Lecture One

Question 1

What is aphasia?

Answer 1

disorders of speaking and listening, caused by stroke, tumor or head injury.

Question 2

What is the left hemisphere responsible for?

Answer 2

most aspects of language processing

Question 3

What percentage of right and left handers show right hemisphere language dominance?

Answer 3

5% of right handers.

30% of left handers.

Question 4

What was the first clue to show left hemisphere specialization?

Answer 4

Marc Dax; who found an association between speech disorders and right sided hemiplegia.

Question 5

What does the right hemisphere deal with?

Answer 5

Visuo-spatial attention

Sarcasm, intonation and metaphors.

Question 6

What is aggramatism?

Answer 6

It affects the ability to convert thoughts into sentences.

Particularly affects the ability to construct a sentence around the verb/action.

Question 7

Where does the brain damage occur in aggramatism?

Answer 7

Affects Brocas area in the left inferior frontal gyrus.
Brocas damage also affects the motor and somatosensory cortex causing;
Hemiplegia; loss of movement control
Hemianaesthesia; loss of touch sensation

Question 8

Which two processes do people with agrammatism suffer with problems in?

Answer 8

Have problems both understanding and producing complex sentences. Therefore suggests shared processes between sentence production and comprehension.

Question 9

In particular patients with agrammatism have problems with…

Answer 9

1. word order
2. function words e.g. is, by…
3. inflectional endings e.g. ing and ed.
   People with agrammatism base their understanding on meanings of individual words, general knowledge and simple assumptions about sentence structure.

Question 10

What is brocas aphasia?

Answer 10

‘Expressive/non-fluent aphasia’
Faulty articulation; speech is difficult to initiate, labored and halted.
May only be able to produce a single word
Multimodal comprehension is preserved, although meaning depending on syntax is impaired.
Different from dysarthia which is a motor problem.

Question 11

What is apraxia of speech?

Answer 11

problems with motor movements.

Question 12

Which area of the brain is involved in representing and manipulating meaning

Answer 12

anterior temporal lobes

Question 13

Define semantic dementia and what areas of the brain that it affects

Answer 13

Its a progressive, degenerative brain disease that particularly affects anterior temporal regions.
Usually affects both regions but is more severe on one side.

Question 14

Deficit in semantic memory is mulit-model. True or false?

Answer 14

True

Question 15

What is preserved in people with semantic dementia?

Answer 15

Grammar (syntax)
Articulation 
episodic memory for events 
spatial and geographical knowledge 
executive control

Question 16

What affects the retention/loss of meaning in semantic dementia patients?

Answer 16

Frequency

Age of Acquisition

Question 17

What did Mayberry et al find regarding the errors that semantic dementia patients make?

Answer 17

Make overgeneralization errors e.g. say a butterfly is a bird.

Question 18

What do the temporal poles do?

Answer 18

Form a hub where knowledge regarding particular aspects of meaning (appearance, sound, feel and use) are brought together from different spoke sits and inter-linked.

Question 19

Pobric et al (2010) applied TMS to the 
Anterior Temporal Lobe
Inferior Parietal lobule 
Occipital Pole. 
Investigated the effects that it had on the naming of high manipulable objects e.g. brush and low manipulable objects such as lettuce. 
What did they find?

Answer 19

Found that disrupting the inferior parietal lobule affects the naming of high manipulable objects more than low.
Anterior temporal lobe had an equal effect on naming tools and low manipulable objects