stress' assessed the spouses' perception and the 'Overprotection Scale for Adults' measured the perception of persons with aphasia. RESULTS: Husbands of women with aphasia did not differ from husbands of women without aphasia. Wives of men with aphasia reported more overprotection than wives of men without aphasia, even when functional impairment was controlled. The men with aphasia did not report feeling overprotected. No significant relationship was uncovered between the report of overprotection and feeling overprotected in couples with aphasia. CONCLUSIONS: Overprotection is present in some couples coping with aphasia.

Bilingual aphasia: semantic organization, strategy use, and productivity in semantic verbal fluency.

A semantic verbal fluency task (Animals, Foods) was administered to 16 aphasic, bilingual adults in French and English. Each subject was tested twice in each language. The two goals of the study were to compare performance across languages and to determine the effect of a deliberate grouping strategy on productivity. All subjects claimed approximately equal prestroke abilities in both languages. The number of words subjects produced was not significantly different in the two languages. Semantic organization across languages was also similar on Test 1. On Test 2, 8 subjects were instructed to group items by subcategory and 8 simply repeated the task. There was no consistent between-group difference in number of correct words or in the semantic organization of responses. Implications for the clinical use of verbal fluency tests and for further research into bilingual lexicosemantic systems are discussed.

A comparison of the prosodic characteristics of the speech of people with Parkinson's disease and Friedreich's ataxia with neurologically normal speakers.

The realization of prosody (speech rate, fundamental frequency, intonation) was investigated in a group of 10 individuals with Parkinson's disease and a group of 10 individuals with Friedreich's ataxia. Data from these two neurologically disordered groups were compared to individuals without neurological impairment. Both neurologically impaired groups retained some aspects of normal speech prosody, while other aspects were affected to a significant degree. The prosodic characteristics of speakers with Parkinson's disease were distinct from those of speakers with Friedreich's ataxia. These results were interpreted in terms of prosodic competence and prosodic performance.

Effects of age and education on the lexico-semantic content of connected speech in adults.

One hundred and thirty-three subjects who considered themselves to be in good health described the bank robbery picture from an aphasia battery for French-speaking subjects. The subjects' connected speech was analyzed and various lexico-semantic measures were obtained. For the purposes of analysis, the subjects were grouped according to age and education level. Results demonstrated that subjects with fewer years of education produced less content than subjects with higher levels of education. Age also affected subjects' performance but only when considering efficiency, the number of content units as a function of time, and the number of different open-class words as a function of time. Older subjects tended to repeat the same content units (using mostly the same words) and comment on some word-finding difficulties they experienced. These behaviors may explain why older subjects were less efficient in the transmission of lexico-semantic information. The results emphasize how age can affect lexico-semantic performance, and add new data about the effects of education, which should be taken into consideration when assessing persons who may show signs of a language disorder.

Semantic organization, strategy use, and productivity in bilingual semantic verbal fluency.

This study of semantic verbal fluency addressed two research questions: (1) What are the between-language similarities and differences in the performance of balanced bilinguals? (2) What is the relationship between productivity and the use of a semantic grouping strategy to organize responses? Forty neurologically normal, bilingual adults were tested twice in each language (French/English), in a 2 (Language) by 2 (Test) by 2 (Group) design. On Test 2, half the 40 subjects were instructed to group items by subcategory, while half simply repeated the test. Results showed (1) many more between-language similarities than differences and (2) no between-group differences in productivity.

Auditory comprehension problems in aphasia from the perspective of aphasic persons and their families and friends.

This study explored with a qualitative approach the experience of auditory comprehension problems from the perspective aphasic persons and their families and friends. Semi-structured group interviews were held with 55 persons (29 aphasic and 26 non-aphasic) who were asked to describe the consequences of aphasia on their lives. Most participants contributed some material to the topic of interest. They described problematic situations, and the behaviours they said they adopted at those times; they also provided explanations of what their problems were. Some discrepancies between aphasic persons and their families and friends were also noted. The essential elements of the experience of an auditory comprehension problem centre around speakers' rate of speech and situations in which aphasic persons feel they are incapable of understanding or of following because of an unfavourable environment.

Improving fundamental frequency modulation in head trauma patients: a preliminary comparison of speech-language therapy conducted with and without IBM's Speech Viewer.

This study involves a preliminary comparison of traditional speech therapy for head trauma patients with therapy assisted by computer. Two subjects were treated in a 'crossover' design to compare the effects of each treatment. While both subjects improved, there was no obvious difference in treatment effectiveness. However, the computer support provided the measures of treatment efficacy which made this comparison possible.

[Values of certain prosodic parameters obtain with French-speaking probands without communication problems]. / Valeurs de certains paramètres prosodiques obtenues auprès de sujets francophones sans trouble de la communication.

Acoustic data are provided in order to facilitate evaluation of the speech of adult patients with prosody disorders such as dysarthria. Forty French-speaking subjects between 45 and 75 years of age, with neither neurological disease nor a communication disorder, were grouped on the basis of sex and age. Subjects were required to produce four series of 20 matched interrogative and declarative sentences. Their productions were recorded and analyzed with an IBM Speech Viewer. Measures of fundamental frequency, of variation in fundamental frequency, of rate over the entire sentence, as well as a measure of intonation (defined as the difference in fundamental frequency between the last syllable of matched declarative and interrogative sentences) are reported in tables for clinical use. These data provide information for the evaluation of the prosody of French-speaking persons.

Intonation and speech rate in dysarthric speech.

Ten dysarthric speakers of various etiologies, type, and severity were compared to age-matched and gender-matched nondysarthric speakers on 40 short sentences. These sentences were presented in both declarative and interrogative versions. Measures of (1) mean intonation difference (average difference in fundamental frequency between the last syllables of interrogative and declarative sentences) and (2) speech rate were obtained using the IBM Speech Viewer system. Analyses of variance were performed on the resulting measures with subject group, sentence type, and sentence sets as independent variables. Results indicate that (1) intonation values are significantly reduced in the dysarthric group as compared to those for the nondysarthric group; (2) rate varies as a function of subject group, sentence type, and sentence set. Moreover, intonation varies with severity of dysarthria, but not speech rate. These findings concur with the notion that dysarthria is a deficit in performance rather than in competence. The results are also discussed in reference to "breath-group" theory for intonation (Lieberman, 1967).

An analysis of the communication of adult residents of a long-term care hospital as perceived by their caregivers.

Different groups of caregivers (nurses, orderlies, professionals, student orderlies and volunteers) who were in frequent interaction with residents from a long-term care hospital were interviewed with a nominal group process. They were asked to identify concrete situations of communication in which residents with no trouble communicating, residents with aphasia and residents with dementia need to express and/or comprehend a message. A total of 196 statements were recorded and coded using a qualitative approach into different categories of communication acts specific to daily life situations and several categories of generic communication acts, which are unrelated to the daily routine of care and treatment. The results show that communication in daily life situations varies little in relation to the different residents. However, residents with language disorders are perceived to be less involved in generic communication acts than residents with no communication disorder. They also demonstrate that the perceptions of communication of the different caregivers vary. The results are discussed in relationship to the conception of an evaluation instrument for language-impaired long-term care residents, which will help in determining intervention as well as the objective evaluation of its effects.

The effects of speech and language therapy for a case of dysarthria associated with Parkinson's disease.

We report the results of a single-subject multiple baseline across behaviours experiment of a 74-year-old woman presenting with Parkinson's disease. Her speech was typical of a hypokinetic dysarthria. The main features of her dysarthric speech were: a restriction in the modulation of fundamental frequency, an inappropriate pitch level and a rate disturbance. Three measures of prosody were operationally defined as follows: (1) linguistic modulation of fundamental frequency, (2) mean fundamental frequency and (3) rate. Treatment focused on ameliorating these aspects employing a multiple baseline design. Measures during and post-therapy documented improvement for each of these three aspects of prosody. Independent judges were also more capable of understanding her speech and her speech prosody after therapy. Upon follow-up measures 10 weeks later, most of the improvement was maintained.

Anomia in moderate aphasia: problems in accessing the lexical representation.

This study has two objectives: (1) to determine through the analysis of surface manifestations of anomia whether one or several anomic syndromes exist, (2) to identify the psycholinguistic process at fault in anomia with reference to M. F. Garrett's (1982, in A. Ellis (Ed.), Normality and pathology in cognitive functions, London/New York: Academic Press) language production model. Two naming tasks were administered to 24 moderate aphasics. Test A was a standard naming task, and test B was a similar task which included subtests designed to indicate which level of representation was affected whenever patients did not name the target word. The subtests required, respectively, the identification of (a) a conceptual property, (b) two semantic attributes, (c) the first and (d) last syllable of the target word, and (e) the target word itself. Descriptive statistics yielded three groups of subjects different in terms of surface anomic manifestations, yet unrelated to clinical type of aphasia. Moreover, no significant differences between groups emerged on the subtests. All groups showed a good performance on the conceptual and the semantic subtests, suggesting preservation of high-level cognitive and semantic processes. In contrast, subjects evidenced poorer performances in syllabic identification, indicating a disruption of lower level mechanisms which are assumed to retrieve and process formal lexical representations. Results support the view that aphasic anomia originates from a difficulty in accessing the formal lexical representation and not from a semantic problem.

Impaired word naming in right-brain-damaged right-handers: error types and time-course analyses.

The purpose of this study is to search for cues that could account for the fact that right-hemisphere lesions affect word naming when the criterion for naming is semantic. The authors analyzed the errors as well as the time course of productions of 35 vascular right-brain-damaged subjects (RBD) and 20 control subjects (C) in a semantic-based word-naming task. Results show that there are no differences between groups in terms of (a) the number of errors produced and, (b) the patterns of error types. However, results also show a reduction of verbal fluency for semantic criteria in RBD-subjects present only after the first 30 seconds of production. These results indicate that reduction of word production in RBD-subjects is not the consequence of nonspecific factors such as perseveration or spontaneity, but reflects problems with the less automatized processes permitting exploration of semantic organization, either because scanning process are affected, or because the presence of a discreet semantic impairment prevents scanning from being as efficient. Given that efficient exploration of semantic knowledge is important for lexico-semantic functioning, the present results suggest that the right hemisphere contributes to some aspects of lexico-semantic processing necessary for language production.