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 - Schröder, Astrid A1 - Burchert, Frank A1 - Stadie, Nicole T1 - Training-induced improvement of noncanonical sentence production does not generalize to comprehension: evidence for modality-specific processes JF - Cognitive neuropsychology N2 - The presence or absence of generalization after treatment can provide important insights into the functional relationship between cognitive processes. The aim of the present study was to investigate the relationship between the cognitive processes that underlie sentence comprehension and production in aphasia. Using data from seven participants who took part in a case-series intervention study that focused on noncanonical sentence production [Stadie et al. (2008). Unambiguous generalization effects after treatment of noncanonical sentence production in German agrammatism. Brain and Language, 104, 211-229], we identified patterns of impairments and generalization effects for the two modalities. Results showed (a) dissociations between sentence structures and modalities before treatment, (b) an absence of cross-modal generalization from production to comprehension after treatment, and (c), a co-occurrence of spared comprehension before treatment and generalization across sentence structures within production after treatment. These findings are in line with the assumption of modality-specific, but interacting, cognitive processes in sentence comprehension and production. More specifically, this interaction is assumed to be unidirectional, allowing treatment-induced improvements in production to be supported by preserved comprehension. KW - syntactic processing of noncanonical sentences KW - sentence production KW - sentence comprehension KW - cross-modal generalization KW - aphasia treatment Y1 - 2015 U6 - https://doi.org/10.1080/02643294.2014.968535 SN - 0264-3294 SN - 1464-0627 VL - 32 IS - 3-4 SP - 195 EP - 220 PB - Routledge, Taylor & Francis Group CY - Abingdon ER -