Harold Goodglass

Normative data on the boston diagnostic aphasia examination, parietal lobe battery, and the boston naming Test

Abstract This report describes normative data for the Boston Diagnostic Aphasia Examination, the “Parietal Lobe Battery” (Goodglass & Kaplan, 1972), and the Boston Naming Test (Kaplan, Goodglass, & Weintraub, 1978). These tests were administered to 147 neurologically normal adult males, who were right-handed and native English-speaking. For each age and education group, means, standard deviations, and the range are reported. The lowest score for each group is suggested as a cut-off below which impairment may be suspected. Differences among age and education groups are specified and briefly discussed.

Contrasting cases of Italian agrammatic aphasia without comprehension disorder

Two patients with agrammatic speech and unimpaired comprehension are presented and contrasted. Case 1 had an infarction involving precentral gyrus, subjacent white matter, and posterior and superior aspects of the insula, largely sparing Brocas area. His speech was slow and dysarthric, consisting of short disconnected phrases with some omission of lexical verbs. Case 2 had an unusual transient aphasia of acute onset without hemiplegia; speech rate, articulation, and sentence length and complexity appeared normal. Both patients tended to omit function words and finite verb inflections, but Case 2 did so much more than did Case 1. Neither patient showed impairment in any other area of language performance. Tentatively, Case 2 is described as being more morphologically impaired but less syntactically impaired than Case 1, while neither has damage to a central language processor.

Semantic field, naming, and auditory comprehension in aphasia.

Abstract The status of semantic fields for 16 target nouns was compared in high and low comprehension aphasics, brain damaged, and normal controls, by measuring latency and miss rate for recognition of six classes of associates, which were presented orally on tape. The ability to name each target was also examined as a function of the integrity of the subjects semantic field for that word. Low comprehension aphasics showed both quantitative and qualitative changes in semantic fields, while milder aphasics showed only mild quantitative impairment, as compared to controls. Both latency and miss rate measures indicated that failure to name a word is associated with reduced semantic field for that word. This result is interpreted as supporting the view that nameing is, in part, determined by the convergence of associations.

Production deficits in aphasia: A voice-onset time analysis ☆

Abstract An experimental study was conducted to examine phonetic and phonemic deficits in the speech production of aphasics. Subjects included four Brocas aphasics, four Conduction aphasics, five Wernickes aphasics, one nonaphasic dysarthric patient, and four normal controls. The subjects read a list of words containing word-initial stop consonants which were subsequently measured acoustically for voice-onset time. The results showed that Brocas aphasics exhibit a more severe production disorder than Conduction aphasics who in turn exhibit a more severe disorder than Wernickes aphasics, in accord with clinical observations. In addition, although Brocas aphasics produced both phonetic and phonemic errors, the results showed that they have a pervasive phonetic disorder which affects their correct target productions as well as the total number of phonetic errors produced. This deficit however seems to be a speech deficit rather than a low-level motor control problem. In contrast, the Wernickes aphasics show a deficit characterized by isolated phonemic mistargeting errors. Finally, the pattern of productions for the Conduction aphasics indicates that some patients show a predominantly phonetic disorder similar to the Brocas aphasics and others show predominantly a phonemic disorder similar to the Wernickes aphasics.

Lexical retrieval in healthy aging

Lexical retrieval for common nouns and verbs was measured using 2 picture naming tests in 162 healthy female and male subjects aged 30 to 79 years. Responses were scored for correctness, responsivity to cueing, and response type. The ability to name both word types declined with age, especially after age 70 in healthy subjects. More errors were made on object names than action names, especially for older subjects. Subjects of all ages were equally able to utilize phonemic cues. With increasing age subjects produced more circumlocutions and fewer semantic errors. Response type difference need not reflect qualitative differences in lexical retrieval; rather, they reflect the quantitatively greater difficulty of the task for healthy older people as compared to younger adults. The naming difficulty for healthy aging, we conclude, is at the label retrieval stage.

The reliability of ear advantage in dichotic listening.

Test-re-test reliability of dichotic listening performance on consonants, vowels, and music was investigated in a population of 42 right-handed subjects. Pearson product moment correlations between (R − L)/(R + L) ear scores on first and second tests were .74 for consonants, .21 for vowels, and .46 for music. Twenty nine percent of subjects reversed ear advantage for consonants on re-testing, 19% reversed for music, and 46% for vowels. Each type of stimulus reveals a significant subgroup (15% for consonants) who retain a deviant ear advantage on retest. In any sample, subjects whose ear advantage scores are on the deviant side are more likely to reverse ear advantages on re-test than subjects who score in the modal direction. These findings are interpreted and discussed in relation to the validity of dichotic listening as an index of cerebral functional asymmetry.

Ipsilateral versus contralateral extinction in dichotic listening resulting from hemisphere lesions.

Summary A study is presented of verbal dichotic listening by twenty-eight left brain-injured aphasic patients and twenty right brain-injured non-aphasic patients. The total population of the study was right-handed. The results reveal that the right hemisphere damaged group demonstrated exclusive extinction of the signals received by the contralateral left ear. The left hemisphere damaged group was divided between those who demonstrated extinction of the contralateral right ear and a significant number of subjects who demonstrated. what. might appear to be paradoxical extinction of the ipsilateral left ear. This ipsilateral extinction is presented as being less paradoxical by a model which postulates that competition between signals received by both ears occurs in the left hemisphere. The signal from the right ear arrives there directly via the more important decussating route but the information from the left ear reaches the left hemisphere via the stronger decussating route to the right hemisphere and anterior commissural fibers. By this model only a left hemisphere lesion can affect the information from either the contralateral or ipsilateral ear.

Dichotic listening, side of brain injury and cerebral dominance

Abstract This study investigated the interaction between the side of a unilateral brain lesion and the class of stimulus used in dichotic presentation. Subjects wre 10 right-brain injured and 10 left-brain injured (aphasic) patients and 10 normal control subjects. Dichotic materials were digits (assumed to be under left hemisphere control), tonal sequences (under right hemisphere control), and clicks which proved to be non-lateralized. Injury to the hemisphere dominant for a given material produced bilateral deficits specific to that material. Superimposed was the “lesion effect” of selectively greater impairment of report from the ear opposite an injured hemisphere.

Differential recognition of tachistoscopically presented English and Hebrew words in right and left visual fields.

In this study, the role of lateral cerebral dominance in the consistent finding of lower tachistoscopic thresholds in the right than in the left visual field for alphabetic material was tested for readers of Hebrew and English. Twenty Israeli Ss were presented with Hebrew and English three-letter words, printed vertically, through a monocular tachistoscope, displaced to left or right of fixation by 2°21′. Ten American Ss were also tested for three-letter English words, under similar conditions. Significantly lower thresholds in the right field were found for both groups and for both languages, despite the fact that Hebrew, unlike English, is read from right to left. These findings tend to support the hypothesis that alphabetic stimuli arriving in the major cerebral hemisphere are more readily recognized than similar stimuli arriving in the hemisphere contralateral to the language areas.

Overt propositional speech in chronic nonfluent aphasia studied with the dynamic susceptibility contrast fMRI method.

This study examined activation levels in the left (L) supplementary motor area (SMA) and the right (R) SMA (separately), and activation in nine R perisylvian language homologues during overt, propositional speech in chronic nonfluent aphasia patients. Previous functional imaging studies with a variety of chronic aphasia patients have reported activation in these regions during different language tasks, however, overt propositional speech has not been examined. In the present research, four nonfluent aphasia patients were studied during overt elicited propositional speech at 4-9 years post-single L hemisphere stroke, which spared the SMA. The dynamic susceptibility contrast (DSC) method of functional MRI was used to calculate relative cerebral blood volume (relCBV) for cortical regions of interest (ROIs) during the first-pass bolus of gadolinium during two conditions: (1) pattern (silent viewing of checkerboard patterns) and (2) story (overt, elicited propositional speech describing sequential pictures, which formed a story). During the story condition, controls had significantly higher relCBV in L SMA than in R SMA; aphasics, however, had significantly higher relCBV in R SMA than in L SMA. During the pattern condition, no significant differences were observed between the L SMA and the R SMA for either controls or aphasics. In addition, aphasics had significantly higher relCBV in the R sensorimotor mouth during story than pattern. This R sensorimotor mouth relCBV was also significantly higher in aphasics than controls during story, and the two groups did not differ during pattern. The overall mean relCBV for the nine R perisylvian ROIs was significantly higher for aphasics than controls during both story and pattern. These results suggest that poor modulation, including possible over-activation of R sensorimotor mouth and other R perisylvian language homologues may underlie in part, the hesitant, poorly articulated, agrammatic speech associated with nonfluent aphasia.