Pierre Feyereisen

MANUAL ACTIVITY DURING SPEAKING IN APHASIC SUBJECTS

Samples of free conversations were recorded in 6 normal and 12 aphasic subjects. Manual activity during speech was observed. Groups were shown to behave in an opposite way for the verbal and nonverbal measures: while aphasic subjects verbal behavior is impaired, they produce more speech-related movements than normals. No differences appear concerning other movements (automanipulation, hand-to-hand posture, miscellaneous movements). Analysis of the aphasie group reveals no difference between the fluent and the nonfluent aphasies. Verbal fluency is shown to be a non-critical factor in the explanation of gesture production. Increased gestural production in aphasies may be interpreted according to the hypothesis that gestures are cues for the difficulties the speaker experiences in the verbal encoding process. n n n nOn a recueilli des echantillons de conversation spontanee chez six sujets normaux et douze aphasiques. Lactivite manuelle accompagnant la parole a ete analysee. Les groupes different en sens oppose selon les mesures, verbales ou non-verbales: perturbes dans leur comportement verbal, les aphasiques produisent plus de gestes que les sujets normaux. Aucune difference ne se manifeste en ce qui concerne les autres mouvements (automanipulation du visage, des mains et mouvements divers). Lanalyse du groupe aphasique ne montre aucune difference entre les aphasiques fluents et non-fluents. La fluidite verbale ne parait donc pas constituer le facteur essentiel dans lexplication de la production gestuelle. Laugmentation de la gesticulation chez les aphasiques peut etre interpretee dans le cadre de lhypothese selon laquelle les gestes sont des indices des difficultes que le locuteur eprouve dans les processus dencodage verbal.

Enactment effects and integration processes in younger and older adults’ memory for actions

The positive effects of gesturing on memory are robust but their interpretation is still controversial. To clarify the issue, recognition and cued recall of action phrases were compared in 24 younger (M=20 years) and 20 older adults (M=68 years), in three encoding conditions—purely verbal tasks (VTs), subject-performed tasks (SPTs), and experimenter-performed tasks (EPTs)—for well- and poorly integrated phrases. As expected, the effects of these factors were significant, but there was no interaction between age-related differences, enactment effects, and semantic association. In particular, both SPT and EPT displayed similar advantages over VT conditions in both age groups and in the two memory tasks. These results are discussed in relation to the debate between Engelkamp on one side, and Kormi-Nouri and Nilsson on the other side, about the role of motor components in the episodic integration of verbs and nouns in action phrases.

Further investigation on the mnemonic effect of gestures: Their meaning matters

Through a series of experiments, Cohen and Otterbein (1992) found that sentences presented together with pantomimes or with representational gestures were more often recalled than sentences presented without gestures. However, the mechanism underlying this mnemonic effect of a multimodal presentation was not fully specified. It may depend on activation of mental images and/or on increased distinctiveness of gestured utterances. The present study compared memory for sentences accompanied by different kinds of gestures—representational and nonrepresentational—to assess the role of meaning in remembering the verbal material. The results of the first experiment indicated that presentation of nonrepresentational gestures did not increase sentence recall as representational gestures did. These representational gestures also influenced performance in a sentence recognition task. In the second experiment, videotapes were edited to create mismatches and when sentences were presented with incongruent representational gestures, recall was not facilitated. Thus, in this study, memory scores did not depend on the distinctiveness of sentences presented with meaningless or mismatching gestures. These findings are discussed in relation to the literature on memory for actions in experimenter-performed tasks (EPTs).

Why do picture naming latencies increase with age : General slowing, greater sensitivity to interference, or task-specific deficits ?

To test different hypotheses about age-related slowing of word and picture naming, response latencies of young and older adults were compared in 2 experiments using the same 4 tasks: picture naming, written word pronunciation, and picture and word categorization. In each case, the target word or picture was presented with a distractor word that had to be ignored. Analyses showed the expected main effects of age, modality, and interference conditions but no consistent interaction between age and other factors. More particularly, age-related slowing was similar in word and picture processing and interference was proportional to overall speed of responding. Thus, no support was found for the hypotheses assuming either declining inhibitory mechanisms or task-specific deficits in older adults. These results were discussed in relation to characteristics of the experimental tasks.

On the measures of fluency in the assessment of spontaneous speech production by aphasic subjects

Traditionally, fluency is used first to refer to an aphasic syndrome and second to describe only a symptom, a defining speech output feature. Both of these uses may be questioned. Different dimensions of fluency, for instance articulatory agility and use of grammatical words, may be found independent; thus fluency does not identify with a consistent association of speech characteristics. When these dimensions are considered separately, other methodological and theoretical problems arise because the several decisions which are made in assessing the rate and ease of speaking do not relate explicitly to current models of speech production. The alternatives to fluency measures are various qualitative analyses of speech on the morpheme and sentence levels. Nevertheless, the inclusion of temporal variables remains useful when combined with a description of the morphological and structural aspects of the performance, when narratives are studied on the discourse level and, in a clinical setting, when therapists have specifically to deal with changes in fluency during the treatment of single cases of aphasia.

How could gesture facilitate lexical access

Several investigators, including speech–language pathologists have examined the hypothesis that the production of a gesture can facilitate word retrieval, in healthy speakers as in persons with aphasia. However, the mechanisms by which gesture can prime lexical access remain unclear. In this commentary, I discuss various models proposed in the literature on gesture and language production in order to make explicit the relationships between the various components underlying multi-modal communication. Empirical and conceptual issues are raised to conclude that, even if the hypothesis of lexical priming was not supported, gesture training for communicative purposes may nevertheless be helpful for persons with aphasia.

Are There Uniform Age-Related Changes Across Tasks Involving Inhibitory Control Through Access, Deletion, and Restraint Functions? A Preliminary Investigation

According to Hasher, Zacks, and May (Attention and performance XVII. Cognitive regulation of performance: Interaction of theory and application, pp. 653–675, MIT Press, 1999), a general age-related decline of inhibitory control affects the contents of working memory through three kinds of functions: limiting access to irrelevant information, deleting information that is no longer relevant, and restraining the production of dominant responses. Supportive evidence has been found in a wide variety of experimental tasks. In the present study, age-related changes were examined in the same group of 34 older (aged 60 to 82) and 30 younger (aged 19 to 30) adults performing the same set of tasks involving the access, deletion, or restraint function. The results indicate that age-related declines in inhibition are not uniform but vary depending on task-specific characteristics.

Neuropsychological perspectives on affective and anxiety disorders, R.I. Davidson (Ed.). Psychology Press, seattle (1998)

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