@article{FyndanisArfaniVarlokostaetal.2018, author = {Fyndanis, Valantis and Arfani, Dimitra and Varlokosta, Spyridoula and Burgio, Francesca and Maculan, Anna and Miceli, Gabriele and Arcara, Giorgio and Palla, Fabio and Cagnin, Annachiara and Papageorgiou, Sokratis G. and Semenza, Carlo}, title = {Morphosyntactic production in Greek- and Italian-speaking individuals with probable Alzheimer's disease}, series = {Aphasiology : an international, interdisciplinary journal}, volume = {32}, journal = {Aphasiology : an international, interdisciplinary journal}, number = {1}, publisher = {Routledge, Taylor \& Francis Group}, address = {Abingdon}, issn = {0268-7038}, doi = {10.1080/02687038.2017.1358352}, pages = {61 -- 87}, year = {2018}, abstract = {Background: In probable Alzheimer's disease (AD), different memory systems, executive functioning, visuospatial recognition, and language are impaired. Regarding the latter, only a few studies have investigated morphosyntactic production thus far. Aims: This study, which is a follow-up on Fyndanis, V., Manouilidou, C., Koufou, E., Karampekios, S., and Tsapakis, E. M. (2013). Agrammatic patterns in Alzheimer's disease: Evidence from tense, agreement, and aspect. Aphasiology, 27, 178-200. doi:10.1080/02687038.2012.705814, investigates whether verb-related morphosyntactic production is (selectively) impaired in AD focusing on two highly inflected languages, Greek and Italian. The morphosyntactic phenomena explored are subject-verb Agreement, Tense/Time Reference, and Mood. Focusing on these phenomena allows us to investigate if recent hypotheses, originally developed in aphasia research, can also capture results related to AD. We tested the hypotheses discussed in Fyndanis, V., Manouilidou, C., Koufou, E., Karampekios, S., and Tsapakis, E. M. (2013). Agrammatic patterns in Alzheimer's disease: Evidence from tense, agreement, and aspect. Aphasiology, 27, 178-200. doi:10.1080/02687038.2012.705814, that is, the Interpretable Features' Impairment Hypothesis (IFIH) (e.g., Fyndanis, V., Varlokosta, S., \& Tsapkini, K. 2012. Agrammatic production: Interpretable features and selective impairment in verb inflection. Lingua, 122, 1134-1147. doi:10.1016/j.lingua.2012.05.004) and the PAst DIscourse LInking Hypothesis (PADILIH; Bastiaanse, R., Bamyaci, E., Hsu, C., Lee, J., Yarbay Duman, T., \& Thompson, C. K. 2011. Time reference in agrammatic aphasia: A cross-linguistic study. Journal of Neurolinguistics, 24, 652-673. doi:10.1016/j.jneuroling.2011.07.001). Methods \& Procedures: Two sentence completion tasks testing the production of subject-verb Agreement, Tense/Time Reference, and Mood were administered to 16 Greek-speaking and 10 Italian-speaking individuals with mild-to-moderate AD, as well as to 16 Greek-speaking and 11 Italian-speaking neurologically intact individuals who were matched with the participants with AD on age and education. Mixed-effects models were fitted to the data. Outcomes \& Results: At the group level, both the Greek and Italian participants with AD performed worse than the controls. Both AD groups revealed selective patterns of morphosyntactic production (Greek: Agreement/Mood > Time Reference; Italian: Agreement > Time Reference > Mood). Past Reference and Future Reference did not dissociate in either of the two AD groups. Nevertheless, in all four participants with AD who showed dissociations, Past Reference was more impaired than Future Reference. Conclusions: The results indicate that the production of verb-related morphosyntactic categories can be impaired in mild-to-moderate AD. The different patterns observed in the two languages are partly attributable to the different way these languages encode Mood. The group results (of both the Greek-and Italian-speaking participants with AD) do not lend support to the PADILIH, whereas only the results of the Italian AD group are fully consistent with the IFIH. However, the individual data are consistent with the PADILIH, and the IFIH is informed by the present data and modified accordingly so that it can capture cross-linguistic patterns of morphosyntactic impairment.}, language = {en} } @article{FyndanisArcaraCapassoetal.2018, author = {Fyndanis, Valantis and Arcara, Giorgio and Capasso, Rita and Christidou, Paraskevi and De Pellegrin, Serena and Gandolfi, Marialuisa and Messinis, Lambros and Panagea, Evgenia and Papathanasopoulos, Panagiotis and Smania, Nicola and Semenza, Carlo and Miceli, Gabriele}, title = {Time reference in nonfluent and fluent aphasia}, series = {Clinical linguistics \& phonetics}, volume = {32}, journal = {Clinical linguistics \& phonetics}, number = {9}, publisher = {Taylor \& Francis Group}, address = {Philadelphia}, issn = {0269-9206}, doi = {10.1080/02699206.2018.1445291}, pages = {823 -- 843}, year = {2018}, abstract = {Recent studies by Bastiaanse and colleagues found that time reference is selectively impaired in people with nonfluent agrammatic aphasia, with reference to the past being more difficult to process than reference to the present or to the future. To account for this dissociation, they formulated the PAst DIscourse LInking Hypothesis (PADILIH), which posits that past reference is more demanding than present/future reference because it involves discourse linking. There is some evidence that this hypothesis can be applied to people with fluent aphasia as well. However, the existing evidence for the PADILIH is contradictory, and most of it has been provided by employing a test that predominantly taps retrieval processes, leaving largely unexplored the underlying ability to encode time reference-related prephonological features. Within a cross-linguistic approach, this study tests the PADILIH by means of a sentence completion task that 'equally' taps encoding and retrieval abilities. This study also investigates if the PADILIH's scope can be extended to fluent aphasia. Greek- and Italian-speaking individuals with aphasia participated in the study. The Greek group consisted of both individuals with nonfluent agrammatic aphasia and individuals with fluent aphasia, who also presented signs of agrammatism. The Italian group consisted of individuals with agrammatic nonfluent aphasia only. The two Greek subgroups performed similarly. Neither language group of participants with aphasia exhibited a pattern of performance consistent with the predictions of the PADILIH. However, a double dissociation observed within the Greek group suggests a hypothesis that may reconcile the present results with the PADILIH.}, language = {en} } @article{CiaccioBurchertSemenza2020, author = {Ciaccio, Laura Anna and Burchert, Frank and Semenza, Carlo}, title = {Derivational morphology in agrammatic aphasia}, series = {Frontiers in Psychology}, volume = {11}, journal = {Frontiers in Psychology}, publisher = {Frontiers Research Foundation}, address = {Lausanne}, issn = {1664-1078}, doi = {10.3389/fpsyg.2020.01070}, pages = {15}, year = {2020}, abstract = {Although a relatively large number of studies on acquired language impairments have tested the case of derivational morphology, none of these have specifically investigated whether there are differences in how prefixed and suffixed derived words are impaired. Based on linguistic and psycholinguistic considerations on prefixed and suffixed derived words, differences in how these two types of derivations are processed, and consequently impaired, are predicted. In the present study, we investigated the errors produced in reading aloud simple, prefixed, and suffixed words by three German individuals with agrammatic aphasia (NN, LG, SA). We found that, while NN and LG produced similar numbers of errors with prefixed and suffixed words, SA showed a selective impairment for prefixed words. Furthermore, NN and SA produced more errors specifically involving the affix with prefixed words than with suffixed words. We discuss our findings in terms of relative position of stem and affix in prefixed and suffixed words, as well as in terms of specific properties of prefixes and suffixes.}, language = {en} }