Browsing by Subject "semanttinen muisti"
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(2016)Aim. The Verbal Fluency task is one of the naming tasks and it is generally used in clinical neuropsychology and logopedics to investigate for example word retrieval strategies and cognitive flexibility. Previous studies have shown that fluency skills increase strongly as the child grows. So far little is known about the quantitative fluency skills in children under six years of age. The aim of this study is to examine how Finnish-speaking healthy and typically developed children perform a semantic verbal fluency task. The task was divided into six different semantic categories. The aim of the study is to find out whether there is a difference between the performance of 3-year-old, 4-year-old and 5-year-old children, and whether gender has an effect on performance. In addition, the children's performance of the fluency task is compared to their performance in Boston Naming Test and Rapid Automatized Naming Test of pictures and colours to find out whether there is any congruence between the fluency task and the naming tests. Methods. The data was gathered in three different day-care centers in Helsinki from 30 children ages 3 to 5. The children were tested at the day-care centers and their performance was recorded with a dictation machine. Testing was divided into two sections of which the first included the naming tests and the second all the fluency categories. The data was analysed using mainly statistical methods. Results. The results show that age has a significant impact on fluency skills. The largest amounts of correct words were produced by the 5-year-old and the smallest amounts by the 3-year-old children. The older children also made fewer errors than the younger children. All children produced more nouns than verbs. The gender had no impact on the performance in the semantic fluency task, the Boston Naming Test or the Rapid Automatized Naming Test. The results also show some connections between fluency task and naming tests.
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(2015)Goals. Event schema or a script is a knowledge structure that describes appropriate sequences of events in a particular context. Script contains components which are vertically and horizontally connected to each other. A person may learn about scripts by personal experience, reading about them, hearing about them and seeing them done. Therefore, scripts contain information from episodic and semantic memory. Script research provides information about memory functions and the representation and the damage of the systems in different diseases affecting the neural systems, such as in Alzheimer's disease (AD). With increasing theoretical knowledge it is possible to develop differential diagnostic and rehabilitation methods for the patients in clinical work. The purpose of the study is to examine the script production of two different scripts in the mild and moderate stage of AD. Methods. The material of AD patients was gathered in 1994-1997 at the Department of Neurology (Memory Clinic) of the Helsinki University Central Hospital. The normal control subjects were from the pool of participants of the Helsinki Aging Brain Study which started in 1989. Ten people with mild AD (LiAT), ten with moderate AD (KoAT) and ten matched normal controls (NoI) were asked to produce as many script events as possible for two scripts: What do you do between waking up and having lunch? (The Morning script) representing episodic memory and What happens at a doctor's appointment? (The Doctor script) representing semantic memory. Sixty seconds were allotted for each script. The scripts were scored for the total number of events, the number of event repetitions, the informativeness of the contents and the plausibility and the centrality of the events. Statistical methods used were the Kruskal-Wallis one way variance analysis and the Mann-Whitney U –test post hoc –test. Results and conclusions. The results showed that the number of events for the both script types was statistically significantly lower for the people with AD compared to the control group. In addition, the ratio of informativeness was statistically significantly poorer for the people with AD. Depending on the script type, people with AD produced less plausible and central events than the control group. The results of the study are consistent in many aspects with the literature and the studies of AD suggesting that episodic memory is first impaired in AD, followed by the impairment of semantic memory.
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