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Abstract:
Klinefelter's Syndrome (KS) is a sex chromosome abnormality
associated with male infertility and mild cognitive deficits.
Individuals with KS have impairments in verbal ability (in
comprehension of spoken input, reading and spelling), as well as
deficits in executive function. The current study tested whether KS
patients show impairments in abilities associated with frontal lobe
function such as working memory and relational reasoning. KS
patients exhibited a deficit in a transitive inference task in
which subjects ordered a set of names based on a list of
propositions about the relative heights of the people named (e.g.,
Abe is taller than Bill, Bill is taller than Charles.) This deficit
was present even for items in which the propositions were given in
order, so a chaining strategy could be used. In contrast, the
patients performed as well as controls on a nonverbal test of
inductive reasoning based on Raven's Progressive Matrices. These
results suggest that KS patients have intact nonverbal reasoning
abilities, but that a difficulty in encoding verbal information
into working memory may underlie their executive and linguistic
impairments.
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