TY - JOUR A1 - De Bleser, Ria T1 - Wernicke's 1903 case pure agraphia : an enigma for classical models of written language processing Y1 - 1996 ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Sidiropoulos, Kyriakos A1 - De Bleser, Ria A1 - Ablinger, Irene A1 - Ackermann, Hermann T1 - The relationship between verbal and nonverbal auditory signal processing in conduction aphasia: behavioral and anatomical evidence for common decoding mechanisms JF - Neurocase : the neural basis of cognition N2 - The processing of nonverbal auditory stimuli has not yet been sufficiently investigated in patients with aphasia. On the basis of a duration discrimination task, we examined whether patients with left-sided cerebrovascular lesions were able to perceive time differences in the scale of approximately 150ms. Further linguistic and memory-related tasks were used to characterize more exactly the relationships in the performances between auditory nonverbal task and selective linguistic or mnemonic disturbances. All examined conduction aphasics showed increased thresholds in the duration discrimination task. The low thresholds on this task were in a strong correlative relation to the reduced performances in repetition and working memory task. This was interpreted as an indication of a pronounced disturbance in integrating auditory verbal information into a long-term window (sampling disturbance) resulting in an additional load of working memory. In order to determine the lesion topography of patients with sampling disturbances, the anatomical and psychophysical data were correlated on the basis of a voxelwise statistical approach. It was found that tissue damage extending through the insula, the posterior superior temporal gyrus, and the supramarginal gyrus causes impairments in sequencing of time-sensitive information. KW - brain lesions KW - conduction aphasia KW - processing of auditory nonverbal stimuli KW - speech perception KW - speech pathology KW - lesion studies Y1 - 2015 U6 - https://doi.org/10.1080/13554794.2014.902471 SN - 1355-4794 SN - 1465-3656 VL - 21 IS - 3 SP - 377 EP - 393 PB - Routledge, Taylor & Francis Group CY - Abingdon ER - TY - JOUR A1 - De Bleser, Ria A1 - Doupont, Patrick A1 - Postler, Jenny A1 - Bormans, Guy A1 - Speelman, Dirk A1 - Mortelmanns, Luc A1 - Debrock, Mark T1 - The organisation of the bilingual lexicon : a PET study Y1 - 2003 ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Burchert, Frank A1 - Swoboda-Moll, Maria A1 - De Bleser, Ria T1 - The left periphery in agrammatic clausal representations : evidence from German N2 - Recently, neurolinguistic explanations informed by linguistic theory have been proposed to account for spontaneous and elicited agrammatic speech production. These are either formulated in terms of impaired representations or they refer to impaired processing. Both have in common that they assume severe disorders of question production due to vulnerability of the left periphery of sentence structures in the representational account, of verb movement in the processing account. We report the results of question elicitation and spontaneous speech analysis in eight chronic German agrammatic speakers. The results indicate that there is not one homogeneous agrammatic pattern, but that the data reveal double dissociations which cannot be accounted for by the unitary explanations of agrammatism which are presently available. An alternative explanation will be provided which-in contrast to the representational account not only refers to global hierarchically organized nodes but relies on linguistic differences within these nodes. The assumption that they can be differentially affected in agrammatism can account for the observed patterns. (c) 2005 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved Y1 - 2005 ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Tsegaye, Mulugeta Tarekegne A1 - De Bleser, Ria A1 - Iribarren, Carolina T1 - The effect of literacy on oral language processing implications for aphasia tests JF - Clinical linguistics & phonetics N2 - Most studies investigating the impact of literacy on oral language processing have shown that literacy provides phonological awareness skills in the processing of oral language. The implications of these results on aphasia tests could be significant and pose questions on the adequacy of such tools for testing non-literate individuals. Aiming at examining the impact of literacy on oral language processing and its implication on aphasia tests, this study tested 12 non-literate and 12 literate individuals with a modified Amharic version of the Bilingual Aphasia Test (Paradis and Amberber, 1991, Bilingual Aphasia Test. Amharic version. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum.). The problems of phonological awareness skills in oral language processing in non-literates are substantiated. In addition, compared with literate participants, non-literate individuals demonstrated difficulties in the word/sentence-picture matching tasks. This study has also revealed that the Amharic version of the Bilingual Aphasia Test may be viable for testing Amharic-speaking non-literate individuals with aphasia when modifications are incorporated. KW - aphasia KW - Bilingual Aphasia Test KW - literacy KW - Amharic KW - phonological awareness KW - word/sentence-picture matching Y1 - 2011 U6 - https://doi.org/10.3109/02699206.2011.567348 SN - 0269-9206 VL - 25 IS - 6-7 SP - 628 EP - 639 PB - Taylor & Francis Group CY - London ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Burchert, Frank A1 - Swoboda-Moll, Maria A1 - De Bleser, Ria T1 - Tense and agreement in clausal representations : Evidence from German agrammatic aphasia Y1 - 2004 ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Burchert, Frank A1 - Swoboda-Moll, Maria A1 - De Bleser, Ria T1 - Tense and Agreement dissociations in German agrammatic speakers : Underspecification vs. hierarchy N2 - The aim of the present paper was to investigate whether German agrammatic production data are compatible with the Tree-Pruning-Hypothesis (TPH; Friedmann & Grodzinsky, 1997). The theory predicts unidirectional patterns of dissociation in agrammatic production data with respect to Tense and Agreement. However, there was evidence of a double dissociation between Tense and Agreement in our data. The presence of a bidirectional dissociation is incompatible with any theory which assumes a hierarchical order between these categories such as the TPH or other versions thereof (such as Lee's, 2003 top-down hypothesis). It will be argued that the data can better be accounted for by relying on newer linguistic theories such as the Minimalist Program (MP, Chomsky, 2000), which does not assume a hierarchical order between independent syntactic Tense and Agreement nodes but treats them as different features (semantically interpretable vs. uninterpretable) under a single node. (c) 2005 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved Y1 - 2005 ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Hanne, Sandra A1 - Burchert, Frank A1 - De Bleser, Ria A1 - Vasishth, Shravan T1 - Sentence comprehension and morphological cues in aphasia: What eye-tracking reveals about integration and prediction JF - Journal of neurolinguistics : an international journal for the study of brain function in language behavior and experience N2 - Comprehension of non-canonical sentences can be difficult for individuals with aphasia (IWA). It is still unclear to which extent morphological cues like case marking or verb inflection may influence IWA's performance or even help to override deficits in sentence comprehension. Until now, studies have mainly used offline methods to draw inferences about syntactic deficits and, so far, only a few studies have looked at online syntactic processing in aphasia. We investigated sentence processing in German-speaking IWA by combining an offline (sentence-picture matching) and an online (eye-tracking in the visual-world paradigm) method. Our goal was to determine whether IWA are capable of using inflectional morphology (number-agreement markers on verbs and case markers in noun phrases) as a cue to sentence interpretation. We report results of two visual-world experiments using German reversible SVO and OVS sentences. In each study, there were eight IWA and 20 age-matched controls. Experiment 1 targeted the role of unambiguous case morphology, while Experiment 2 looked at processing of number-agreement cues at the verb in caseambiguous sentences. IWA showed deficits in using both types of morphological markers as a cue to non-canonical sentence interpretation and the results indicate that in aphasia, processing of case-marking cues is more vulnerable as compared to verbagreement morphology. We ascribe this finding to the higher cue reliability of agreement cues, which renders them more resistant against impairments in aphasia. However, the online data revealed that IWA are in principle capable of successfully computing morphological cues, but the integration of morphological information is delayed as compared to age-matched controls. Furthermore, we found striking differences between controls and IWA regarding subject-before-object parsing predictions. While in case-unambiguous sentences IWA showed evidence for early subjectbefore-object parsing commitments, they exhibited no straightforward subject-first prediction in case-ambiguous sentences, although controls did so for ambiguous structures. IWA delayed their parsing decisions in case-ambiguous sentences until unambiguous morphological information, such as a subject-verbnumber-agreement cue, was available. We attribute the results for IWA to deficits in predictive processes based on morphosyntactic cues during sentence comprehension. The results indicate that IWA adopt a wait-and-see strategy and initiate prediction of upcoming syntactic structure only when unambiguous case or agreement cues are available. (C) 2015 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. KW - Aphasia KW - Sentence comprehension deficits KW - Prediction KW - Eye-tracking KW - Online morpho-syntactic processing KW - Morphological cues Y1 - 2015 U6 - https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jneuroling.2014.12.003 SN - 0911-6044 VL - 34 SP - 83 EP - 111 PB - Elsevier CY - Oxford ER - TY - JOUR A1 - De Bleser, Ria A1 - Reul, J. A1 - Kotlarek, F. A1 - Faiss, C. A1 - Schwarz, M. R. T1 - Rapid recovery of aphasia and deep dyslexia after extensive left-hemisphere damage in childhood Y1 - 1994 ER - TY - JOUR A1 - De Bleser, Ria A1 - Faiss, J. A1 - Schwarz, M. R. T1 - Rapid recovery of aphasia and deep dyslexia after cerebrovascular left-hemisphere damage in childhood Y1 - 1996 ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Pantel, J. A1 - De Bleser, Ria A1 - Schwarz, M. R. A1 - Weiller, C. T1 - Rapid progressive from of posterior cerebral dysfunction with apperceptive agnosia in a 34-year-old man : another case of Heidenhain's syndrome? Y1 - 1995 ER - TY - JOUR A1 - De Bleser, Ria A1 - Schwarz, Wolfgang A1 - Burchert, Frank T1 - Quantitative neurosyntactic analyses : the final word? Y1 - 2006 UR - http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/journal/0093934X U6 - https://doi.org/10.1016/j.bandl.2005.06.010 SN - 0093-934X ER - TY - JOUR A1 - De Bleser, Ria A1 - Weis, J. A1 - Schwarz, M. R. T1 - Primary progressive aphasia : a 14-year-follow-up study Y1 - 1996 ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Kadyamusuma, McLoddy R. A1 - De Bleser, Ria A1 - Mayer, Jörg T1 - Perceptual discrimination of Shona lexical tones and low-pass filtered speech by left and right hemisphere damaged patients JF - Aphasiology : an international, interdisciplinary journal N2 - Background: While the role of the right hemisphere (RH) in prosodic processing is prominent, research on the perception of lexical tones has shown that left hemisphere damaged (LHD) patients are more impaired than right hemisphere damaged (RHD) patients. Dichotic listening and imaging studies with healthy speakers of tone languages demonstrate that at least at the phonemic and lexical level, prosody is processed in the left hemisphere (LH) when the variations in pitch are phonemically distinctive. There is no report available yet on the perceptual discrimination of a Bantu language in patients after unilateral brain damage. Aims: We addressed the question of how well Shona aphasic patients and right hemisphere damaged patients perceive pitch contrasts in Shona lexical words and also in their homologous low-pass filtered counterparts. We also sought to discover the validity of the current hypotheses on hemispheric lateralisation particularly the hypothesis on hemispheric lateralisation based on language function to account for the Shona data. Methods Procedures: A total of 7 LHD and 7 RHD patients and 14 healthy controls participated in two discrimination tasks that examined perception of lexical tone in (a) bisyllabic Shona words and (b) low-pass filtered stimuli. In both tasks the participants were tasked with judging the pitch as the same or different in 120 bisyllabic words and 120 low-pass filtered stimuli. Outcomes Results: The results demonstrated that the tonal discrimination of the LHD group was more reduced in comparison to the RHD group and control participants. However, the performance of the RHD patients was not error free relative to the control participants, although significantly better than the LHD patients in both tasks. Conclusions: At least for the phonemic and lexical levels, brain damage to the dominant hemisphere results in lexical tone impairment for LHD patients, and cognitive load processing results in a subdued but good performance for RHD patients. The LH is therefore dominant for processing tone when it is lexically distinctive. KW - Brain damage KW - Shona KW - Lexical tones KW - Perception KW - Low-pass filtered stimuli KW - Pitch discrimination Y1 - 2011 U6 - https://doi.org/10.1080/02687038.2010.540336 SN - 0268-7038 VL - 25 IS - 5 SP - 576 EP - 592 PB - Wiley CY - Hove ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Burchert, Frank A1 - De Bleser, Ria T1 - Passives in agrammatic sentence comprehension : a German Study N2 - Background: A large number of studies examining agrammatic comprehension of canonical and non-canonical sentences in Broca's aphasia have focused on passives and results have been interpreted in theoretical frameworks such as the trace deletion hypothesis (TDH: Grodzinsky, 1995a). However, there are a number of unresolved issues associated with passives. The linguistic analysis of passive structures in different languages has remained controversial as well as the empirical neurolinguistic basis of agrammatic passive comprehension. In addition, a variety of morphological and semantic questions have been raised with respect to the implicit argument in short passives and the ordering of thematic roles reflected by different positions of the by-phrase in long passives. Aims: The major aims of the present study were to re-examine the analyses of passives with and without traces, the role of an implicit argument in short passives, and the influence of the position of the by-phrase on agrammatic sentence comprehension. Methods & Procedures: A binary picture-sentence matching task was administered to six non-fluent German agrammatic speakers. Various types of passives including long, short, and topicalised passives were tested. Additionally, comprehension of active SVO sentences was assessed in a separate but similar session. Only those patients whose comprehension on active sentences was above chance were included. Outcomes & Results: As a group, the six subjects performed above chance over all passive types. If only long canonical passives are considered, as is done in most studies, five subjects showed a pattern compatible with the TDH. However, the picture was modified if other passive constructions were taken into account, in which case only three of the six subjects showed TDH conformity. Conclusions: There is no unique pattern of agrammatic passive comprehension and only half of the agrammatic subjects conformed to the trace deletion hypothesis. Given the results on long canonical and topicalised passives, our data support linguistic analyses that assume a trace- based derivation of passives. Furthermore, the results are in line with linguistic analyses adopting an implicit argument in short passives. Since comprehension of topicalised passives with a canonical order of theta-roles was not better than that of long passives without a canonical order, the agrammatic problem with passives does not seem to hinge on semantics Y1 - 2004 ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Rausch, P. A1 - Burchert, Frank A1 - De Bleser, Ria T1 - Parallels in the breakdown of CP and DP-internal movement processes in agrammatism : a preliminary case study Y1 - 2005 SN - 0093-934X ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Springer, Lydia A1 - Burk, F. A1 - De Bleser, Ria A1 - Stadie, Nicole T1 - Oral and written naming in a multilingual aphasic patient Y1 - 1995 ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Postler, Jenny A1 - De Bleser, Ria A1 - Cholewa, Jürgen A1 - Glauche, V. A1 - Hamzei, F. A1 - Weiller, C. T1 - Neuroimaging the semantic system (s) Y1 - 2003 ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Wartenburger, Isabell A1 - Heekeren, Hauke R. A1 - Burchert, Frank A1 - Heinemann, Steffi A1 - De Bleser, Ria A1 - Villringer, Arno T1 - Neural correlates of syntactic transformations N2 - Many agrammatic aphasics have a specific syntactic comprehension deficit involving processing syntactic transformations. It has been proposed that this deficit is due to a dysfunction of Broca's area, an area that is thought to be critical for comprehension of complex transformed sentences. The goal of this study was to investigate the role of Broca's area in processing canonical and non-canonical sentences in healthy subjects. The sentences were presented auditorily and were controlled for task difficulty. Subjects were asked to judge the grammaticality of the sentences while their brain activity was monitored using event-related functional magnetic resonance imaging. Processing both kinds of sentences resulted in activation of language-related brain regions. Comparison of non-canonical and canonical sentences showed greater activation in bilateral temporal regions; a greater activation of Broca's area in processing antecedent-gap relations was not found. Moreover, the posterior part of Broca's area was conjointly activated by both sentence conditions. Broca's area is thus involved in general syntactic processing as required by grammaticality judgments and does not seem to have a specific role in processing syntactic transformations. (C) 2004 Wiley-Liss, Inc Y1 - 2004 UR - http://www3.interscience.wiley.com/journal/38751/home SN - 1065-9471 ER - TY - JOUR A1 - De Bleser, Ria A1 - Luzzatti, C. T1 - Morphological processing in Italian agrammatic speakers : syntactic implementation of inflectional morphology Y1 - 1994 ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Luzzatti, C. A1 - De Bleser, Ria T1 - Morphological processing in Italian agrammatic speakers : eight experiments in lexical morphology Y1 - 1996 ER - TY - JOUR A1 - De Bleser, Ria T1 - Modality-specific anomias Y1 - 1997 ER - TY - JOUR A1 - De Bleser, Ria A1 - Bayer, Josef A1 - Luzzatti, Claudio T1 - Linguistic theory and morphosyntactic impairments in German and Italian aphasics Y1 - 1996 ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Kadyamusuma, McLoddy R. A1 - De Bleser, Ria A1 - Mayer, Jörg T1 - Lexical tone disruption in Shona after brain damage JF - Aphasiology : an international, interdisciplinary journal N2 - Background: The issue of production and perception of lexical tone in patients with brain lesions has been investigated mainly through East Asian languages and Norwegian. The present study investigated the lateralisation of lexical tone in Shona, a Bantu language. Van Lancker (1980) proposed a continuum scale of the levels of functional pitch in the speech signal. According to the functional lateralisation account (FLH), the left hemisphere (LH) is associated with highly structured pitch contrasts, such as phonological tone, whereas the right hemisphere (RH) is specialised for the least structured pitch functions cueing emotional and personal information. The extant data show that the ability to produce and identify lexical tone is frequently more impaired as a result of lesions to the LH than RH lesions. Aims: The present investigation focused on the lateralisation of lexical tone in Shona speakers. The study sought to validate if the scale of hemispheric lateralisation as proposed by Van Lancker (1980) is also valid for Shona, a Bantu language. Methods & Procedures: We examined five LH damaged (LHD) patients and five RH (RHD) damaged patients using a confrontational picture-naming task and a lexical tone identification task of Shona lexical tone. The first experiment investigated the ability of LHD patients and RHD patients to identify Shona lexical tone in 60 disyllabic minimal pairs. The second experiment examined the ability of Shona brain-damaged patients to produce lexical tone using a confrontational picture-naming task with 120 lexical items. Outcomes & Results: We observed a dissociation in the performance of both the LHD and RHD patients in the two tasks. Both groups were impaired in the tone identification task relative to the non-brain-damaged controls. However, RHD patients performed significantly better than the LHD patients in the tone identification task. On the other hand, both LHD and RHD groups were equally impaired in the tone production task in comparison to the controls. Conclusions: The discrepancy in the production and perception of Shona lexical tone for this group of brain-damaged patients shows that, although the two modes are related, they do not always get disrupted at the same level after brain damage. The results from the tone identification task suggest to a certain extent that the FLH is also valid for Shona. In order to account for all the data there is need to carefully consider alternative accounts like the acoustic cue hypothesis (Van Lancker & Sidtis, 1992). KW - Brain-damaged patients KW - Lexical tone KW - Shona KW - Aphasia KW - Production KW - Identification Y1 - 2011 U6 - https://doi.org/10.1080/02687038.2011.590966 SN - 0268-7038 VL - 25 IS - 10 SP - 1239 EP - 1260 PB - Wiley CY - Hove ER - TY - JOUR A1 - De Bleser, Ria A1 - Cholewa, Jürgen A1 - Stadie, Nicole A1 - Tabatabaie, Sia T1 - LeMo, an expert system for single case assessment of word processing impairments in aphasic patients Y1 - 1997 ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Stadie, Nicole A1 - Tabatabaie, Sia A1 - De Bleser, Ria A1 - Cholewa, Jürgen T1 - LeMo - an expert-system for the assessment of lexical and morphological impairments in aphasia Y1 - 1995 ER - TY - JOUR A1 - De Bleser, Ria T1 - Information processing models in cognitive psychology and neuropsychology Y1 - 1994 ER - TY - JOUR A1 - De Bleser, Ria A1 - Davidoff, J. T1 - Impaired picture-recognition with preserved object naming and reading Y1 - 1995 ER - TY - JOUR A1 - De Bleser, Ria T1 - History of aphasia : negative optic aphasia ; how much semantics does a name need? ; Wolff's re- examination of Voit N2 - Background: A prominent model of semantic processing in modern cognitive psychology proposes that semantic memory originates in everyday life experience with concrete objects such as plants, animals, and tools (Martin Chao, 2001). When the meaning of a concrete content word is being acquired, the learner is confronted with stimuli of various modalities related to the word's meaning. This comes to be stored as sensory knowledge about the object. It is further postulated that there is a conceptual domain remote from the mechanisms of perception, which is often referred to as functional knowledge or verbal semantics. There is a large body of neuropsychological literature trying to establish how much sensory and functional semantics is needed to access a name, and whether the relative contribution of these types of knowledge is the same for all categories of objects. Another controversial issue is whether naming requires access to semantic knowledge, or whether object names can be accessed directly from vision without the intervention of semantics, as is generally accepted for written word naming. Some support for this assumption seems to come from cases of so-called non-optic aphasia, a condition in which patients can name from visual presentation only but not from any other modality of presentation such as auditory, verbal, tactile, etc. In optic aphasia, a condition far better established, naming is possible from all modalities except vision. Aims: The aim of this paper is to draw attention to the first case description of non-optic or negative optic aphasia described by Wolff (1897, 1904). Methods Procedures: The case describes the results of a re-examination of Voit, who was seen by several neurologists in the course of a decade in classical aphasiology. The patient demonstrated anomia in oral but not in written naming of objects in view. Wolff's examination involves extensive testing of semantic processing in several modalities, especially with respect to the status of functional and sensory semantic features Outcomes Results: The re-examination of patient Voit by Wolff in 1897 with new procedures revealed a specific impairment in processing sensory knowledge, while functional knowledge of objects was relatively preserved. This led to a naming impairment in all modalities of presentation except the visual one. Using more refined tasks, Wolff also demonstrated receptive impairments, in contrast to previous researchers who had concluded that the impairment was restricted to oral production. Conclusions: Although Wolff's (1904) case of negative optic aphasia has been almost completely forgotten (but see Bartels Wallesch, 1996), it is astonishingly modern in its conceptual approach and in the central questions it addresses on the mechanisms involved in the process of naming and on the structure of the semantic system. As is usual in classical cases, the methodology may appear less stringent than in most contemporary work, but the approach was brilliant. Y1 - 2009 UR - http://www.informaworld.com/smpp/title~content=t713393920~db=all U6 - https://doi.org/10.1080/02687030802593197 SN - 0268-7038 ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Wartenburger, Isabell A1 - Burchert, Frank A1 - Heekeren, Hauke R. A1 - De Bleser, Ria A1 - Villringer, Arno T1 - Grammaticality judgments on sentences with and without movement of phrasal constituents : an event-related fMRI study Y1 - 2003 UR - http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/journal/09116044 SN - 0911-6044 ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Cholewa, Jürgen A1 - De Bleser, Ria T1 - Further neurolinguistics evidence for morphological fractionation within the lexical system Y1 - 1996 ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Burchert, Frank A1 - Weldlich, C. A1 - De Bleser, Ria T1 - Focus in the left periphery : a cue to agrammatic sentence comprehension? Y1 - 2005 ER - TY - JOUR A1 - De Bleser, Ria A1 - Marshall, J. C. T1 - Egon Weigl and the concept of inner speech Y1 - 2005 SN - 0010-9452 ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Schröder, Astrid A1 - Stadie, Nicole A1 - Postler, Jenny A1 - Lorenz, Antje A1 - Swoboda-Moll, Maria A1 - Burchert, Frank A1 - De Bleser, Ria T1 - Does training-induced improvement of noncanonical sentence production in agrammatic aphasia generalize to comprehension? : a multiple single case study Y1 - 2005 SN - 0093-934X ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Burchert, Frank A1 - De Bleser, Ria A1 - Sonntag, Katharina T1 - Does morphology make the difference? : Agrammatic sentence comprehension in German Y1 - 2003 ER - TY - JOUR A1 - De Bleser, Ria A1 - Cholewa, Jürgen T1 - Dissociations between inflection, derivation and compounding : neurolinguistic evidence for morphological fractionations within the lexical system Y1 - 1998 ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Hanne, Sandra A1 - Sekerina, Irina A. A1 - Vasishth, Shravan A1 - Burchert, Frank A1 - De Bleser, Ria T1 - Chance in agrammatic sentence comprehension what does it really mean? Evidence from eye movements of German agrammatic aphasic patients JF - Aphasiology : an international, interdisciplinary journal N2 - Background: In addition to the canonical subject-verb-object (SVO) word order, German also allows for non-canonical order (OVS), and the case-marking system supports thematic role interpretation. Previous eye-tracking studies (Kamide et al., 2003; Knoeferle, 2007) have shown that unambiguous case information in non-canonical sentences is processed incrementally. For individuals with agrammatic aphasia, comprehension of non-canonical sentences is at chance level (Burchert et al., 2003). The trace deletion hypothesis (Grodzinsky 1995, 2000) claims that this is due to structural impairments in syntactic representations, which force the individual with aphasia (IWA) to apply a guessing strategy. However, recent studies investigating online sentence processing in aphasia (Caplan et al., 2007; Dickey et al., 2007) found that divergences exist in IWAs' sentence-processing routines depending on whether they comprehended non-canonical sentences correctly or not, pointing rather to a processing deficit explanation. Aims: The aim of the current study was to investigate agrammatic IWAs' online and offline sentence comprehension simultaneously in order to reveal what online sentence-processing strategies they rely on and how these differ from controls' processing routines. We further asked whether IWAs' offline chance performance for non-canonical sentences does indeed result from guessing. Methods Procedures: We used the visual-world paradigm and measured eye movements (as an index of online sentence processing) of controls (N = 8) and individuals with aphasia (N = 7) during a sentence-picture matching task. Additional offline measures were accuracy and reaction times. Outcomes Results: While the offline accuracy results corresponded to the pattern predicted by the TDH, IWAs' eye movements revealed systematic differences depending on the response accuracy. Conclusions: These findings constitute evidence against attributing IWAs' chance performance for non-canonical structures to mere guessing. Instead, our results support processing deficit explanations and characterise the agrammatic parser as deterministic and inefficient: it is slowed down, affected by intermittent deficiencies in performing syntactic operations, and fails to compute reanalysis even when one is detected. KW - Eye movements KW - Non-canonical sentences KW - Agrammatic aphasia KW - Broca's aphasia KW - Chance performance KW - Online and offline processing KW - Sentence comprehension disorders KW - German syntax Y1 - 2011 U6 - https://doi.org/10.1080/02687038.2010.489256 SN - 0268-7038 VL - 25 IS - 2 SP - 221 EP - 244 PB - Wiley CY - Hove ER - TY - JOUR A1 - De Bleser, Ria A1 - Kauschke, Christina T1 - Acquisition and loss of nouns and verbs: parallel or divergent patterns? Y1 - 2003 ER - TY - JOUR A1 - De Bleser, Ria T1 - A linguist's view on progressive anomia: Evidence for Delbrück (1886) in modern neurolinguistic research JF - Cortex : a journal devoted to the study of the nervous system and behaviour N2 - In his short paper of 1886, the neogrammarian linguist Delbruck sketches his views on normal language processing and their relevance for the interpretation of some of the symptoms of progressive anomic aphasia. In particular, he discusses proper name impairments, verb and abstract noun superiority and the predominance of semantically related errors. Furthermore, he suggests that part of speech, morphology and word order may be preserved in this condition. This historical document has been lost in oblivion but the original ideas and their relevance for contemporary discussions merit a revival. KW - neogrammarians Y1 - 2006 U6 - https://doi.org/10.1016/S0010-9452(08)70421-0 SN - 0010-9452 VL - 42 SP - 805 EP - 810 PB - Elsevier CY - Milano ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Patil, Umesh A1 - Hanne, Sandra A1 - Burchert, Frank A1 - De Bleser, Ria A1 - Vasishth, Shravan T1 - A Computational Evaluation of Sentence Processing Deficits in Aphasia JF - Cognitive science : a multidisciplinary journal of anthropology, artificial intelligence, education, linguistics, neuroscience, philosophy, psychology ; journal of the Cognitive Science Society N2 - Individuals with agrammatic Broca's aphasia experience difficulty when processing reversible non-canonical sentences. Different accounts have been proposed to explain this phenomenon. The Trace Deletion account (Grodzinsky, 1995, 2000, 2006) attributes this deficit to an impairment in syntactic representations, whereas others (e.g., Caplan, Waters, Dede, Michaud, & Reddy, 2007; Haarmann, Just, & Carpenter, 1997) propose that the underlying structural representations are unimpaired, but sentence comprehension is affected by processing deficits, such as slow lexical activation, reduction in memory resources, slowed processing and/or intermittent deficiency, among others. We test the claims of two processing accounts, slowed processing and intermittent deficiency, and two versions of the Trace Deletion Hypothesis (TDH), in a computational framework for sentence processing (Lewis & Vasishth, 2005) implemented in ACT-R (Anderson, Byrne, Douglass, Lebiere, & Qin, 2004). The assumption of slowed processing is operationalized as slow procedural memory, so that each processing action is performed slower than normal, and intermittent deficiency as extra noise in the procedural memory, so that the parsing steps are more noisy than normal. We operationalize the TDH as an absence of trace information in the parse tree. To test the predictions of the models implementing these theories, we use the data from a German sentence—picture matching study reported in Hanne, Sekerina, Vasishth, Burchert, and De Bleser (2011). The data consist of offline (sentence-picture matching accuracies and response times) and online (eye fixation proportions) measures. From among the models considered, the model assuming that both slowed processing and intermittent deficiency are present emerges as the best model of sentence processing difficulty in aphasia. The modeling of individual differences suggests that, if we assume that patients have both slowed processing and intermittent deficiency, they have them in differing degrees. KW - Aphasia KW - Non-canonical sentences KW - Sentence-picture matching KW - Eye movements KW - Computational modeling KW - Cognitive architecture KW - Individual differences Y1 - 2016 U6 - https://doi.org/10.1111/cogs.12250 SN - 0364-0213 SN - 1551-6709 VL - 40 SP - 5 EP - 50 PB - Wiley-Blackwell CY - Hoboken ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Schwarz, M. R. A1 - De Bleser, Ria A1 - Poeck, K. A1 - Weis, J. T1 - A case of primary progressive ahasia : a 14year follow-up study with neuropathological findings Y1 - 1998 ER -