We assessed language functioning in 116 age-, education-, and severity-matched patients with the clinical diagnosis of Alzheimer's disease (AD), multi-infarct dementia (MID) due to small-vessel ischemic disease, or a frontotemporal form of degeneration (FD). Assessments of comprehension revealed that patients with AD are significantly impaired in their judgments of single word and picture meaning, whereas patients with FD had sentence comprehension difficulty due to impaired processing of grammatical phrase structure. Patients with MID did not differ from control subjects in their comprehension performance. Traditional aphasiologic measures did not distinguish between AD, MID, and FD. Selective patterns of comprehension difficulty in patients with different forms of dementia emphasize that language deficits cannot be explained entirely by the compromised memory associated with a progressive neurodegenerative illness.

The aim of this study was to investigate working memory in multiple sclerosis (MS) patients. To test the hypothesis that the central executive system (CES) of working memory is impaired, 36 MS patients were administered a dual-task paradigm in which a judgment of line orientation measure was performed concurrently with finger tapping, humming a melody, or reciting the alphabet. MS patients exhibited a significantly greater decrement in performance than controls during the more demanding dual-task conditions (concurrent humming or alphabet recitation) as compared with the single-task condition. Dual-task performance in MS patients correlated with performance on the Paced Auditory Serial Addition Test but not with other cognitive or clinical measures. The authors conclude that MS patients have a working memory deficit reflecting an impaired central executive system. Moreover, impairments in speed of information processing in MS patients are associated with this CES deficit.Memory dysfunction is the most common cognitive impairment observed in patients with multiple sclerosis (MS). A long-term memory deficit in these patients is well documented (Grafman, Rao, & Litvan, 1990), but most early studies of MS patients have concluded that short-term memory (STM) is intact. Support for this claim was derived from the observation of a normal digit span, as well as an intact recency effect on supraspan list learning, measures commonly used to assess STM (Caine, Bamford, Schiffer, Shoulson, & Levy, 1986;Rao, Hammeke, McQuillen, Khatri, & Lloyd, 1984). Although most studies continue to focus on the long-term memory impairments in MS patients , evidence is accumulating that STM deficits may also exist (Grigsby, Ayarbe, Kravcism, & Busenbark, 1994;Rao et al., 1993). However, the nature of these deficits remain unclear. The purpose of this study was to further investigate STM processing in MS patients.Several experimental tasks have been useful for identifying impairment in various aspects of STM in MS patients. One experimental measure, the Brown-Peterson task (Peterson & Peterson, 1959), measures consolidation of information in STM and the effect of interference on temporarily stored information. With this task, two groups of investigators (Beatty,

A home-based, family-inclusive service for veterans with TBI shows promise for improving meaningful outcomes and warrants further research and clinical application.

We studied 20 patients with Alzheimer's disease (AD) on a picture-naming task consisting of frequency-matched pairs of nouns and verbs that were homophonic and homographic (e.g., paint). Intragroup comparisons revealed that verb naming is significantly more difficult for patients with AD than noun naming. An error analysis demonstrated that patients with AD produce significantly more semantic and descriptive errors for verbs than nouns. We correlated verb naming and noun naming with measures of grammatical comprehension, lexical retrieval, and visuoperceptual processing, but there were no selective effects for verbs compared with nouns. Differences in the mental representation of concepts underlying verbs and nouns may account, in part, for the relative difficulty naming with verbs in AD.

Prior research on oppositional culture theory has generally focused on beliefs about the opportunity structure, or the "acting white" hypothesis, as an explanation for racial differences in school achievement. However, little attention has been given to the mechanism by which these beliefs affect achievement: schooling behaviors. The authors posit that students' prior level of skills may be an important omitted factor that biases the effect of schooling behaviors on achievement. Using data from the National Educational Longitudinal Survey, they found that whereas behaviors account for a larger proportion of Asian Americans' achievement advantage than do prior skills, prior skills explain half to nearly three-quarters of blacks' low achievement relative to that of whites and that dramatic declines in behavioral effects on achievement are observed after prior skills are controlled. Finally, the findings show that schooling behaviors are partially shaped by prior skills. They suggest that students with low skill levels prior to high school are likely to have poor achievement at the end of their high school careers, regardless of their schooling behaviors during high school. E xplaining racial differences in achievement continues to remain important to researchers, educators, and policy makers. One explanation for variation in achievement among minority groups during adolescence that has garnered much attention is Ogbu's (1978) oppositional culture theory (or resistance model). The theory posits that racial differences in school achievement occur because Asian Americans adopt pro-schooling behaviors and blacks adopt an oppositional culture that is characterized by counterproductive schooling behaviors (e.g., being disruptive in class, not doing homework) relative to whites (Fordham and Ogbu 1986). Thus, most studies on oppositional culture theory have focused on causes of racial differences in schooling behaviors-differences in perceptions about the opportunity structure. The behavioral response to these beliefs that has received the most attention is the "acting white" hypothesis, which proposes that good school performance is denigrated and labeled as acting white (see, e.g., Carter 1999Carter , 2005Cook and Ludwig 1997; Downey and Ainsworth-Darnell 2002;Farkas, Lleras, and Maczuga 2002;Fordham and Ogbu 1986;Tyson, Darity, and Castellino 2005). Sociology of EducationScholars who have assessed the resistance model have been more apt to use high school samples to evaluate racial variations in schooling orientation (e.g