• The Journal of the Korea Contents Association
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• v.11 no.9
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• pp.407-413
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• 2011

Distinguishing aphasia in stroke patients and observing the subtle linguistic characteristics associated with it primarily requires the use of instruments that provide reliable assessment results. Additionally, examiners should be fully aware of how to use those instruments. This study examined 46 stroke patients for aphasia and assessed the reliability of their diagnoses according to examiners whose medical fields were different from each other. Furthermore, a comparison was made between the reliability before training and that after training. To this end, 46 stroke patients were tested for aphasia and in terms of their speech disorder degree by 3 groups, each of which consisted of 12 professionals (3 SLP, 3 neurologist, and 3 nurse). In the result, a rating of 'acceptable' was given for speech intelligibility tasks and the voice quality of /ah-/ prolongation, and other sub-tests were marked as 'good-excellent' by the experts with different areas of medical expertise. For the tasks marked as 'acceptable', the subjects were video-trained for 3 weeks and the differences were compared before and after their training. Consequently, the differences in the examiners' ratings in the speech intelligibility tasks showed a significant decrease and the accuracy of their voice quality ratings showed a significant increase. In the result of research on the correlation between the accuracy of the sub-test ratings and the amount of clinic experience, speech therapists developed more accuracy in rating a picture description task and a speech intelligibility task as their experience accumulated. Meanwhile, doctors and nurses showed more accurate ratings in picture description tasks with greater clinical experience. The results of this study suggest that assessing the neurologic-communicative disorders of stroke patients requires ongoing training and experience, especially for speech disorders. It was also found that the rating reliability in this case could be improved by training.

• Speech Sciences
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• v.13 no.2
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• pp.7-18
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• 2006

An aphasia screening test can serve a main purpose of differentiating aphasics from non-aphasic patients in a quick as well as efficient manner. As a preliminary study for developing a standardized aphasia screening test for Korean patients, we constructed an aphasia screening test constituting items from the Paradise' Korean version-the Western Aphasia Battery(P K-WAB). All test items were analyzed in order to extract items with optimal item discrimination and adequate item difficulty indices. From the results, we were able to select some items from each subtest with optimal results of discriminant function analysis for aphasic and normal control groups. It is expected, thus, that information on the item analysis could be utilized in developing a Korean aphasia screening test.

• 재활복지
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• v.20 no.3
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• pp.45-65
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• 2016

The purposes of this study were to determine recent trends of domestic and international studies for primary progressive aphasia (PPA) patient group and to identify areas for future research. For these purposes, 171 studies on communication disorders of a PPA were chosen and sub-categories for research methods and contents were also analyzed. The sub-categories for research methods include types of research subject, research purpose and research field. As the research subject, 'agrammatism' was most frequently dealt with in both domestic and international studies; as the research purpose, 'characteristics study' accounted for the largest portion; and with respect to the research field, the international studies have covered evenly language, speech and others, while the domestic studies have handled only the field of 'language,' paying no attention to 'speech' and 'others.' In the international studies, apraxia of speech was added to the conventional three sub-types of PPA classification, so distinction between the four symptoms has been actively studied; however, patient cases were difficult to find in Korea, so the symptoms the patients had, although centering around communication disorders, have been rarely researched in the domestic studies. The results suggested that there have been extremely few studies related and their research field has lacked diversity. We suggested a direction for future research on communication disorders with PPA.

• Journal of Yeungnam Medical Science
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• v.27 no.1
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• pp.27-36
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• 2010

Purpose : The purpose of this study was to find out cognitive function of the patients with subjective memory complaint. Material and Methods : From March 1st 2005 to May 31st 2009, 155 normal individuals without any medical illness who visited Yeungnam University Hospital to undergo medical checkup with neurocognitive test was enrolled, and checked by using Cognitive Assessment & Reference Diagnostic System. Results : 107 of the patients had normal cognitive function, 21 patients (about 15%) were diagnosed with dementia, and 10 patients (about 7%) were diagnosed with considerable psychiatric illness, such as depression, anxiety disorder, adjustment disorder. In amnesia, agnosia, aphasia, attention, calculation, dysexecution, Dementia group and Psychiatric illness group has worse score than Normal individuals group. But, in apraxia, Dementia group has worse score than Psychiatric illness group and Normal individual group. Conclusion : Because the patients with subjective memory complaint can be diagnosed as any psychiatric illness as well as dementia, sensitive screening test and early psychiatric approach is needed.