An open-label trial of bromocriptine in nonfluent aphasia: a qualitative analysis of word storage and retrieval.

Anomia is a commonly found in aphasia and has been attributed to a loss of representations (storage deficit) or to a loss of access to these representations (retrieval deficit). Bromocriptine, a dopamine agonist, was tested on four patients, two men and two women, with nonfluent aphasia. The patients were tested in an open-label ABBA design using a stochastic model that measured the degree of storage and retrieval deficits. All patients showed significant improvements in word retrieval. Bromocriptine may be a useful adjunct in the treatment of selected patients with a nonfluent aphasia in which retrieval deficits play a major role.

Partial phonological marking facilitates the acquisition of noun subclasses: a replication.

This is a partial replication of Brooks, Braine, Catalano, Brody, and Sudhalter (1993). 32 participants learned a miniature linguistic system (MLS). Vocabulary of the MLS consisted of an actor subject, two sets of 19 object nouns, and two sets of three suffixes. In the experimental language, 60% of the nouns were phonologically marked with a common ending for each class; in the control, these endings were distributed across the classes. Participants were trained using pictures. Sentences about the pictures combined the actor's name with an object and an appropriate suffix that described the actor-object relation. A subset of possible sentences and objects was reserved for later testing. During generalization tests, participants had to produce sentences for pictures they had not seen during training. The experimental group was markedly superior to the control. The replication supports the earlier finding that learning of seemingly arbitrary linguistic classes can be facilitated by partial phonological cues.

Narratives: A window on the oral substrate of written language disabilities.

Oral precursors underlying competence with literacy activities are approached through a review of studies on narrative comprehension and production in children identified as language learning disabled (LLD). Areas addressed include a general overview of narrative types, the kinds of narrative knowledge that are acquired, the nature of story organization, and developmental acquisitions in story recall and generation. Nine studies on the oral comprehension and production of language learning disabled children are then compared with respect to methodological issues and patterns of performance. Implications from these studies are discussed in terms of their potential insight for subtypes of a LLD including the value of oral narratives in identifying precursors for competence with written language.

Relationship between pictorial interpretation and comprehension of three spatial relations in school-age children.

Effects on spatial term comprehension as the result of transformations in the stimulus dimensions of six pictures containing the same three figures were explored using Piaget's concept of spatial perspective. A Modified Test of Pictorial Space (MTPS), adapted from Hudson's (1960) studies on non-Western pictorial perception strategies, was administered to 200 children, aged 6 yrs 5 mos to 11 yrs 3 mos. The purpose of the investigation was to gather data on (1) pictorial interpretation as a function of variations in perceptual depth cue complexity and transformations in conceptual perspective and (2) order of acquisition in the comprehension of two sets of spatial terms referring to perceptual object knowledge and more advanced conceptual knowledge of object relations. Significant age and IQ, but not sex, interactions were found for MTPS performance. Data analyses also supported predicted orders of acquisition and indicated that transformation of conceptual perspective better differentiated among the age span than did either perceptual depth cue complexity or comprehension of spatial terms. Findings are discussed in terms of their methodological and substantive implications for constructing and interpreting pictorially-based language comprehension tasks.