Case Study - WLP Flashcards
Which researcher studied her?
Schwartz
What are the locations of her lesions?
Generalised cortical atrophy because of her diagnosis of primary presenile dementia
What impairments did WLP suffer?
Inability to communicate
Lexical function was severely impaired
Anomia
Expressive and receptive language problem
Couldn’t learn any associations on a learning task
What functions were spared?
Well groomed, cooperative and appropriate in affect
Scored 95 on IQ test and did very well on visuo spatial tasks
Motor sequences
Able to read aloud and write to dictation
Which test was used to test her vocabulary? What was the result?
Peabody vocab test
Vocab of a 6 year old
WLP has a tendency to select related but inappropriate alternatives for words for example daughter instead of sister. What is this called?
Semantic distinction failure
How was WLPs anomia tested? What were the results?
She was asked to name 70 household items but couldn’t. However she was able to precisely mime each of them showing she understood what each was and what the task was about
What is a hypothesis about WLPs semantic abilities ?
Believed that she is gradually losing semantic features that define reference terms, so it starts with more specific ones and moves to general ones
For example she over extends the label of dog to cards as well because she can’t semantically differentiate
What is the name of the task used to test WLP?
Picture pointing task
What were the different conditions in the picture pointing task?
Active voice, the cow kicks the horse
Passive voice, the car is pulled by the truck
Comparative adjective, the girl is fatter than the boy
Spatial preposition, the square is over the circle
When WLP and aphasics are compared who makes the most errors?
Aphasics make a lot of errors, and WLP makes very few errors especially in the spatial ones
So what’s a conclusion about WLP? What is she evidence for?
Preserved syntactic and phonological capacities in the face of marked semantic loss
She’s evidence for the triple route model of reading
What as the gender age and disorder is WLP?
Age 62, female, with dementia and aphasia
What were the different conditions in the multiple choice object naming task ?
Correct name -dog
Semantic distractor - cat
Phonological distractor - dig
Two random - car and phone
What were WLPs results on the multiple choice object naming task? In the second test?
Over time?
Performed very badly on the semantic tasks, nut much better on the phonological and random.
In the second test WLP did pretty much the same even though she’d already seen the words before
Overtime she made more and more errors on all of them, severe degeneration
