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Janice Kay

Publications and source records attributed to Janice Kay.

6 recordsLinked to original sources
PubMed2006

Phonological dyslexia and phonological impairment: an exception to the rule?

The condition known as phonological dyslexia involves very poor reading of non-words, with otherwise good word reading performance [e.g. Derouesné & Beauvois, 1979; Sartori, G., Barry, C., & Job, R. (1984). Phonological dyslexia: A review. In R. N. Malatesha & H. A. Whitaker (Eds.), Dyslexia: A global issue. The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff Publishers]. Theoretical accounts of this non-word reading impairment suggest disruption to either a component of a non-lexical orthographic-phonological reading route [that is specifically involved in reading non-words; Coltheart, M., Rastle, K., Perry, C., Langdon, R., & Zeigler, J. (2001). A dual route cascaded model of visual word recognition and reading aloud. Psychological Review, 108, 204-256] or to generalised phonological processes on which novel reading is heavily dependent [Farah, M., Stowe, R. M., & Levinson, K. L. (1996). Phonological dyslexia: Loss of a reading-specific component of cognitive architecture? Cognitive Neuropsychology, 13, 849-868; Harm, M. W., & Seidenberg, M. S. (1999). Phonology, reading acquisition, and dyslexia: Insights from connectionist models. Psychological Review, 106, 491-528]. The present paper questions the latter hypothesis: that phonological dyslexia always occurs in connection with some other form of phonologically based disruption (i.e. in a 'cluster' of impairments that are not necessarily reading-specific). Contrary to this view, several recent studies have reported that phonological dyslexia can occur without corresponding generalised phonological impairment [e.g. Caccappolo-van Vliet, E., Miozzo, M., & Stern, Y. (2004a). Phonological dyslexia without phonological impairment? Cognitive Neuropsychology, 21, 820-839; Caccappollo-van Vliet, E., Miozzo, M., & Stern, Y. (2004b). Phonological dyslexia: A test case for reading models. Psychological Science, 15, 583-590]. However, the work is subject to a number of criticisms. The following study examines performance of a phonological dyslexic case (JH) on a variety of phonological based tasks and, unlike many other studies, components of phonological short-term memory. Despite clear impairments in reading non-words, good performance on a variety of phonological tasks makes the possibility of generalised phonologically based disruption unlikely. The view that JH's good phonological skill was dependent on the use of spelling based strategies was also excluded. As a result, JH's pattern of performance provides clear evidence that phonological dyslexia can occur without any generalised phonological impairment.

Articulation Disorders↗
PubMed2006

Selective preservation of memory for people in the context of semantic memory disorder: patterns of association and dissociation.

A number of single cases in the literature demonstrate that person-specific semantic knowledge can be selectively impaired after acquired brain damage compared with that of object categories. However, there has been little unequivocal evidence for the reverse dissociation, selective preservation of person-specific semantic knowledge. Recently, three case studies have been published which provide support for the claim that such knowledge can be selectively preserved [Kay, J., & Hanley, J. R. (2002). Preservation of memory for people in semantic memory disorder: Further category-specific semantic dissociation. Cognitive Neuropsychology, 19, 113-134; Lyons, F., Hanley, J. R., & Kay, J. (2002). Anomia for common names and geographical names with preserved retrieval of names of people: A semantic memory disorder. Cortex, 38, 23-35; Thompson, S. A, Graham, K. S., Williams, G., Patterson, K., Kapur, N., & Hodges, J. R. (2004). Dissociating person-specific from general semantic knowledge: Roles of the left and right temporal lobes. Neuropsychologia, 42, 359-370]. In this paper, we supply further evidence from a series of 18 patients with acquired language disorder. Of this set, a number were observed to be impaired on tests of semantic association and word-picture matching using names of object categories (e.g. objects, animals and foods), but preserved on similar tests using names of famous people. Careful methodology was applied to match object and person-specific categories for item difficulty. The study also examined whether preservation of person-specific semantic knowledge was associated with preservation of knowledge of 'biological categories' such as fruit and vegetables and animals, or with preservation of 'token' knowledge of singular categories such as countries. The findings are discussed in the context of a variety of accounts that examine whether semantic memory has a categorical structure.

Adult↗
PubMed2004

Biographical knowledge: modality-specific or modality-neutral?

A number of patients have been reported who produce more semantic information in response to faces than to names, and vice versa (e.g., Eslinger et al., 1996). It has sometimes been claimed that these patterns are consistent with the hypothesis that faces and names gain access to separate, modality-specific, biographic knowledge systems. Resolving this debate has proved somewhat difficult, however, given limitations of existing data. Not only are there relatively few patients showing these particular patterns of differentiation, but also testing has often not been sufficiently thorough to rule out alternative accounts. In this paper, we present results of two studies investigating biographical knowledge differences in neurological patients and healthy adult controls. The first study focused on two patients who appeared to access more information about famous people in response to their names than to their faces. On superficial analysis, this pattern could be seen to support the notion of modality-specific biographical knowledge systems. However, closer examination revealed that, for both cases, the findings could be explained by a difficulty in face recognition, rather than by assuming separate semantic representations for faces and names. The second study investigated the role of face and name cues in accessing biographical information in younger and older healthy adults. We found that accuracy in retrieval of biographical information was significantly better with name cues for both groups. Results from these studies not only highlight the processes that must be examined in order to demonstrate modality-specific differences conclusively, but also reveal a fundamental bias in retrieval of biographical knowledge that has not been addressed in research of this nature.

Adult↗
PubMed2002

Anomia for common names and geographical names with preserved retrieval of names of people: a semantic memory disorder.

This paper describes the case of an anomic patient (FH) who is impaired at naming pictures of objects but has no difficulties in recalling the names of familiar people. Even though his performance on McKenna's (1997) Category Specific Naming Test was at the first percentile, he consistently recalled the names of familiar people as successfully as controls. It is argued that the pattern of performance displayed by FH represents a much clearer double dissociation with proper name anomia than any case previously reported (Cipolotti et al., 1993; Semenza and Sgaramella, 1993). FH is unable to provide detailed semantic information about many of the objects that he cannot name, even though he can recall semantic information about familiar people. Consequently his case appears to represent the mirror image of the proper name anomic patient (APA) described by Miceli et al. (2000) who was unable to recall detailed semantic information about many of the people she was unable to name. Further investigation of FH's anomia revealed impairments in retrieving both common nouns and verbs, and difficulties in retrieving and comprehending geographical names. It is argued that FH's preserved ability to name and recall biographical information about people supports the view that knowledge about familiar people may be subserved by its own dedicated neural subsystem (Kay and Hanley, 1999; Miceli et al., 2000; Gentileschi et al., 2001).

Aged↗
PubMedDate not supplied

Phonetic and phonological analysis of progressive speech degeneration: a case study.

In this paper we report on an adult male participant with a rare form of progressive speech degeneration. We present acoustic phonetic data on his vowel and consonant production, and describe his prosody and syllable structure. We suggest possible phonological analyses of his speech, concluding that a gestural approach to phonology best characterizes his speech production and its degeneration.

Articulation Disorders↗