Testing Graceful Degradation in a Patient with Aphasia

Author： Lesk Valerie Womble Stephen Rumiati Raffaella

ISSN： 1355-4794

Source： Neurocase, Vol.13, Iss.4, 2007-08, pp. : 248-255

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Abstract

We report an investigation of phonological priming of a picture naming task in an anomic aphasic, PB, using caffeine as a pharmacological manipulation. We compare her results to controls on a similar paradigm testing the hypothesis that qualitative results in controls would carry over to the damaged brain demonstrating a "graceful degradation" in performance. When primed with words phonologically related to a target, PB made more word retrieval failures on caffeine as a function of related primes (controls make fewer) and fewer word retrieval failures as a function of unrelated primes (controls make more). The results thus supported the rejection of the hypothesis and we conclude that the use of the pharmacological manipulation provides a sensitive test for the graceful degradation of function.