Biomedical subjects
H W Buckingham
Publications and source records attributed to H W Buckingham.
Language representation in the human brain: evidence from cortical mapping.
The manner in which the human brain processes grammatical-syntactic and lexical-semantic functions has been extensively debated in neurolinguistics. The discreteness and selectivity of the representation of syntactic-morphological properties in the dominant frontal cortex and the representation of the lexical-semantics in the temporo-parietal cortex have been questioned. Three right-handed adult male neurosurgical patients undergoing left craniotomy for intractable seizures were evaluated using various grammatical and semantic tasks during cortical mapping. The sampling of language tasks consisted of trials with stimulation (experimental) and without stimulation (control) from sites in the dominant fronto-temporo-parietal cortex The sampling of language implicated a larger cortical area devoted to language (syntactic-morphological and lexical-semantic) tasks. Further, a large part of the fronto-parieto-temporal cortex was involved with syntactic-morphological functions. However, only the parieto-temporal sites were implicated with the ordering of lexicon in sentence construction. These observations suggest that the representation of language in the human brain may be columnar or multilayered.
David Hartley's psychobiological associationism and the legacy of Aristotle.
The idea that there are certain "laws" of learning (similarity, contrast, contiguity) can be traced to Aristotle. He maintained that external stimuli cause small movements in the vessels to the dominant heart, the vestiges of which can be linked to one another. Aristotle's laws of learning were incorporated into the writings of Hobbes, Locke, and Berkeley, men who said nothing about the physiological correlates of mental associations. This left the door open for David Hartley to combine mental associationism with the Newtonian idea that sensations can cause minute particle vibrations in the nerves. Hartley's amalgam of psychology, philosophy, and neurology was first presented in 1746, as a "trial balloon" at the end a little-known monograph on a treatment for kidney stones. It was repeated three years later in his better-known Observations on Man. In many ways, modern psychobiological connectionism can be traced back to Hartley's Conjectures of 1746, in which Aristotle's original thoughts were modified with then current ideas about functions of the mind and the nervous system.
Alexander Crichton (1763-1856). Disorders of fluent speech and associationist theory.
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Phonological transformations in Spanish-speaking aphasics.
Thirty-seven aphasic patients whose native language is Spanish were divided into four groups: (1) Broca's, (2) Wernicke's, (3) Conduction, and (4) Anomia. Phonological errors produced on repetition and object-naming tasks were analyzed in terms of type of transformation and degree of similarity between target and errors in terms of shared distinctive features. Segmental transformations were of the following types: (1) pure substitution, (2) pure addition, (3) deletion, (4) reduplicative addition (doublet creation)--anticipatory (right to left) or preservative (left to right), (5) reduplicative substitution (doublet creation)--anticipatory or perseverative, and (6) mutual exchanges. Pure substitutions were the most prevalent, exchanges, the least. Some error types were found to differentiate significantly between aphasic populations. We suggest that different mechanisms may underlie the same error type for different aphasic populations.
Amer-Ind versus ASL: recognition and imitation in aphasic subjects.
The imitation and recognition ability of brain-damaged and normal subjects was tested for 30 pairs of semantically matched ASL signs and corresponding Amer-Ind gestures. Subjects were rated according to severity and site of lesion. They were 6 nonaphasic, right-hemisphere brain-damaged subjects, 12 aphasic subjects, and 12 non-brain-damaged geriatric subjects. Results indicated that the Amer-Ind gestures were significantly easier to imitate and to recognize than the matched ALS signs. The relationships between these gestural abilities and severity of aphasia, site of lesion, Amer-Ind transparency ratings, and subjects' performance on a standardized aphasia test are outlined. The theoretical implications that concern the neural systems which mediate spoken and limb gestures are discussed.
Early development of association theory in psychology as a forerunner to connection theory.
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Phonetic disintegration in a five-year-old following sudden hearing loss.
The speech of a five-year-old boy who suffered a profound hearing loss following meningitis was sampled at two-week intervals for nine months. Speech samples were subjected to phonetic transcription, spectrographic analysis, and intelligibility testing. Immediately post-trauma, the child displayed slightly slower, F0 elevated, acoustically intense speech in which phonemic distortion and syllabification of consonants occurred occasionally; single word intelligibility was depressed below normal between 20-30%. By the 18th week, a sudden decline in intelligibility, increasing monotony of pitch, and a pattern of strongly emphatic, prolonged, aspirated, syllabified, and increasingly distorted consonants were manifest. At year's end, the child's speech bore some resemblance to the speech of the deaf in terms of suprasegmentals, intonation, and intelligibility, but differed because the child rarely, if ever deleted speech sounds or diphthongized vowels strongly. It is speculated that phonetic processes such as diphthongization, syllabification, and prolonged duration may be strategies for enhancing feedback during speech.
Semantic paraphasia.
In the present paper a large corpus of semantic word selection errors from a severe Wernicke's aphasic is analyzed in accordance with a taxonomy recently proposed in the literature. In an attempt to demonstrate the systematicity of the aphasic substitutions, the errors are classified along a wide range of conceptual spheres. In addition, recent theories of the Russian neuropsychologist A. R. Luria are considered in providing an explanation for lexical selection deficits. Finally, comparisons are made between aphasic errors and similar errors seen in "slips-of-the-tongue" in non-brain damaged normal subjects.
Explanation in apraxia with consequences for the concept of apraxia of speech.
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Alliteration and assonance in neologistic jargon aphasia.
This paper discusses certain aspects of the speech patterns of neologistic jargon aphasic patients, whose syndrome is one form of a more general classification referred to as Wernicke's or cortical sensory aphasia. The classical lesion site is in the posterior superior temporal convolution of the dominant hemisphere. Patients with such lesions typically have difficulties in the comprehension of auditory linguistic stimuli and their speech is often marked with neologistic jargon. A neologism is a phonological form produced by the patient for which one cannot recover with any reasonable degree of certainty some single item in the patient's vocabulary as it presumably existed before the onset of the disease. Specific analysis is focused on those stretches of speech which exhibit perseveration to the point where there is an excessive amount of alliteration and assonance. The data is described in terms of segments, syllables and sequences of syllables and related to both a mechanism underlying the production of this sort of speech and to the more general problems of neologisms in jargon aphasia.
A critique of A. R. Luria's neurodynamic explanation of paraphasia.
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The conduction theory and neologistic jargon.
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