TY  - JOUR
A1  - Bos, Laura S.
A1  - Dragoy, Olga V.
A1  - Avrutin, S.
A1  - Iskra, E.
A1  - Bastiaanse, Roelien
T1  - Understanding discourse-linked elements in aphasia: A threefold study in Russian
JF  - Neuropsychologia : an international journal in behavioural and cognitive neuroscience
N2  - Background: Agrammatic speakers have problems with grammatical encoding and decoding. However, not all syntactic processes are equally problematic: present time reference, who questions, and reflexives can be processed by narrow syntax alone and are relatively spared compared to past time reference, which questions, and personal pronouns, respectively. The latter need additional access to discourse and information structures to link to their referent outside the clause (Avrutin, 2006). Linguistic processing that requires discourse-linking is difficult for agrammatic individuals: verb morphology with reference to the past is more difficult than with reference to the present (Bastiaanse et al., 2011). The same holds for which questions compared to who questions and for pronouns compared to reflexives (Avrutin, 2006). These results have been reported independently for different populations in different languages. The current study, for the first time, tested all conditions within the same population.
 Aims: We had two aims with the current study. First, we wanted to investigate whether discourse-linking is the common denominator of the deficits in time reference, wh questions, and object pronouns. Second, we aimed to compare the comprehension of discourse-linked elements in people with agrammatic and fluent aphasia.
 Methods and procedures: Three sentence-picture-matching tasks were administered to 10 agrammatic, 10 fluent aphasic, and 10 non-brain-damaged Russian speakers (NBDs): (1) the Test for Assessing Reference of Time (TART) for present imperfective (reference to present) and past perfective (reference to past), (2) the Wh Extraction Assessment Tool (WHEAT) for which and who subject questions, and (3) the Reflexive-Pronoun Test (RePro) for reflexive and pronominal reference.
 Outcomes and results: NBDs scored at ceiling and significantly higher than the aphasic participants. We found an overall effect of discourse-linking in the TART and WHEAT for the agrammatic speakers, and in all three tests for the fluent speakers. Scores on the RePro were at ceiling.
 Conclusions: The results are in line with the prediction that problems that individuals with agrammatic and fluent aphasia experience when comprehending sentences that contain verbs with past time reference, which question words and pronouns are caused by the fact that these elements involve discourse linking. The effect is not specific to agrammatism, although it may result from different underlying disorders in agrammatic and fluent aphasia.
KW  - Aphasia
KW  - Sentence comprehension
KW  - Discourse-linking
KW  - Tense
KW  - Time reference
KW  - wh Questions
KW  - Pronouns
Y1  - 2014
U6  - https://doi.org/10.1016/j.neuropsychologia.2014.02.017
SN  - 0028-3932
SN  - 1873-3514
VL  - 57
SP  - 20
EP  - 28
PB  - Elsevier
CY  - Oxford
ER  - 
TY  - JOUR
A1  - Adelt, Anne
A1  - Hanne, Sandra
A1  - Stadie, Nicole
T1  - Treatment of sentence comprehension and production in aphasia
BT  - is there cross-modal generalisation?
JF  - Neuropsychological rehabilitation
N2  - Exploring generalisation following treatment of language deficits in aphasia can provide insights into the functional relation of the cognitive processing systems involved. In the present study, we first review treatment outcomes of interventions targeting sentence processing deficits and, second report a treatment study examining the occurrence of practice effects and generalisation in sentence comprehension and production. In order to explore the potential linkage between processing systems involved in comprehending and producing sentences, we investigated whether improvements generalise within (i.e., uni-modal generalisation in comprehension or in production) and/or across modalities (i.e., cross-modal generalisation from comprehension to production or vice versa). Two individuals with aphasia displaying co-occurring deficits in sentence comprehension and production were trained on complex, non-canonical sentences in both modalities. Two evidence-based treatment protocols were applied in a crossover intervention study with sequence of treatment phases being randomly allocated. Both participants benefited significantly from treatment, leading to uni-modal generalisation in both comprehension and production. However, cross-modal generalisation did not occur. The magnitude of uni-modal generalisation in sentence production was related to participants’ sentence comprehension performance prior to treatment. These findings support the assumption of modality-specific sub-systems for sentence comprehension and production, being linked uni-directionally from comprehension to production.
KW  - Sentence comprehension
KW  - sentence production
KW  - cross-modal generalisation
KW  - aphasia treatment
Y1  - 2016
U6  - https://doi.org/10.1080/09602011.2016.1213176
SN  - 0960-2011
SN  - 1464-0694
VL  - 28
IS  - 6
SP  - 937
EP  - 965
PB  - Routledge, Taylor & Francis Group
CY  - Abingdon
ER  - 
TY  - JOUR
A1  - Zakarias, Lilla
A1  - Salis, Christos
A1  - Wartenburger, Isabell
T1  - Transfer effects on spoken sentence comprehension and functional communication after working memory training in stroke aphasia
JF  - Journal of neurolinguistics : an international journal for the study of brain function in language behavior and experience
N2  - Recent treatment protocols have been successful in improving working memory (WM) in individuals with aphasia. However, the evidence to date is small and the extent to which improvements in trained tasks of WM transfer to untrained memory tasks, spoken sentence comprehension, and functional communication is yet poorly understood. To address these issues, we conducted a multiple baseline study with three German-speaking individuals with chronic post stroke aphasia. Participants practised two computerised WM tasks (n-back with pictures and aback with spoken words) four times a week for a month, targeting two WM processes: updating WM representations and resolving interference. All participants showed improvement on at least one measure of spoken sentence comprehension and everyday memory activities. Two of them showed improvement also on measures of WM and functional communication. Our results suggest that WM can be improved through computerised training in chronic aphasia and this can transfer to spoken sentence comprehension and functional communication in some individuals.
KW  - Aphasia
KW  - Working memory
KW  - n-back training
KW  - Transfer
KW  - Sentence comprehension
KW  - Verbal communication
Y1  - 2018
U6  - https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jneuroling.2017.12.002
SN  - 0911-6044
VL  - 48
SP  - 47
EP  - 63
PB  - Elsevier
CY  - Oxford
ER  - 
TY  - JOUR
A1  - Metzner, Paul
A1  - von der Malsburg, Titus Raban
A1  - Vasishth, Shravan
A1  - Roesler, Frank
T1  - The Importance of Reading Naturally: Evidence From Combined Recordings of Eye Movements and Electric Brain Potentials
JF  - Cognitive science : a multidisciplinary journal of anthropology, artificial intelligence, education, linguistics, neuroscience, philosophy, psychology ; journal of the Cognitive Science Society
KW  - Reading
KW  - Sentence comprehension
KW  - ERP
KW  - Eye movements
KW  - Regressions
Y1  - 2017
U6  - https://doi.org/10.1111/cogs.12384
SN  - 0364-0213
SN  - 1551-6709
VL  - 41
SP  - 1232
EP  - 1263
PB  - Wiley
CY  - Hoboken
ER  - 
TY  - JOUR
A1  - Frank, Stefan L.
A1  - Trompenaars, Thijs
A1  - Vasishth, Shravan
T1  - Cross-Linguistic Differences in Processing Double-Embedded Relative
Clauses: Working-Memory Constraints or Language Statistics?
JF  - Cognitive science : a multidisciplinary journal of anthropology, artificial intelligence, education, linguistics, neuroscience, philosophy, psychology ; journal of the Cognitive Science Society
N2  - An English double-embedded relative clause from which the middle verb is omitted can often be processed more easily than its grammatical counterpart, a phenomenon known as the grammaticality illusion. This effect has been found to be reversed in German, suggesting that the illusion is language specific rather than a consequence of universal working memory constraints. We present results from three self-paced reading experiments which show that Dutch native speakers also do not show the grammaticality illusion in Dutch, whereas both German and Dutch native speakers do show the illusion when reading English sentences. These findings provide evidence against working memory constraints as an explanation for the observed effect in English. We propose an alternative account based on the statistical patterns of the languages involved. In support of this alternative, a single recurrent neural network model that is trained on both Dutch and English sentences is shown to predict the cross-linguistic difference in the grammaticality effect.
KW  - Bilingualism
KW  - Cross-linguistic differences
KW  - Sentence comprehension
KW  - Relative clauses
KW  - Centre embedding
KW  - Grammaticality illusion
KW  - Self-paced reading
KW  - Recurrent neural network model
Y1  - 2016
U6  - https://doi.org/10.1111/cogs.12247
SN  - 0364-0213
SN  - 1551-6709
VL  - 40
SP  - 554
EP  - 578
PB  - Wiley-Blackwell
CY  - Hoboken
ER  - 
TY  - JOUR
A1  - Lago, Sol
A1  - Shalom, Diego E.
A1  - Sigman, Mariano
A1  - Lau, Ellen F.
A1  - Phillips, Colin
T1  - Agreement attraction in Spanish comprehension
JF  - Journal of memory and language
N2  - Previous studies have found that English speakers experience attraction effects when comprehending subject-verb agreement, showing eased processing of ungrammatical sentences that contain a syntactically unlicensed but number-matching noun. In four self-paced reading experiments we examine whether attraction effects also occur in Spanish, a language where agreement morphology is richer and functionally more significant. We find that despite having a richer morphology, Spanish speakers show reliable attraction effects in comprehension, and that these effects are strikingly similar to those previously found in English in their magnitude and distributional profile. Further, we use distributional analyses to argue that cue-based memory retrieval is used as an error-driven mechanism in comprehension. We suggest that cross-linguistic similarities in agreement attraction result from speakers deploying repair or error-driven mechanisms uniformly across languages. (C) 2015 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
KW  - Agreement attraction
KW  - Number morphology
KW  - Spanish
KW  - Sentence comprehension
Y1  - 2015
U6  - https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jml.2015.02.002
SN  - 0749-596X
SN  - 1096-0821
VL  - 82
SP  - 133
EP  - 149
PB  - Elsevier
CY  - San Diego
ER  - 
TY  - JOUR
A1  - Engelmann, Felix
A1  - Vasishth, Shravan
A1  - Engbert, Ralf
A1  - Kliegl, Reinhold
T1  - A framework for modeling the interaction of syntactic processing and eye movement control
JF  - Topics in cognitive science
N2  - We explore the interaction between oculomotor control and language comprehension on the sentence level using two well-tested computational accounts of parsing difficulty. Previous work (Boston, Hale, Vasishth, & Kliegl, 2011) has shown that surprisal (Hale, 2001; Levy, 2008) and cue-based memory retrieval (Lewis & Vasishth, 2005) are significant and complementary predictors of reading time in an eyetracking corpus. It remains an open question how the sentence processor interacts with oculomotor control. Using a simple linking hypothesis proposed in Reichle, Warren, and McConnell (2009), we integrated both measures with the eye movement model EMMA (Salvucci, 2001) inside the cognitive architecture ACT-R (Anderson et al., 2004). We built a reading model that could initiate short Time Out regressions (Mitchell, Shen, Green, & Hodgson, 2008) that compensate for slow postlexical processing. This simple interaction enabled the model to predict the re-reading of words based on parsing difficulty. The model was evaluated in different configurations on the prediction of frequency effects on the Potsdam Sentence Corpus. The extension of EMMA with postlexical processing improved its predictions and reproduced re-reading rates and durations with a reasonable fit to the data. This demonstration, based on simple and independently motivated assumptions, serves as a foundational step toward a precise investigation of the interaction between high-level language processing and eye movement control.
KW  - Sentence comprehension
KW  - Eye movements
KW  - Reading
KW  - Parsing difficulty
KW  - Working memory
KW  - Surprisal
KW  - Computational modeling
Y1  - 2013
U6  - https://doi.org/10.1111/tops.12026
SN  - 1756-8757
VL  - 5
IS  - 3
SP  - 452
EP  - 474
PB  - Wiley-Blackwell
CY  - Hoboken
ER  - 
TY  - JOUR
A1  - Mätzig, Paul
A1  - Vasishth, Shravan
A1  - Engelmann, Felix
A1  - Caplan, David
A1  - Burchert, Frank
T1  - A computational investigation of sources of variability in sentence comprehension difficulty in aphasia
JF  - Topics in cognitive science
N2  - We present a computational evaluation of three hypotheses about sources of deficit in sentence comprehension in aphasia: slowed processing, intermittent deficiency, and resource reduction. The ACT-R based Lewis and Vasishth (2005) model is used to implement these three proposals. Slowed processing is implemented as slowed execution time of parse steps; intermittent deficiency as increased random noise in activation of elements in memory; and resource reduction as reduced spreading activation. As data, we considered subject vs. object relative sentences, presented in a self-paced listening modality to 56 individuals with aphasia (IWA) and 46 matched controls. The participants heard the sentences and carried out a picture verification task to decide on an interpretation of the sentence. These response accuracies are used to identify the best parameters (for each participant) that correspond to the three hypotheses mentioned above. We show that controls have more tightly clustered (less variable) parameter values than IWA; specifically, compared to controls, among IWA there are more individuals with slow parsing times, high noise, and low spreading activation. We find that (a) individual IWA show differential amounts of deficit along the three dimensions of slowed processing, intermittent deficiency, and resource reduction, (b) overall, there is evidence for all three sources of deficit playing a role, and (c) IWA have a more variable range of parameter values than controls. An important implication is that it may be meaningless to talk about sources of deficit with respect to an abstract verage IWA; the focus should be on the individual's differential degrees of deficit along different dimensions, and on understanding the causes of variability in deficit between participants.
KW  - Sentence comprehension
KW  - Aphasia
KW  - Computational modeling
KW  - Cue-based retrieval
Y1  - 2018
U6  - https://doi.org/10.1111/tops.12323
SN  - 1756-8757
SN  - 1756-8765
VL  - 10
IS  - 1
SP  - 161
EP  - 174
PB  - Wiley
CY  - Hoboken
ER  -