Mehdi Rahgozar

A new set of 272 pictures for psycholinguistic studies: Persian norms for name agreement, image agreement, conceptual familiarity, visual complexity, and age of acquisition

Pictures are often used in studies on memory, perception, and language; normative data are thus needed for such visual stimuli. In the present study, we aimed to obtain normative data for a set of 272 black-and-white pictures from middle-aged and elderly Persian speakers. A total of 206 volunteers were divided into two groups: a middle-aged (40–59 years old) group and an elderly (60 years old and over) group. The groups had similar characteristics in terms of education. Norms for every picture were developed to provide measures of name agreement, image agreement, conceptual familiarity, age of acquisition, and visual complexity. The results revealed that all of these measures vary with age, except for conceptual familiarity.

Persuasive discourse impairments in traumatic brain injury

Background: Considering the cognitive and linguistic complexity of discourse production, it is expected that individuals with traumatic brain injury (TBI) should face difficulties in this task. Therefore, clinical examination of discourse has become a useful tool for studying and assessment of communication skills of people suffering from TBI. Among different genres of discourse, persuasive discourse is considered as a more cognitively demanding task. However, little is known about persuasive discourse in individuals suffering from TBI. Objectives: The purpose of this study was to evaluate the performance of adults with TBI on a task of spoken persuasive discourse to determine the impaired linguistic measures. Patients and Methods: Thirteen TBI nonaphasic Persian speaking individuals, ranged between 19 to 40 years (Mean = 25.64 years; SD = 6.10) and 59 healthy adults matched by age, were asked to perform the persuasive discourse task. The task included asking the participants to express their opinion on a topic, and after the analysis of the produced discourse, the two groups were compared on the basis of their language productivity, sentential complexity, maze ratio and cohesion ratio. Results: The TBI group produced discourses with less productivity, sentential complexity, cohesion ratio and more maze ratio compared the control group. Conclusions: As it is important to consider acquired communication disorders particularly discourse impairment of brain injured patients along with their other clinical impairments and regarding the fact that persuasive discourse is crucial in academic and social situations, the persuasive discourse task presented in this study could be a useful tool for speech therapists, intending to evaluate communication disorders in patients with TBI.

Identifying Some Risk Factors of Time to Recurrent Relapses in Bipolar IDisorder Patients using Frailty Model of Survival Analysis

Objective: Bipolar I disorder patients often experience relapse once and even more with no limit on number of relapses. The time to relapses of these patients are rarely studied particularly considering heterogeneity across individuals. The aim of this study was to identify some risk factors of time to recurrent relapses in bipolar I disorder patients with a recurrent event model in survival analysis. Methods: In a retrospective longitudinal study, data of medical records of 526 bipolar I disorder patients who had referred to Razi Psychiatric hospital in Tehran from 1993 to 2011 with at least one relapse, with-out relapse in other hospitals or home in this duration, were investigated and time to recurrent relapses were collected in months. Semiparametric penalized frailty model which consider whit-in subject correlation and heterogeneity across individuals, was applied to identify the risk factors of recurrent time to relapses. Results: Significant frailty parameter (p<0.001) prove presence of heterogeneity among data. In frailty model the effects of substance abuse (p=0.041), regular fluctuation (p=0.002) and marital status (p=0.009) were significant on the hazard of recurrent times to relapses but other variables showed no significant effect. Conclusions: Substance abuse, marital status and RF are important risk factors in order to plan for postpone the time to next relapses. More studies are required to clear out the effect of other covariates with this model.