Mothers tend to jiggle their newborn infants at the breast, or jiggle the bottle, during pauses in the newborn's sucking. When observing mothers' natural and unconstrained feeding of their infants at ages 2 weeks and 8 weeks, the cessation of jiggling proved to be a better elicitor of a resumption of sucking than the jiggling itself. An experiment in which bottles were jiggled according to a predetermined, controlled schedule showed that this phenomenon is due to a contingent response on the part of the infant rather than mothers'anticipation of the burst. Thus the feeding can appear to be an exchange of turns, in which the infant's pause is answered by the mother's jiggling and the end of jiggling is answered by the next burst. Mothers shorten their jiggling over the first 6 weeks. Infants' pauses also grow shorter. Finally such behavioral characteristics are reported to be seen in rudimentary forms in vocal behavior of nonhuman primates.

View full abstract

[in Japanese]

View full abstract

[in Japanese]

View full abstract

    Electrical stimulation mapping studies in 2 patients with brain tumor showed the following functional localization in the frontal language area ; 1) Stimulation of the inferior part of the left precentral gyrus produced the same articulatory disturbance as anarthria (phonetic disintegration) developed by Broca's aphasics due to cerbro-vascular accidents. At some electrodes where anarthria occurred, we also demonstrated mild writing impairment consisting of literal paragraphia in Kana (phonogram) and difficulty in retrieving Kanji (ideogram) characters. 2 ) Stimulation of Broca's arera did not elicit anarthria but word finding difficulty with some phonemic cue effects or verbal paraphasias. At some electrodes in Broca's area, paragraphia in Kanji was also observed. 3 ) Stimulation of the foot of the second frontal gyrus, so called Exner's writing center, did not produce writing disturbance but word finding difficulty or verbal praraphasias.

View full abstract

    Effectiveness of tactile and auditory-verbal cues was compared from the data of 60 aphasics in object naming test of Japanese version of the Western Aphasia Battery. The subjects consisted of 18 Broca aphasics,18 Wernicke aphasics,12 anomics, 4 global aphasics, 3 other types of aphasics, and 5 unclassificable aphasics. All received tactile and auditory-verbal cues in their naming task. Each one of 20 ordinary objects was presented to the subject for visual naming. When he named it correctly, next object was presented to him. When he failed in visual naming, he was allowed to touch the object. When he could name it by tactile cuing, next object was presented for visual naming. When he failed by touch, he was told first sound of the target word, or its first half meaningful unit when it was a composite word. The latter cue was called auditory-verbal cue. Each cue was judged as effective when the subject could name more than 3 words correctly among those he could not name before presenting the cue. Results were as follows. 1 ) Tactile cue was effective in 3 out of 60 subjects. However, in 2 of them, auditory-verbal cue was also effective. Therefore, only one subject demonstrated that tactile cue was a sole effective cue to prompt his naming performance. 2 ) Auditory-verbal cue was effective in 41 out of 60 subjects, in 2 of which tactile cue was effective. Therefore,39 subjects demonstrated that auditory-verbal cue was a sole effective cue to prompt their naming performances. 3 ) The subjects who demonstrated auditory-verbal cue as effective showed strong correlation between their performances of visual naming and those of auditory-verbal naming. 4 ) There were more cases who had lesions in temporal and temporo-parietal lobes among those who did not demonstrate auditory-verbal cue as effective than among those who demonstrated it as effective.

View full abstract