Indices of interjudge reliability and inter- and intrajudge agreement were calculated from the ratings made by 15 experienced speech clinicians on five deviant speech dimensions with respect to 15 speakers with ataxic dysarthria. Speakers were chosen to cover a wide range of speech intelligibility (16–97%) as measured by the sentence intelligibility transcriptions of the Assessment of Intelligibility of Dysarthric Speech (Yorkston & Beukelman, 1981). Intraclass correlation coefficients derived from each judge on two occasions were above .6 for imprecise consonants, excess and equal stress, and harsh voice, but below .6 for distorted vowels and below .5 for irregular articulatory breakdown. The last dimension also had the lowest percent agreement for the interjudge and intrajudge comparisons. Poor speech dimension definition seems to be the most likely source of error on irregular articulatory breakdown. Judges agreed equally well in rating dysarthric speech across the range from low to high intelligibility.

This article explores the relationship between the neologisms and perseverative errors produced by KVH, a man with severe neologistic jargon aphasia. Detailed examination of KVH's level of language processing breakdown revealed mild difficulties with phonological encoding and severe difficulties accessing the lexical form of the word. Many of KVH's neologisms contained phonemes perseverated from previous neologisms, suggesting an integral relationship between the production of neologisms and the perseveration of phonemes. Furthermore, KVH's patterns of whole word (total)and phonological (blended) perseverations reflected his proposed underlying language processing deficits, consistent with recent literature on perseveration (e.g.,Cohen and Dehaene, 1998). However, the simple binary distinction oftotalandblendedperseveration is proposed to be somewhat limited for understanding the underlying nature of KVH's complex neologistic errors. Possible explanations regarding the mechanisms underlying the production of KVH's neologistic and perseverative errors also are discussed.

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There exist few clinical assessments for limb apraxia, a disorder of learned, purposeful action, that enable clinicians to distinguish pathological from normal variance in limb praxis performance. We describe a theoretically motivated, comprehensive assessment battery for limb apraxia and present control comparison scores for 16 older healthy normal individuals on subtests designed to distinguish the integrity of components of the praxis system.

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