Ira Belmont

Admission and Follow-up Status of Reading Disabled Children Referred to a Medical Clinic

Fifty-eight reading disabled children referred to a medical clinic for developmentally disabled children were examined on admission and after 3 to 5 years of special educational intervention. As a group, the children showed minimal gains in reading, remaining among the poorest readers for age. However, one-third of the children (mainly the older ones) made sufficient progress which, while slowly achieved, resulted in a minimal degree of functional reading. A high proportion of the children were diagnosed as having neurologic and/or psychiatric disorders which were unrelated to the level of reading failure found within the group. The findings suggested that such children are not representative of the general population of poor readers in the community and that throughout their schooling they require special educational methods, other than reading, for the acquisition of subject matter.

AUDITORY-VISUAL INTERSENSORY PROCESSING AND VERBAL MEDIATION

The present study examined the question of whether auditory-visual intersensory processing is necessarily mediated verbally. Auditory-visual integration was examined in neurologically damaged patients with and without language disturbance and in a control group of non-brain-damaged patients. It was found that both groups of neurologically damaged patients performed more poorly than did the control group. However, there was no real difference in performance between brain-damaged patients with and without language disturbance. It was further found that the degree of language disorder was not related to the degree of auditory-visual integrative incompetence. It was concluded that the presence or absence of language disorder in the brain-injured patients did not differentially affect their auditory-visual integrative performance and that therefore perceptual processing is not necessarily mediated by language.

Comparison or Perceptuol Training and Remedial Instruction for Poor Beginning Readers

Two matched groups of beginning readers with equivalent degrees of risk for reading failure were provided, respectively, with supplementary perceptual training or remedial instruction using letters and words, in addition to receiving regular first grade classroom instruction. After 7 months of supplementary instruction, both groups had made equivalent advances in reading level, indicating that neither perceptual training nor remedial reading was the superior program.

Unilateral hearing loss in hemiplegic patients.

Although there is abundant evidence that unilateral damage to the brain frequently results in contralateral elevation of tactile and visual thresholds, there is still disagreement over whether similar threshold changes occur for hearing. In the present study we report unilateral auditory thresholds for single stimuli in hemiplegic patients which provide evidence pertinent to this issue. Unilateral auditory thresholds were obtained for a group of 19 left hemiplegic patients and a group of 19 non-brain-damaged control patients matched for age, sex, and social antecedents. A comparative analysis of the auditory threshold levels in the hemiplegic and control groups indicated that although the two groups acheived similar threshold levels for the right ear the hemiplegic group showed a significantly higher threshold for the left ear than did the control group. Thresholds shown by individual patients revealed that while 9 hemiplegic patients showed threshold levels within the range of the normal controls, 10 of them showed elevation of thresholds for the left ear beyond the limits demonstrated by the control subjects. Thus, unilateral elevation of threshold was exhibited on the side opposite the lesion by 53 percent of the hemiplegic patients. The results obtained suggested that the auditory system is not unique among sense systems and that unilateral cerebral damage can result in contralateral threshold changes in audition as well as in somesthetic and visual sensibility.

Delayed information processing and judgment of temporal order following cerebral damage.

The view that damage to part of the central nervous system leads to a delay in information processing by the injured portion was tested by requiring left hemiplegic patients and normal controls to judge the temporal order of two successively presented auditory stimuli when one ear and then the other was stimulated first. The inertia hypothesis was confirmed by the finding that while normal individuals were accurate in their judgments of order of stimulation, the hemiplegic patients tended to report that the ear related to the affected hemisphere was stimulated last, independent of the objective order of stimulation.

The perceptual organization of complex arrays by educable mentally subnormal children.

The perceptual selection and organization of complex stimulus arrays by 8− to 10-year-old educable mentally subnormal children indicated that such children were perceptually as reactive as were normal children, but 1) were less able to analyze their percepts, 2) tended to impose inappropriate organizations, 3) were less able to use verbal cues as an aid, and 4) were less influenced by social interaction in their perceptions. Mentally subnormal children with and without clinical signs of central nervous system damage did not differ in their organization of the complex stimulus arrays. The results are related to the issues of attention, motivation, and role of language in perception, as well as to the concept of brain damage.

Delayed sensory motor processing following cerebral damage. II. A multisensory defect.

Based on previous findings that patients who have unilateral cerebral damage show a unilateral delay in sensory and sensory motor processing involving somatesthetic stimuli, the present study was conducted to determine whether such delay is restricted to the one sense system or is characteristic of the auditory system as well. Twenty-five left hemiplegic patients and 26 control patients who showed no evidence of central nervous system disorder were examined, using simple reaction time to laterally applied tones as the response indicator. Stimulation of the two ears was subjectively equated and a nonlateralized common response (voice) was used to rule out the possible effects of lateralized changes in sensory sensitivity and motor effectiveness. In contrast to the control subjects, left hemiplegic patients (right cerebral damage) showed abnormally long reaction times to stimulation of the left ear but not to right ear stimulation. The findings of this and related studies were interpreted as showing that delayed sensory and sensory motor processing is probably characteristic of all afferent systems in the affected hemisphere and has functional consequences for perception and awareness and for the organization of action.