Cognitive consequences of early phase of literacy Dellatolas, Georges; Willadino Braga, Lucia; Souza, Ligia do Nascimento ...
Journal of the International Neuropsychological Society,
07/2003, Letnik:
9, Številka:
5
Journal Article
Recenzirano
The effect of the degree of illiteracy (complete or incomplete) on phonological skills, verbal and visual memory and visuospatial skills is examined in 97 normal Brazilian adults who considered ...themselves illiterate, and 41 Brazilian school children aged 7 to 8 years, either nonreaders or beginning readers. Similar literacy effects were observed in children and in adults. Tasks involving phonological awareness and visual recognition memory of nonsense figures distinguish the best nonreaders and beginning readers. Children performed better than adults at oral repetition of short items and figure recall, and adults better than children at semantic verbal fluency, digit span, and word list recall. A principal component analysis of the correlations between tasks showed that phonological awareness/reading, phonological memory/oral repetition, and semantic verbal memory/fluency tasks, generated different components. The respective role of culturally based preschool activities and literacy on the cognitive functions that are explored in this study is discussed.
To provide referential normative data on simple tasks dealing with number processing and calculation which could be used in clinical investigations, 551 normal volunteers aged between 18 and 69 years ...from France and Belgium (n = 180). Italy (n = 212) and Germany (n = 159). performed the 31 tasks which constitute the EC301 calculation and number processing battery. Differences between countries were significant for 16 tasks and a Gender x Education interaction was observed for some tasks, with men performing better than women among subjects with low education only. To present an overview of preserved and impaired calculation and number processing abilities in left-brain damaged (LBD) aphasic patients and right-brain damaged (RBD) nonaphasic patients, the 31 subtests of the EC301 battery were proposed to 80 patients with cerebrovascular accident, 56 left and 24 right, for most cases in the territory of the middle cerebral artery. LBD aphasic patients showed low performance on oral and alphabetical spoken verbal and written verbal counting, transcoding when a written code was involved, and mental or written calculation; but relatively good performance at finding the number of elements in small sets, comparing numbers written in the Arabic digital code and placing correctly numbers on an analogue number line. The lowest performances of RBD patients were observed for estimation tasks and for placing a number on a scale. Results and their implications for further research are discussed according to the present information processing and anatomofunctional models of calculation and number processing.
Several brain-damaged patients showed a series of performance dissociations related to the surface format of numbers. These findings provide empirical evidence against two crucial assumptions of the ...calculation and number processing model proposed by McCloskey, Caramazza and Basili (36) and widely accepted within the current literature on developmental dyscalculia. First, the unique syntactical system for verbal numbers can fractionate into two syntactic components, one for spoken verbal and one for written verbal numbers, respectively. Second, access to simple number facts (multiplication tables) seems to rely on format-specific routes and not on the access to supposedly unique abstract representations. The data can also hardly be interpreted within the theoretical framework of the "triple-code" information processing model of Dehaene (16) and of its anatomical implementation by Dehaene and Cohen (19). Taken together, these results favour a cognitive architecture of the numerical system with a variety of format-specific processes and multiple representations proposed by Campbell and Clark (8) which remain to be fully specified.
Shortly before the acquisition of right and left, which generally occurs around age 6-7 years, a very simple right/left discrimination task makes it possible to distinguish groups of children with ...strikingly different cognitive abilities. Preschool children aged from 5 to 6.4 years were asked to show their left hand, right eye, left ear and right hand. On a variety of simple cognitive tasks exploring verbal fluency, syntactic comprehension, working memory, visuo-spatial ability and number processing, children who made from 1 to 3 errors (14% of the sample) performed significantly worse than those who showed systematic reversal (30%) and those who made no error. Differential use of logical thinking can partially explain these differences. Neuropsychological implications of these developmental findings are discussed.
Calculation and number processing abilities were assessed in normal (n = 138) and traumatic brain-injured (n = 15) Brazilian literate subjects. The study aimed (i) to analyse the effects of ...demographic factors and to provide tentative norms adjusted for the relevant variables, (ii) to examine the factorial structure of the battery and to evaluate its clinical validity for diagnosis purposes, and (in) to question the power of current models to account for effects and dissociations found for these groups. Analysis indicated a main effect of education on most subtests and of sex on three, but none for age. Cut-off scores for normality were defined at Percentile 10 with reference to education. The sensitivity of the battery to the presence of arithmetical impairments was considered satisfactory since 11 out of the 15 patients showed pathological scores. A principal component analysis indicated that the different subtests were grouped into three factors, which were tentatively interpreted with reference to current information-processing models. The multiple single-case analysis of dissociations in patients' performance suggested some limits with respect to anatomo-functional models of calculation and number processing.
This study presents a microcomputer-assisted rehabilitation programme for picture confrontation naming impairments. The results reported concern two aphasic patients with inverse pretherapeutic ...dependencies between oral and written naming mechanisms. The surface dysgraphic's written naming responses were often mediated by access to phonological word forms, whereas the conduction aphasic's oral responses often relied on covert finding of orthographic word forms. The rehabilitation technique focused exclusively on written naming from the keyboard, without oral training. Improvements were obtained in both cases, with various generalizations to non-drilled items, untrained (oral) modality and handwriting. These beneficial effects were still present 1 year post-therapy. Microcomputer-delivered cues thus seem to be a promising technique for the rehabilitation of oral and written naming difficulties in some aphasic patients.
We report on the significant beneficial outcomes of two contrasted experimental rehabilitation techniques for grammaticality judgements operating on numbers in written word forms (verbal numbers).
...The information processing approach provided the theoretical framework for designing training programmes. The verbal primitives were classified into lexical categories (units, teens, decades, and hundreds). A set of lexico-syntactical rules was stated in terms of well-formed or illegal sequences of categories. Grammaticality judgement was simulated by a left-to-right parser performing the lexical categorization of verbal number primitives and operating with the relevant acceptance/rejection syntactical rules.
In Therapy I, neither rules nor lexical categorization were taught to the patient, who was just presented with many verbal numbers in a grammaticality judgement task on a video screen. Automatic feedback to the patient qualified only the nature of his responses (correct or errors). In Therapy II, the patient was taught the rules and the lexical categories they operated upon.
The two rehabilitation methods were successively administered and each induced different but significant improvement in grammaticality judgements not only on trained items but also on comparable undrilled items. Intratask learning transfer was enhanced by training with a large variety of items sharing the same underlying lexicosyntactical structure, which proved more efficient than mere repetition of exercises on the very same items. Intertask learning transfers were obtained in other number processing situations like writing verbal numbers from Arabic forms (or the reverse), magnitude comparisons, and numerical size estimation of verbal numbers.
Examines the relationship between anagram solving and reading aloud proficiency in Italian (n=43) and French (n=50) sixth-grade children. Finds a statistically significant relation in Italian ...children but not such a direct link in French children. Concludes that anagram solving may highlight some developmental stages and processing strategies in the acquisition and elaboration of written language. (PA)
To assess subjective experience after stroke, 214 patients completed the 63-item European Brain Injury Questionnaire. The same questionnaire was also completed by a close relative of each patient and ...by 214 control participants matched for gender and age. A principal component analysis showed 3 factors: depressive mood, cognitive difficulties, and difficulties in social interactions. In self-assessment, whereas the first 2 factors were scored higher by patients than by controls, the level of difficulty in social interactions did not differ between these 2 groups. In hetero-assessment, relatives scored patients' difficulties higher than patients did, especially for items suggesting the impact of stroke on themselves. Psychological difficulties of stroke patients and the consequences on their relatives need to be taken into account in rehabilitation programs.
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Dostopno za:
BFBNIB, DOBA, IZUM, KILJ, NUK, PILJ, PNG, SAZU, UILJ, UKNU, UL, UM, UPUK
