J. Richard Hanley

Impairment of the visuo-spatial sketch pad

A case study is presented of a female patient, ELD, who has difficulty in the immediate recall of short sequences of visuo-spatial material following a right-hemisphere aneurysm. Despite poor performance on tasks such as the Brooks Matrix and the Corsi Blocks, ELD is good at the immediate serial recall of letters even when presentation modality is visual and shows effects of phonological similarity and articulatory suppression. This pattern of performance represents a double dissociation from that which has been observed with the short-term memory patient PV (Vallar & Baddeley, 1984), who is extremely poor at serial recall of verbal material but shows no visual memory impairment. It is argued that ELD has an impairment to the visuo-spatial component of working memory (Baddeley, 1986) in the absence of any phonological loop deficit. Further investigation reveals that ELD performs poorly on mental rotation tasks and finds it difficult to use imagery mnemonics, but has no difficulty in retrieving visuo-spatial information from long-term memory so long as it was learnt before her illness.

Defective recognition of familiar people

Abstract Although they cannot recognise people from their faces, prosopagnosic patients are frequently able to identify people from their voices or clothing. They can also retrieve information about these people in response to their name (e.g. De Haan, Young, & Newcombe, 1987). In contrast, we present details of a patient, BD, who, following herpes simplex encephalitis, has difficulty in identifying people from their face, their name, and their voice. This seems to be a form of semantic memory impairment, and for BD it appears in the context of a more general impairment of knowledge of living things. In learning tasks similar to those used by De Haan et al. (1987) and Kapur, Heath, Meudell, and Kennedy (1986), however, BD shows evidence of preserved access to information concerning people that he does not recognise from their face or name. The pattern of preserved access that is revealed is more extensive than that shown by De Haan et al.s prosopagnosic patient PH. BD shows covert knowledge of the politi...

A Longitudinal Study of Phonological Awareness, Visual Skills, and Chinese Reading Acquisition among First-graders in Taiwan

The main purpose of this study was to investigate whether a child’s phonological awareness and visual skills before instruction in school had any predictive power for later Chinese reading ability among 1st-graders in Taiwan. The study also examined the extent to which phonological awareness and visual skills varied in three separate testing sessions during the 1st grade. These testing sessions took place just before the children had learned the alphabetic system Zhu-Yin-Fu-Hao, immediately after the children had learnt Zhu-Yin-Fu-Hao, and, finally, at the end of the first year of schooling. Forty 6-year-old Chinese children from Taiwan took part in the study. The test materials included a Chinese Characters Reading Test, a set of Phonological Awareness tests, a Visual Paired Associates learning test, and a vocabulary and IQ test. Phonological awareness at the first testing session was found to be significantly related to the ability to read Chinese characters at the end of the first year. However, the predictive power of early phonological awareness decreased markedly when the effects of preschool reading scores were partialled out. Therefore, the study provided evidence that phonological processes are significantly related to success in the first year of Chinese reading, but was unable to establish whether or not differences in phonological skills are a cause of differences in the reading ability of Chinese children. In addition 10 weeks of instruction in Zhu-Yin-Fu-Hao led to an increase in performance on all tests of phonological awareness. This is consistent with the view that learning an alphabetic script improves phonological awareness ability.

Effects of orthographic transparency on reading and phoneme awareness in children learning to read in Wales

The relationship between the development of reading skills and the consistency of the orthography (writing system) is investigated in a study that examines reading acquisition in children living in Wales. Performance of children learning to read Welsh (a transparent alphabetic orthography) on tests of reading and phoneme detection was compared with the performance of children learning to read English (an opaque alphabetic orthography). The children were tested during their second year of formal reading instruction at school when they were aged between 5 and 6 years, and again one year later. The children learning to read in Welsh performed significantly better at reading both real words and nonwords than children learning to read in English. The English readers made fewer phonologically based reading errors. The Welsh readers also performed better on a phoneme awareness task. These findings support the claim that children learn to read more quickly in a transparent orthography, and provide further evidence that the consistency of the orthography influences the initial adoption of different strategies for word recognition.

Developmental Surface Dyslexia and Dysgraphia: An Orthographic Processing Impairment:

This study presents a detailed investigation of a young man in his early twenties who has suffered from a severe spelling impairment since childhood, and currently has a spelling age of only 9 years and 2 months. In contrast with the developmental phonological dyslexics reported by Campbell and Butterworth (1985) and Funnell and Davison (1989), his performance on tests of phonological awareness is good. In addition, he can read and spell non-words competently and, unlike normal 9-year-old children, virtually all of his spelling errors are phonologically appropriate. Further analysis of these errors reveals that he has knowledge of many of the different ways in which a given phoneme can be written, and that he uses phoneme-to-grapheme correspondences at the end of a word that are different from those he uses earlier in a word. However, he finds it difficult to spell words that contain uncommon phoneme-to-grapheme correspondences, which is compatible with the view that he has not developed an orthographic spelling lexicon. Although his oral reading of words is prompt and generally accurate, analysis of his lexical decision performance and the way that he defines homophones indicate that he does not have fully specified lexical entries available for reading either. We suggest that he suffers from a general orthographic processing deficit, and relies instead upon the combination of sub-lexical phonology and a lexicon that contains only partial information about way in which words are spelt. This leads to reasonably competent reading, even of many irregular words, but produces very poor spelling. It is argued that qualitatively different types of developmental dyslexia do genuinely exist, but that reading impairments are likely to be much more pronounced in children who have a phonological rather than an orthographic processing deficit.

Developmental phonagnosia: A selective deficit of vocal identity recognition

Phonagnosia, the inability to recognize familiar voices, has been studied in brain-damaged patients but no cases due to developmental problems have been reported. Here we describe the case of KH, a 60-year-old active professional woman who reports that she has always experienced severe voice recognition difficulties. Her hearing abilities are normal, and an MRI scan showed no evidence of brain damage in regions associated with voice or auditory perception. To better understand her condition and to assess models of voice and high-level auditory processing, we tested KH on behavioural tasks measuring voice recognition, recognition of vocal emotions, face recognition, speech perception, and processing of environmental sounds and music. KH was impaired on tasks requiring the recognition of famous voices and the learning and recognition of new voices. In contrast, she performed well on nearly all other tasks. Her case is the first report of developmental phonagnosia, and the results suggest that the recognition of a speakers vocal identity depends on separable mechanisms from those used to recognize other information from the voice or non-vocal auditory stimuli.

The effects of different types of retrieval cues on the recall of names of famous faces.

The present study investigated the effects of cues on subjects’ abilities to retrieve the names of famous faces that they had previously been unable to recall. In Experiment 1 subjects were presented with a second photograph of the celebrity, or biographical information about the celebrity, or the celebrity’s initials. Each type of cue produced a quite different pattern of recall. Biographical information was least likely to elicit the name when the subject already knew the celebrity’s occupation, and most likely when subjects found the face familiar only. Conversely, initials were more likely to elicit the name when the occupation was already known than when the face was at first found unfamiliar or familiar only. Rather surprisingly, no significant differences were observed when a new photograph was used as a cue. In Experiment 2, the effects of a new photograph were compared with a condition in which the same photograph was presented twice. A new photograph was beneficial when subjects had previously found the face unfamiliar and when they found the face familiar only, but not when they knew the occupation. It is argued that these, as well as other aspects of the results, generally support the view that successive, but distinct stages are involved in face recognition, consistent with the model put forward by Bruce and Young (1986).

I Recognise You but I Can't Place You: An Investigation of Familiar-only Experiences during Tests of Voice and Face Recognition

In this paper, we examine in detail the situation in which a subject finds that a face or voice is familiar but is unable to retrieve any biographical information about the person concerned. In two experiments, subjects were asked to identify a set of 40 celebrities either from hearing their voice or from seeing their face. Although many more celebrities were identified and named in response to their face than their voice, the results showed that there was a very large number of occasions when a celebritys voice was felt to be familiar but the subject was unable to retrieve any biographical information about the person. This situation occurred less frequently in response to seeing a celebritys face; when a face was found familiar, the subject was much more likely to be able to recall the celebritys occupation. The possibility that these results might have come about because subjects were using different criteria to determine familiarity in the face and voice conditions was investigated and discounted. An additional finding was that when subjects found a face to be familiar-only, they were able to recall significantly more additional information about the person when they were cued by the persons voice than when they simply saw the face again. These results are discussed in relation to the models of person recognition put forward by Bruce and Young (1986) and Burton, Bruce, and Johnston (1990).

Irrelevant speech, articulatory suppression, and phonological similarity: A test of the phonological loop model and the feature model

Two experiments tested competing predictions about the nature of the irrelevant speech effect that were derived from Neath’s (2000) feature model and from Salamé and Baddeley’s (1982) phonological loop model. The first experiment examined the combined effects of irrelevant speech and articulatory suppression when target items were presented auditorily. Contrary to the suggestions of Neath, but consistent with the phonological loop model, the effects of articulatory suppression and irrelevant speech were additive even when the irrelevant speech was presented during the retention interval. The second experiment examined the combined effects of irrelevant speech and phonological similarity when target items were presented visually. Consistent with the phonological loop model, the effects of phonological similarity and irrelevant speech were additive when participants were specifically instructed to use articulatory/phonological rehearsal to remember the list items. The results therefore contradicted Neath’s claim that irrelevant speech abolishes the phonological similarity effect when list items are presented visually. However, the effect of phonological similarity was abolished in the irrelevant speech conditions when no instructions were given concerning rehearsal. It is argued that the phonological similarity effect disappears in some experiments because participants sometimes employ a semantic rehearsal strategy, consistent with the views of Salamé and Baddeley (1986).

Anomia for common names and geographical names with preserved retrieval of names of people: a semantic memory disorder.

This paper describes the case of an anomic patient (FH) who is impaired at naming pictures of objects but has no difficulties in recalling the names of familiar people. Even though his performance on McKennas (1997) Category Specific Naming Test was at the first percentile, he consistently recalled the names of familiar people as successfully as controls. It is argued that the pattern of performance displayed by FH represents a much clearer double dissociation with proper name anomia than any case previously reported (Cipolotti et al., 1993; Semenza and Sgaramella, 1993). FH is unable to provide detailed semantic information about many of the objects that he cannot name, even though he can recall semantic information about familiar people. Consequently his case appears to represent the mirror image of the proper name anomic patient (APA) described by Miceli et al. (2000) who was unable to recall detailed semantic information about many of the people she was unable to name. Further investigation of FHs anomia revealed impairments in retrieving both common nouns and verbs, and difficulties in retrieving and comprehending geographical names. It is argued that FHs preserved ability to name and recall biographical information about people supports the view that knowledge about familiar people may be subserved by its own dedicated neural subsystem (Kay and Hanley, 1999; Miceli et al., 2000; Gentileschi et al., 2001).