TY - JOUR A1 - Zakariás, Lilla A1 - Keresztes, Attila A1 - Marton, Klara A1 - Wartenburger, Isabell T1 - Positive effects of a computerised working memory and executive function JF - Neuropsychological rehabilitation N2 - Aphasia, the language disorder following brain damage, is frequently accompanied by deficits of working memory (WM) and executive functions (EFs). Recent studies suggest that WM, together with certain EFs, can play a role in sentence comprehension in individuals with aphasia (IWA), and that WM can be enhanced with intensive practice. Our aim was to investigate whether a combined WM and EF training improves the understanding of spoken sentences in IWA. We used a pre-post-test case control design. Three individuals with chronic aphasia practised an adaptive training task (a modified n-back task) three to four times a week for a month. Their performance was assessed before and after the training on outcome measures related to WM and spoken sentence comprehension. One participant showed significant improvement on the training task, another showed a tendency for improvement, and both of them improved significantly in spoken sentence comprehension. The third participant did not improve on the training task, however, she showed improvement on one measure of spoken sentence comprehension. Compared to controls, two individuals improved at least in one condition of the WM outcome measures. Thus, our results suggest that a combined WM and EF training can be beneficial for IWA. KW - Aphasia rehabilitation KW - transfer effect KW - updating training KW - interference control KW - sentence comprehension deficit Y1 - 2016 U6 - https://doi.org/10.1080/09602011.2016.1159579 SN - 0960-2011 SN - 1464-0694 VL - 28 IS - 3 SP - 369 EP - 386 PB - Routledge, Taylor & Francis Group CY - Abingdon ER - TY - GEN A1 - Räling, Romy A1 - Hanne, Sandra A1 - Schröder, Astrid A1 - Keßler, Carla A1 - Wartenburger, Isabell T1 - Judging the animacy of words BT - the influence of typicality and age of acquisition in a semantic decision task N2 - The age at which members of a semantic category are learned (age of acquisition), the typicality they demonstrate within their corresponding category, and the semantic domain to which they belong (living, non-living) are known to influence the speed and accuracy of lexical/semantic processing. So far, only a few studies have looked at the origin of age of acquisition and its interdependence with typicality and semantic domain within the same experimental design. Twenty adult participants performed an animacy decision task in which nouns were classified according to their semantic domain as being living or non-living. Response times were influenced by the independent main effects of each parameter: typicality, age of acquisition, semantic domain, and frequency. However, there were no interactions. The results are discussed with respect to recent models concerning the origin of age of acquisition effects. T3 - Zweitveröffentlichungen der Universität Potsdam : Humanwissenschaftliche Reihe - 305 KW - Age of acquisition KW - Animacy decision KW - Semantic classification task KW - Typicality Y1 - 2016 U6 - http://nbn-resolving.de/urn/resolver.pl?urn:nbn:de:kobv:517-opus4-98402 ER -