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S Copstick

Publications and source records attributed to S Copstick.

3 recordsLinked to original sources

Deep dysphasic performance in non-fluent progressive aphasia: a case study.

We present a patient (PW) with non-fluent progressive aphasia, characterized by severe word finding difficulties and frequent phonemic paraphasias in spontaneous speech. It has been suggested that such patients have insufficient access to phonological information for output and cannot construct the appropriate sequence of selected phonemes for articulation. Consistent with such a proposal, we found that PW was impaired on a variety of verbal tasks that demand access to phonological representations (reading, repetition, confrontational naming and rhyme judgement); she also demonstrated poor performance on syntactic and grammatical processing tasks. However, examination of PW's repetition performance also revealed that she made semantic paraphasias and that her performance was influenced by imageability and lexical status. Her auditory-verbal short-term memory was also severely compromised. These features are consistent with 'deep dysphasia', a disorder reported in patients suffering from stroke or cerebrovascular accident, and rarely reported in the context of non-fluent progressive aphasia. PW's pattern of performance is evaluated in terms of current models of both non-fluent progressive aphasia and deep dysphasia.

Anomia↗

A test of a common assumption regarding the use of antenatal training during labour.

The nature and purpose of antenatal classes are reviewed briefly, together with the common assumption that women given antenatal training to cope with their labour pains do all in fact make use of the breathing and postural techniques which have been taught in the classes when they come to labour itself. This assumption was tested by obtaining reports of the use of such techniques from sixty primiparous mothers after their labours. The results showed that the majority of these women did use their coping techniques at the onset of contractions, but as labour progressed toward delivery fewer and fewer mothers did so, less than a third practising any kind of coping techniques by the time they were in the second stage of labour. Of the more than two thirds remaining, a very substantial number could be accounted for by the mothers who had epidural analgesia, but, even allowing for this, more than half of the 'non-epidural' mothers failed to make use of their postural and breathing techniques during the second stage of labour. These findings suggest that it should no longer be assumed that all women taught to cope with labour pains by learning postural and breathing techniques in antenatal classes will necessarily be able to use them throughout labour itself.

Adaptation, Psychological↗