Carolyn Wilshire

Victoria University of Wellington · School of Psychology

This study investigated the effect of lexical content on sentence production in nonfluent aphasia. Five participants with nonfluent aphasia, four with fluent aphasia, and eight controls were asked to describe pictured events in subject-verb-object sentences. Experiment 1 manipulated speed of lexical retrieval by varying the frequency of sentence no...

This paper examines how theories of psychopathology conceptualize symptoms. We identify five questions that need to be asked about symptoms, including what kind of constructs they are, how we should describe them and what causal explanations they support. We then examine how three different theoretical frameworks address these questions: The Diagno...

Geraghty’s recent editorial on the PACE trial for chronic fatigue syndrome has stimulated a lively discussion. Here, I consider whether the published claims are justified by the data. I also discuss wider issues concerning trial procedures, researcher allegiance and participant reporting bias. Cognitive behavioural therapy and graded exercise thera...

In this study, we assessed eight individuals with aphasia on seven measures that have previously been associated with damage to anterior language structures. Voxel-based lesion-symptom mapping was used to explore their neural correlates. We identified two distinct clusters of measures. The first, fluency and grammaticality, included measures of spe...

In this article, we examine how symptoms are conceptualized in theories of psychopathology. We identify five questions that need to be asked about symptoms, including what kind of constructs they are, how we should describe them, and what causal explanations they support. We then examine how three different theoretical frameworks address these ques...

In our original article (this issue, p. ♦♦♦), we argued that focusing research on individual symptoms of psychopathology might provide valuable information about their underlying nature and result in better classification systems, explanations, and treatment. To this end, we formulated five core questions that were intended to guide subsequent rese...

In a recent paper, Sharpe and Greco suggest that chronic fatigue syndrome/myalgic encephalomyelitis (MECFS) can be viewed as an instance of “illness without disease”, and consequently, treatment should be directed towards altering the patient’s experience of, and response to, their symptoms. We discuss two broad issues that arise from Sharpe and Gr...

In a recent paper, Sharpe and Greco suggest that chronic fatigue syndrome/myalgic encephalomyelitis (MECFS) can be viewed as an instance of "illness without disease", and consequently, treatment should be directed towards altering the patient's experience of, and response to, their symptoms. We discuss two broad issues that arise from Sharpe and Gr...

In a recent paper, we argued that the conclusions of the PACE trial of chronic fatigue syndrome are problematic because the pre-registered protocol was not adhered to. We showed that when the originally specific outcomes and analyses are used, the evidence for the effectiveness of CBT and graded exercise therapy is weak. In a companion paper to thi...

The current paper critically evaluates Beck and Bredemeier’s (2016) Unified Model of Depression (UMD) and explores some of the wider issues it raises about explanations of depression. Our evaluation touches upon several challenges that are relevant to any integrative explanation of depression. These include: 1) dealing with the heterogeneity inhere...

Background: The PACE trial was a well-powered randomised trial designed to examine the efficacy of graded exercise therapy (GET) and cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT) for chronic fatigue syndrome. Reports concluded that both treatments were moderately effective, each leading to recovery in over a fifth of patients. However, the reported analyses...

This chapter explains why neuroscience must not be seen as a stand-alone explanation for criminal behavior. Forensic neuroscience is a rapidly developing area of research and promises to yield new ways of explaining and responding to crime and its associated problems. The chapter argues that forensic neuroscience can provide an important, multi-dis...

BACKGROUND: The PACE trial was a well-powered randomised trial designed to examine the efficacy of graded exercise therapy (GET) and cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT) for chronic fatigue syndrome. Reports concluded that both treatments were moderately effective, each leading to recovery in over a fifth of patients. However, the reported analyses...

In light of the growing interest in forensic neuroscience, a pressing question concerns whether or not neurobiological evidence and explanations can make a useful contribution to understanding and managing crime. Here we argue that neuroscience methodologies, such as EEG and fMRI, can provide a valuable source of information about phenomena related...

In light of the growing research and practice interest in forensic neuroscience, a pressing question concerns whether or not neuroscience theories and findings can make a useful contribution to the explanation and management of crime. We argue that in order to respond to this query, it is necessary to be clear about (a) What constitutes a forensic...

Objective: To characterize the language impairments that occur in brain tumor patients using a cognitively oriented theoretical framework. Method: Forty-nine preoperative brain tumor patients completed a new testing protocol (the BLAST) which assesses 8 well documented, "core" cognitive skills required for language: auditory word recognition, ac...

BACKGROUND: Recently, we critically evaluated the claim from the PACE trial that cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT) and graded exercise therapy (GET) can lead to recovery from chronic fatigue syndrome. We showed that the trial’s definition of recovery was so loose it failed to capture the term’s core meaning. Also, this definition was substantiall...

BACKGROUND: Publications from the PACE trial reported that 22% of chronic fatigue syndrome patients recovered following graded exercise therapy (GET), and 22% following a specialised form of CBT. Only 7% recovered in a control, no-therapy group. These figures were based on a definition of recovery that differed markedly from that specified in the t...

Perspectives on Psychological Science 2016, Vol. 11(5) 606–631.

One important theoretical question about word production concerns whether the phonemes of a word are retrieved in parallel or in sequential order. To address this question, Meyer and Schriefers (Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition 17:1146-1160, 1991) used an auditory picture-word interference task and manipulated the...

Conduction aphasia is a syndrome characterized by impaired repetition in the context of relatively preserved auditory comprehension and fluent speech. The classical conceptualization of conduction aphasia as a disconnection syndrome has been undermined in recent years. Nevertheless, this diagnosis delineates a small subset of individuals with aphas...

Background: Researchers and clinicians have long known that in aphasia, the ability to produce connected speech is poorly predicted by tests of single word production. Connected speech is most commonly assessed using rating scales, in which the examiner rates the speech on various fluency-rated and grammatical wellformedness measures. However, with...

We report an individual with Broca's aphasia (J.H.M.), who exhibited powerful lexical context effects in word production tasks. In an adjective-noun production task (Experiment 1), J.H.M.'s production accuracy decreased as the number of adjectives in the phrase increased (e.g., curly hair vs. long curly hair). In a picture pair naming task (Experim...

This paper examines the effect of semantic variables on serial recall in two contrasting aphasic cases and a group of controls. Experiment 1 manipulates word imageability and Experiment 2 manipulates semantic similarity. Controls not only showed better recall of imageable/semantically grouped lists, but under some conditions they also produced prop...

Background: The majority of cognitive neuropsychological treatments for impairments in phonological encoding utilise some form of phonological cueing or support. Most commonly, the participant is provided with supporting information about the phonological form of a particular word (either partial or complete, auditory or written), and must then gen...

This study compared the effectiveness of two reading treatment programmes for two contrasting developmental dyslexics. W.B. demonstrated "pure" phonological dyslexia (deficient nonword reading but normal irregular-word reading) and N.S. "pure" surface dyslexia (the converse pattern). Both participants completed: (a) a phonological programme, which...

Background: The cognitive neuropsychological approach aims to describe aphasic disorders of word production by identifying the specific cognitive process(es) that are impaired in each individual. This approach is becoming increasingly influential in the assessment, investigation, and treatment of word production difficulties in aphasia. The classic...

In this study, we use an auditory picture-word interference task to examine an anomic individual, NP. NP produced semantic errors in picture naming, but his comprehension was relatively well preserved. In the task, pictures to be named were accompanied by semantically, phonologically or unrelated distractors, presented at onsets ranging from -200ms...

Two fluent aphasics, IG and GL, performed a phonological priming task in which they repeated an auditory prime then named a target picture. The two patients both had selective deficits in word production: they were at or near ceiling on lexical comprehension tasks, but were significantly impaired in picture naming. IG's naming errors included both...

This thesis compares the effectiveness of two reading treatment programmes, each developed to address the key difficulties of two subtypes of developmental dyslexia - phonological and surface dyslexia, respectively. Previous cognitive neuropsychological research has commonly administered a single tailored treatment programme to each individual. How...

A recent theory of lexical access in picture naming maintains that all nonword errors are generated during the retrieval of phonemic segments from the lexicon (Dell, Schwartz, Martin, Saffran, & Gagnon, 1997b). This theory is challenged by "dual origin" theories that postulate a second, post-lexical mechanism, whose disruption gives rise to "phonem...

In this paper we describe an aphasic patient, MS, who is impaired across a wide range of auditory input processing and spoken word production tasks. MS's performance on all these tasks shows phonological features: (1) his performance is poorest on auditory tasks with a strong phonological component, such as phoneme discrimination, auditory lexical...

The syllable has received considerable empirical support as a unit of processing in speech perception, but its status in speech production remains unclear. Some researchers propose that syllables are individually represented and retrieved during phonological encoding (e.g., Dell, 1986; Ferrand, Segui, & Grainger, 1996; MacKay, 1987). We test this h...

We describe a patient (BM) with nonfluent aphasia who presents with sparse, fragmented spontaneous speech but normal or near-normal performance on standard naming tasks. However, more detailed investigation revealed some unusual features to BM's naming: On a task involving repeated naming of a small set of targets, his performance degenerated when...

This paper analyses the incidence and distribution of phonemic misordering errors (or ''contextual'' errors) in the phonologically related nonword responses of aphasic individuals. A diverse group of 22 individuals was examined in two separate picture naming studies. Contextual error rates were found to be above chance for only two of the participa...

A corpus of phonological errors produced in narrative speech by a Wernicke's aphasic speaker (R.W.B.) was tested for context effects using two new methods for establishing chance baselines. A reliable anticipatory effect was found using the second method, which estimated chance from the distance between phoneme repeats in the speech sample containi...

The "tongue twister" paradigm is underutilized as a research tool because so little is known about how it induces errors. The two experiments reported here explore this paradigm in detail using a task variation which minimizes articulatory and mnemonic load. This task was found to elicit good rates of apparently "pure" prearticulatory errors. Two o...

One controversial phenomenon concerning slips of the tongue is the tendency for the onsets of words to slip more frequently than segments at other word positions. Some researchers attribute this effect to the phonological properties of word onsets, while others suggest it reflects something specific about the role played by the word onset during ph...

The speech of a patient with a mild impairment in phonological encoding (or “Reproduction Conduction Aphasia’’) was investigated using a series of specially designed experimental tasks. The patient committed phonemic paraphasias in all speech production tasks, although these were somewhat less pronounced in repetition than other single word tasks....