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Biomedical subjects

S Blumstein

Publications and source records attributed to S Blumstein.

11 recordsLinked to original sources
PubMed1989

Reaction time methodology and the aphasic patient: a reply to Hagoort (1988).

P. Hagoort (1988, Brain and Language, 36, 335-348) suggests that the results of an experiment conducted with aphasic patients reported by W. Milberg, S. E. Blumstein, and B. Dworetzky (1987, Brain and Language, 31, 138-150) are "difficult to interpret in terms of a selective access model for normal processing because of a confound caused by the use of repeated lexical decision targets." We argue that the use of repeated lexical decision targets and other methodological compromises are necessary for using the lexical decision reaction time paradigm with aphasic patients. Furthermore, the minor differences between our data and those presented by Hagoort do not undermine our claims concerning semantic processing in different subgroups of aphasics, nor our comparisons of these patients to normal subjects.

Aphasia↗
PubMed1988

Phonological processing and lexical access in aphasia.

This study explored the relationship between on-line processing of phonological information and lexical access in aphasic patients. A lexical decision paradigm was used in which subjects were presented auditorily with pairs of words or word-like stimuli and were asked to make a lexical decision about the second stimulus in the pair. The initial phonemes of the first word primes, which were semantically related to the real word targets, were systematically changed by one or more than one phonetic feature, e.g., cat-dog, gat-dog, wat-dog. Each of these priming conditions was compared to an unrelated word baseline condition, e.g., nurse-dog. Previous work with normals showed that even a nonword stimulus receives a lexical interpretation if it shares a sufficient number of phonetic features with an actual word in the listener's lexicon. Results indicated a monotonically decreasing degree of facilitation as a function of phonological distortion. In contrast, fluent aphasics showed priming in all phonological distortion conditions relative to the unrelated word baseline. Nonfluent aphasics showed priming only in the undistorted, related word condition relative to the unrelated word baseline. Nevertheless, in a secondary task requiring patients to make a lexical decision on the nonword primes presented singly, all aphasics showed phonological feature sensitivity. These results suggest deficits for aphasic patients in the various processes contributing to lexical access, rather than impairments at the level of lexical organization or phonological organization.

Adult↗
PubMed1976

Iconic recognition of musical symbols in the lateral visual fields.

Subjects with formal musical training were tested tachistoscopically in order to obtain thresholds for recognizing single notes a staff, presented successively to the lateral visual fields. They were also tested on backward visual making of the same stimuli to determine the interstimllus interval needed to escape the masking effect (critical ISI). Response requirements in threshold and ISI conditions were nonverbal (depressing an organ key), or verbal (indicating the stimulus by name). Recognition threshold for notes were lower in the right visual field than in the left, and verbal responses were easier than manual responses in the threshold condition. However, critical ISIs were lower in the left field than in the right, and ISIs from the left visual field were lower with manual responses than with verbal responses. These findings support the idea that (a) threshold and ISI represent separate levels of perceptual processing, and (b) in trained subjects, the ability to recognize musical symbols may be governed by the left hemisphere, while the information-processing stage of iconic storage may occur in the right hemisphere.

Adolescent↗