Nadine Martin

• Temple University

Verbal short-term memory (STM) deficits are associated with language processing impairments in people with aphasia. Importantly, the integrity of STM can predict word learning ability and anomia therapy gains in aphasia. While the recruitment of perilesional and contralesional homologous brain regions has been proposed as a possible mechanism for a...

Verbal short-term memory (STM) deficits are associated with language processing impairments in people with aphasia. Importantly, the integrity of STM can predict word learning ability and anomia therapy gains in aphasia. While the recruitment of perilesional and contralesional homologous brain regions has been proposed as a possible mechanism for a...

People with aphasia (PWA) present with language deficits including word retrieval difficulties after brain damage. Language learning is an essential life-long human capacity that may support treatment-induced language recovery after brain insult. This prospect has motivated a growing interest in the study of language learning in PWA during the last...

The purpose of this project was to determine whether verbal interaction with a virtual clinician that produced gestures facilitated the use of meaningful gestures in the affected and unaffected upper extremity of individuals with aphasia. We hypothesized that active engagement with a virtual clinician that produces natural gestures will support the...

Transcortical sensory aphasia (TCSA) has historically been regarded as a disconnection syndrome characterized by impaired access between words and otherwise intact core object knowledge. Yet, an extensive body of research has also demonstrated a range of associated nonverbal semantic deficits in TCSA, suggestive of a multimodal semantic impairment...

Background: Speech segmentation is one of the initial and mandatory phases of language learning. Although some people with aphasia have shown a preserved ability to learn novel words, their speech segmentation abilities have not been explored. Aims: We examined the ability of individuals with chronic aphasia to segment words from running speech via...

The present case study investigated modality-specific aspects of novel word acquisition in aphasia. It was prompted by recent aphasia case studies indicating great interindividual variability in the ability to learn and maintain novel words in aphasia. Moreover, two previous case studies revealed a striking effect of input modality by showing effec...

Aphasia is an acquired communication disorder that affects the ability to speak and understand spoken language. The purpose of this project is to create a virtual clinician to help individuals with aphasia practice self-initiated speech in everyday communication situations. The project will gauge the interaction and quality of this virtual clinicia...

BACKGROUND: In recent years, some critical voices have been raised in regard to the significance of cognitive neuropsychology (CNP) to the study of brain and mind. Given the central role of language disorders in CNP research, it is time to consider the relevance of this research approach in aphasiology. AIMS: We analyze the main points of criticism...

Background: The study of novel word learning in aphasia can shed light on the functionality of patients' learning mechanisms and potentially help in treatment planning. Previous studies have indicated that persons with aphasia are able to learn some new vocabulary. However, these learning outcomes appear short-lived and evidence for the ability to...

BACKGROUND: Language performance in aphasia can vary depending on several variables such as stimulus characteristics and task demands. This study focuses on the degree of verbal working memory (WM) load inherent in the language task and how this variable affects language performance by individuals with aphasia. AIMS: The first aim was to identify t...

BACKGROUND: Previous research has suggested separable short-term memory (STM) buffers for the maintenance of phonological and lexical-semantic information, as some patients with aphasia show better ability to retain semantic than phonological information and others show the reverse. Recently, researchers have proposed that deficits to the maintenan...

Verbal working memory is an essential component of many language functions, including sentence comprehension and word learning. As such, working memory has emerged as a domain of intense research interest both in aphasiology and in the broader field of cognitive neuroscience. The integrity of verbal working memory encoding relies on a fluid interac...

Researchers have learned much about the cognitive organization of the language system by studying speech errors made by speakers with and without aphasia. Some aspects of errors made in language production reflect linguistic properties of language (e.g., linguistic similarities between an intended word and the word that was produced in error). Othe...

Background: Verbal short-term memory (STM) impairments are invariably present in aphasia. Word processing involves a minimal form of verbal STM, i.e., the time course over which semantic and phonological representations are activated and maintained until they are comprehended, produced, or repeated. Thus it is reasonable that impairments of word pr...

Background: Novel word learning of persons with aphasia is little studied, even though a better understanding of learning processes would inform development of effective treatment strategies. Recent evidence suggests some remaining verbal learning capacity in persons with aphasia. Long-term maintenance of newly learned active vocabulary has not bee...

Background: Sentence production impairment in aphasia has been attributed to several possible sources that are not mutually exclusive. Linguistic accounts often attribute the difficulty to the complexity of a verb's syntactic and/or semantic argument structure. Cognitive processing accounts emphasise the reduced processing capacity observed in agr...

The authors report an investigation of the short-term memory (STM) impairments of 15 aphasic subjects (diagnosed at ages 26–75 yrs) whose language profiles varied with respect to the relative involvement of lexical-semantic and phonological processes. On the hypothesis that STM is dependent on capacities intrinsic to language processing, repetition...

Purpose In this article, the authors encapsulate discussions of the Language Work Group that took place as part of the Workshop in Plasticity/NeuroRehabilitation Research at the University of Florida in April 2005. Method In this narrative review, they define neuroplasticity and review studies that demonstrate neural changes associated with aphasi...

Background: Perseverations of sounds and words are common errors in aphasia. Understanding their mechanisms is of considerable interest to theories of word retrieval and also to treatment of anomia. Here, we explore the hypothesis that perseveration errors are generated by the same mechanisms as non‐perseverative errors: weak activation of the inte...

Background: Treatments for sound‐blending ability in phonological dyslexia that train single grapheme–phoneme correspondences have had mixed success. A more recent approach to re‐establishing sound‐blending abilities is to train correspondences of bigraph–biphone units (CV + VC = CVC) (Berndt, Haendiges, Mitchum & Wayland, 19961. Berndt , R. S. ,...

Background: We present an anomia treatment study using a modified contextual priming (CP) technique for two anomic participants. The reason for the modification attempt is that the most recent studies have indicated that the CP procedure is less effective in the case of impairment to lexical‐semantic processes than in the case of phonological defic...

Lexical access in language production, and particularly pathologies of lexical access, are often investigated by examining errors in picture naming and word repetition. In this article, we test a computational approach to lexical access, the two-step interactive model, by examining whether the model can quantitatively predict the repetition-error p...

Naming of two semantically impaired aphasic patients was treated with the contextual repetition priming technique, which involves repeated repetition of names of pictures that are related semantically, phonologically, or are unrelated. Our previous studies using this technique have suggested that patients with impaired access to lexical-semantic re...

measure of nonword repetition, while any improvement in performance on repeating nonwords provided a measure of phonological learning. Through all the blocks and for all stimuli, the participant's task was sim- ply to repeat each nonword, immediately after its presentation. Expressive and receptive word learning (expressive recall and receptive rec...

Many facts about aphasic and nonaphasic naming are explained by models that use spreading activation to map from the semantics of a word to its phonology. The implemented model of picture naming discussed here achieves this by coupling interactive feedback with two selection steps. The model’s structure and default parameters were set up to match t...

Background: Aphasia can disrupt processing of semantic and/or phonological aspects of words and each of these domains involves multiple operations. Adequate assessment of word processing requires multiple measurements probing in each domain. Aims: This paper aims to facilitate accurate and comprehensive testing of the multiple operations involved i...

The present case continues the series of anomia treatment studies with contextual priming (CP), being the second in-depth treatment study conducted for an individual suffering from semantically based anomia. Our aim was to acquire further evidence of the facilitation and interference effects of the CP treatment on semantic anomia. Based on the resu...

Chromium thin films exhibiting a columnar microstructure were prepared by dc magnetron sputtering. The glancing angle deposition technique (GLAD) combined with the periodical changing of the incidence flux angle from α to −α was used to sculpt chromium thin films following a zigzag microstructure. The zigzag microstructure was systematically modifi...

The possibility to use new organic semiconductor materials, in place of silicon wafers, in the fabrication of photovoltaic devices on substrates offer the prospect of lower manufacturing costs, particularly for large area applications. Thus, one of the most promising areas in fullerene research involves its potential application, mixed with conjuga...

Sensitive skin is a frequently evoked cosmetic disorder, but its prevalence in France is unknown. Using a survey of a representative sample of the French population aged over 15 carried out by ISPSOS-Santé, we assessed the frequency of sensitive skin. We used the quota method (gender, age, occupation of the head of the family) and stratification by...

Background: Semantic dementia (SD) is a neurodegenerative disease that impacts long-term conceptual and lexical knowledge (Hodges & Patterson, 1996). Severe naming difficulties are prevalent in SD, yet little is known about the potential for word learning in this population.Aims: We assessed patterns of repetition and implicit learning in patients...

Amplified spontaneous emission ASE in optically pumped polystyrene PS films doped with two different oligo-p-phenylenevinylene derivatives OPVs, with three 3-OPV and five 5-OPV monomer units is reported. It is observed that there is a maximum content of oligomer 25 wt. % for 3-OPV and 20 wt. % for 5-OPV that can be introduced in the films, due to d...

This article focuses on postural anticipation and multi-joint coordination during locomotion in healthy and autistic children. Three questions were addressed. (1) Are gait parameters modified in autistic children? (2) Is equilibrium control affected in autistic children? (3) Is locomotion adjusted to the experimenter-imposed goal? Six healthy child...

Novel photo- and electroactive triads, in which pi-conjugated p-phenylenevinylene oligomers (oPPVs) of different length are connected to a photoexcited-state electron donor (i.e., zinc tetraphenylporphyrin) and an electron acceptor (i.e., C(60)), were designed, synthesized, and tested as electron-transfer model systems. A detailed physicochemical i...

Within the context of exploring photophysical properties of [60]fullerene-based donor–acceptor ensembles, we highlight in this con-tribution an approach towards the synthesis of a novel series of donor-bridge-acceptor, C 60 –wire–exTTF, ensembles that incorporate p-phenylenevinylene oligomers, in which the conjugation length has been systematically...

We describe a set of pictorial and auditory stimuli that we have developed for use in word learning tasks in which the participant learns pairings of novel auditory sound patterns (names) with pictorial depictions of novel objects (referents). The pictorial referents are drawings of "space aliens," consisting of images that are variants of 144 diff...

In this article, we review an account of movement errors that is based on a model of serial order and an interactive spreading activation model of word production. This account makes two claims. First, anticipations and perseverations arise from malfunctions of a mechanism that maintains serial order in speech production and that has three componen...

Background: Many therapy techniques for word retrieval disorders use some form of priming to improve access to words. Priming can facilitate or interfere with naming under different circumstances. We examined effects of priming when combined with semantic or phonological context (training words in groups that are semantically or phonologically rela...

The weight-decay (WD) and semantic-phonological (SP) models offer competing accounts of how brain damage disrupts processing within an interactive 2-step lexical-access framework. A few studies have compared these deficit models for how well they fit individual naming profiles on the Philadelphia Naming Test (PNT) (Dell, Lawler, Harris, & Gordon, 2...

In conclusion, Nickels and Howard's present an interesting attempt to dissociate effects of phoneme number, syllable number, and syllable complexity as sources of the word length effect in production. Although little in the way of definitive conclusions can be drawn from this study, it does provide a "roadmap" for future studies. With some addition...

In the first part of this study, we investigated effects of item and task type on span performance in a group of aphasic individuals with word processing and STM deficits. Group analyses revealed significant effects of item on span performance with span being greater for digits than for words. We also investigated associations between subjects' lex...

We tracked the evolvement of naming-related cortical dynamics with magnetoencephalography when five normal adults successfully learned names and/or meanings of unfamiliar objects. In all subjects, the learning of new names was associated with pronounced cortical effects. The learning effect was of long latency and emerged as a change of activation...

Background : Repetition priming is often a component of treatments for word-finding disorders. It can facilitate or interfere with naming success depending on a number of factors. Here we investigate the effectiveness of massed priming coupled with semantic or phonological context as a treatment for naming impairments arising from semantic and phon...

Alternative acceptor materials are possible candidates to improve the optical absorption andyor the open circuit voltage of polymer–fullerene solar cells. We studied a novel fullerene-type acceptor, DPM-12, for application in polymer–fullerene bulk heterojunction photovoltaic devices. Though DPM-12 has the identical redox potentials as methanofulle...

Thin films of titanium oxynitride were successfully prepared by dc reactive magnetron sputtering using a titanium metallic target, argon, nitrogen and water vapour as reactive gases. The nitrogen partial pressure was kept constant during every deposition whereas that of the water vapour was systematically changed from 0 to 0.1 Pa. These films were...

A theory of the cognitive organisation of lexical processing, verbal short-term memory, and verbal learning is presented along with a summary of data that bear on this issue. We conceive of verbal STM as the outcome of processing that invokes both a specialised short-term memory and the lexical system. On this model, performance of verbal STM tasks...

The synthesis and characterization of a new series of substituted polythiophenes containing an electron acceptor anthraquinone moiety in the side chain are reported. The acceptor molar content was varied by the co-polymerization of both alkylthiophene and thiophene bearing anthraquinone monomers in different ratios. NMR analysis shows a good correl...

The use of bipolar materials as an active layer in polymeric solar cells can be an alternative to 'bulk-heterojunctions' composed of donor-acceptor blends. We have prepared two series of polyalkylthiophene copolymers having acceptor molecules covalently grafted to the backbone. The random copolymerization of thiophene monomers containing an accepto...

Ruchkin et al. offer a compelling case for a model of short-term storage without a separate buffer. Here, I discuss some cognitive neuropsychological data that have been offered in support of and against their model. Additionally, I discuss briefly some new directions in cognitive neuropsychological research that bear on the role of attention in Ru...

We present data from a patient with a progressive fluent aphasia, BA, who exhibited a severe verbal impairment but a relatively preserved access to knowledge from pictures. She exhibited surface dyslexia and dysgraphia and was impaired in the production of the past tense of irregular verbs and the plural form of irregular nouns. She exhibited a mil...

We describe a study where a specific treatment method for word-finding difficulty (so-called contextual priming technique, which combines massive repetition priming with semantic priming) was applied with three chronic left hemisphere-damaged aphasics. Both before and after treatment, which focused on naming of a series of pictures, naming-related...

The aim of this study was to examine the neural substrates of multi-object naming by positron emission tomography in normals. Multi-object naming is used in a technique called contextual priming (CP) to elicit contextual effects on picture naming through systematic manipulation of the relatedness of to-be-named pictures in an array. Inhibitory and...

Background: We present a multiple-baseline single-case treatment study on anomia. The present anomia treatment technique originates from several studies whose aim was to test word-production models in a multiple object naming paradigm by eliciting naming responses in normal (Martin, Weisberg, & Saffran, 1989) and aphasic speakers (Laine & Martin, 1...

TiNx thin films were grown on (100) Si and glass substrates by dc reactive magnetron sputtering. A titanium target was sputtered in Ar + N2 atmosphere using a pulsing flow rate of the nitrogen gas. A constant pulsing period was used for every deposition whereas the nitrogen injection time was changed. The systematic variation of the nitrogen inject...