Kathryn A. Bayles

Confrontation naming impairment in dementia.

The effects of dementia etiology and severity on the confrontation naming ability of individuals with Alzheimers, Huntingtons, and Parkinsons diseases and multi-infarct dementia are investigated. Although naming impairment is reported as a consequence of dementing illness, confrontation naming is not found to be significantly impaired in mildly involved patients. Further, although moderate Huntingtons and Parkinsons patients made more naming errors than normals, only moderate Alzheimers disease patients are found to be significantly different. Regardless of etiology, most misnamings are found to be semantically related or semantically and visually related to the stimulus. Results challenge the theory that misnamings of dementia patients result primarily from misperception.

Language function in senile dementia

Abstract The effects of senile dementia on language function were described from analyses of patient performance on the language tasks of naming, sentence correction, sentence disambiguation, story-retelling, and verbal description and four psychological tests reputed sensitive to the disease. While communicative function was not found to be impaired in the normal senescent, marked impairment was observed in patients with senile dementia. Particularly vulnerable was the semantic system and dissociation of semantic capacities from those of syntax and phonology was observed.

Relation of linguistic communication abilities of Alzheimer's patients to stage of disease.

A battery of linguistic communication (L-C) tasks was administered to 152 Alzheimers disease patients in different stages of the disease and 60 normal elders. Subject performance data are used to construct a profile of L-C deficits by disease stage, as determined by ratings on the Global Deterioration Scale. Specification also is made of the L-C tasks on which mild Alzheimers patients perform like normal elders, the relative difficulty of various L-C processes, the disease stage in which the greatest change occurs in L-C functions, and the degree of variation in L-C for individuals at a particular level of dementia severity.

Alzheimer's disease effects on semantic memory: Loss of structure or impaired processing?

Results of several prior studies, in which Alzheimers disease (AD) patients missed the same concepts on multiple tasks, have been used to substantiate the theory that AD causes concept-specific loss of information from semantic memory However, sample sizes in these studies are modest, test-retest intervals small, and typically only a few tasks were used. In the present study 69 An subjects were annually administered 11 tasks, each using the same 13 concepts. Only a few instances were observed in which a concept was missed across all 11 tasks. When performances on the Oral Reading and Dictation tasks were removed from analysis, because of their questionable reliance on semantic memory, the number of missed concepts rose only modestly. A substantial rise in the number of missed concepts occurred, however, when performances on the four multiple- choice tasks were removed. Interpreting the larger number of missed concepts on the five remaining generative semantic tasks as evidence of item-specific loss is problematic, nonetheless, because the generative semantic tasks were among the hardest in the battery and the frequency with which an individual subject missed a concept across all tasks accorded with the subjects dementia severity level. Results also indicate that task difficulty, more than concept specificity, determine whether a concept is missed. Overall, results suggest that a concept will disappear when all of the tasks in which it is a stimulus become too difficult for the patient to perform. Study results call into question the appropriateness of using batteries of effortful, attention demanding tasks for ascertaining whether AD causes item-specific loss of conceptual knowledge.

Naming and categorical knowledge in Alzheimer's disease: The process of semantic memory deterioration ☆

Semantic memory deterioration in Alzheimers disease (AD) has been theorized to proceed from a loss of object attribute knowledge to a loss of category knowledge. The theory is based on the belief that naming is a computational process requiring object attribute knowledge. It is strengthened by reports that AD patients misname by giving category information and perform poorer on tests of attribute than category knowledge. The purpose of this study was to test the theorys validity by administering naming and category knowledge tasks to AD and normal elderly control subjects. Results revealed a theoretically unexpected outcome, that is, naming became easier relative to the recall and recognition of category information.

Verbal perseveration of dementia patients

Patterns of perseveration and frequency of carrier phrases were studied in the verbal descriptive discourse of dementia patients controlled for etiology and severity. Dementia patients were found to perseverate significantly more frequently than normals and severity of dementia was more strongly associated than etiology with increased perseveration. Frequency of carrier phrases did not distinguish the descriptive discourse of dementia patients from normals. Discontinuous perseveration was more common than continuous perseveration, and perseveration of ideas after an intervening response was the perseverate most typical of the dementia patient. Findings of the study are related to prominent theories of the cause of perseveration.

Generative naming in Parkinson disease patients

The generative naming ability (verbal fluency) of 88 idiopathic Parkinson disease (PD) patients was evaluated and compared to that of 21 Alzheimer disease (AD) patients and 43 normal age- and education-matched normal control subjects. The PD patients were classified according to whether they scored within the normal range on the Mini-Mental State Examination (MMSE), a score of 27 or higher, or in the abnormal range, a score of 26 or lower. Semantic and letter generative naming tasks were administered to assess verbal fluency. Results of the study provide evidence that letter category naming is inherently more difficult than semantic category naming; that age significantly affects generative naming; that PD patients with normal MMSE scores were significantly inferior to normal control subjects in generative naming even after the effects of age and mental status are controlled; that PD patients with non-normal MMSE scores performed like AD patients after controlling for the effects of age and mental status; and, that ideational perseveration is the most common type of error response for all subject groups.

Effects of working memory deficits on the communicative functioning of Alzheimer's dementia patients.

Individuals with Alzheimers disease experience frontal lobe pathology and deficits in working memory processes are well documented. Less documented is how various working memory deficits impact communicative functioning. The performance data of individuals with mild and moderate Alzheimers dementia on five tests of language comprehension and four tests of language expression are presented and discussed in the context of possible contributions from impaired working memory functions. The argument is advanced that diminished scores on tests of language comprehension and production result primarily from attenuated span capacity, difficulty focusing attention, encoding, and activation of long-term knowledge rather than from loss of linguistic knowledge. Techniques that may advantage Alzheimers patients in the comprehension and expression of linguistic information are discussed.(1) Readers will become familiar with the typical functioning of individuals with Alzheimers disease on common linguistic expression and comprehension tasks. (2) Readers will become familiar with the distinction between language knowledge and performance and its importance in understanding the cause of communication breakdowns in individuals with Alzheimers disease. (3) Readers will become familiar with techniques that may facilitate the communicative functioning of individuals with Alzheimers disease.

Memory Impairment and Executive Control in Individuals with Stroke-Induced Aphasia

The purpose of this study was to examine memory abilities of aphasic individuals in relation to site of neurological lesion. Fourteen individuals with stroke-induced aphasia (7 with anterior lesions; 7 with posterior lesions) and 14 demographically matched control subjects were given selected tests of short-term memory (STM) and long-term memory (LTM). Stroke patients were impaired relative to control subjects on tests of verbal memory, with greater impairment of LTM associated with anterior lesions and greater impairment of STM associated with posterior lesions. Verbal memory performance did not correlate highly with language ability, and did not appear to be simply a consequence of language impairment. Executive control deficits were postulated as explanatory of the LTM impairment associated with anterior lesions.

Comparing the difficulty of letter, semantic, and name fluency tasks for normal elderly and patients with Parkinson's disease

Research on the effect of Parkinsons disease (PD) on verbal fluency has produced conflicting results. In this study, 88 PD patients with no dementia, 11 PD patients with questionable mental status, 15 PD patients with dementia, and 46 elders free from mental disorder were administered a variety of semantic, letter, and name fluency tasks. The results revealed that, contrary to popular assumption, semantic fluency was not always superior to letter fluency. Rather, verbal fluency was influenced by the nature of the individual categories. Interestingly, the relative difficulty of many categories was fairly stable across groups. The results also indicated that the individual fluency tasks were differentially sensitive to the mental status of the PD patients. Overall, the findings suggest that closer attention to the nature of the tested categories may help clarify the inconsistent effects of PD on verbal fluency.