49 Homophone confusion in Alzheimer’s patients. A homophone is a word whose pronunciation is the same as that of another word having a different meaning and spelling

(e.g., nun and none, doe and dough, etc.). Brain and Language (Apr. 1995) reported on a study of homophone spelling in patients with Alzheimer’s disease. Twenty Alzheimer’s patients were asked to spell 24 homophone pairs given in random order. Then the number of homophone confusions (e.g., spelling doe given the context, bake bread dough ) was recorded for each patient. One year later, the same test was given to the same patients.

The data for the study are provided in the next table and saved in the HOMOPHONE file. The researchers posed the following question: “Do Alzheimer’s patients show a significant increase in mean homophone confusion errors over time?” Perform an analysis of the data to answer the researchers’ question. What assumptions are necessary for the procedure used to be valid? Are they satisfied?

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Patient Time 1 Time 2 12345678201 5 1 0 530 0 1 2 1 1 9 0 5 7 12 0 13 3 14 5 15 7 16 10 16 7898 17 5 18 6 9 11 62080308268 9 10 9 12 5 19 20 Based on Neils, J., Roeltgen, D. P., and Constantinidou, F. "Decline in homophone spelling associated with loss of semantic influence on spelling in Alzheimer's disease." Brain and Language, Vol. 49, No. 1, PP. 27-49.