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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.
One of the most important social cognitive skills in humans is the ability to “put oneself in someone else’s shoes,” that is, to take another person’s perspective. In socially situated communication, perspective taking enables the listener to arrive at a meaningful interpretation of what is said (sentence meaning) and what is meant (speaker’s meaning) by the speaker. To successfully decode the speaker’s meaning, the listener has to take into account which information he/she and the speaker share in their common ground (CG). We here further investigated competing accounts about when and how CG information affects language comprehension by means of reaction time (RT) measures, accuracy data, event-related potentials (ERPs), and eye-tracking. Early integration accounts would predict that CG information is considered immediately and would hence not expect to find costs of CG integration. Late integration accounts would predict a rather late and effortful integration of CG information during the parsing process that might be reflected in integration or updating costs. Other accounts predict the simultaneous integration of privileged ground (PG) and CG perspectives. We used a computerized version of the referential communication game with object triplets of different sizes presented visually in CG or PG. In critical trials (i.e., conflict trials), CG information had to be integrated while privileged information had to be suppressed. Listeners mastered the integration of CG (response accuracy 99.8%). Yet, slower RTs, and enhanced late positivities in the ERPs showed that CG integration had its costs. Moreover, eye-tracking data indicated an early anticipation of referents in CG but an inability to suppress looks to the privileged competitor, resulting in later and longer looks to targets in those trials, in which CG information had to be considered. Our data therefore support accounts that foresee an early anticipation of referents to be in CG but a rather late and effortful integration if conflicting information has to be processed. We show that both perspectives, PG and CG, contribute to socially situated language processing and discuss the data with reference to theoretical accounts and recent findings on the use of CG information for reference resolution.
Children born preterm are at higher risk to develop language deficits. Auditory speech discrimination deficits may be early signs for language developmental problems. The present study used functional near-infrared spectroscopy to investigate neural speech discrimination in 15 preterm infants at term-equivalent age compared to 15 full term neonates. The full term group revealed a significantly greater hemodynamic response to forward compared to backward speech within the left hemisphere extending from superior temporal to inferior parietal and middle and inferior frontal areas. In contrast, the preterm group did not show differences in their hemodynamic responses during forward versus backward speech, thus, they did not discriminate speech from nonspeech. Groups differed significantly in their responses to forward speech, whereas they did not differ in their responses to backward speech. The significant differences between groups point to an altered development of the functional network underlying language acquisition in preterm infants as early as in term-equivalent age.
Breaking Continuous Flash Suppression (bCFS) has been adopted as an appealing means to study human visual awareness, but the literature is beclouded by inconsistent and contradictory results. Although previous reviews have focused chiefly on design pitfalls and instances of false reasoning, we show in this study that the choice of analysis pathway can have severe effects on the statistical output when applied to bCFS data. Using a representative dataset designed to address a specific controversy in the realm of language processing under bCFS, namely whether psycholinguistic variables affect access to awareness, we present a range of analysis methods based on real instances in the published literature, and indicate how each approach affects the perceived outcome. We provide a summary of published bCFS studies indicating the use of data transformation and trimming, and highlight that more compelling analysis methods are sparsely used in this field. We discuss potential interpretations based on both classical and more complex analyses, to highlight how these differ. We conclude that an adherence to openly available data and analysis pathways could provide a great benefit to this field, so that conclusions can be tested against multiple analyses as standard practices are updated.
Comprehension of transitive sentences relies on different kinds of information, like word order, case marking, and animacy contrasts between arguments. When no formal cues like case marking or number congruency are available, a contrast in animacy helps the parser to decide which argument is the grammatical subject and which the object. Processing costs are enhanced when neither formal cues nor animacy contrasts are available in a transitive sentence. We present an ERP study on the comprehension of grammatical transitive German sentences, manipulating animacy contrasts between subjects and objects as well as the verbal case marking pattern. Our study shows strong object animacy effects even in the absence of violations, and in addition suggests that this effect of object animacy is modulated by the verbal case marking pattern.
Die Konkurrenz schläft nie!
(2020)
A close call
(2018)
The present study investigated how lexical selection is influenced by the number of semantically related representations (semantic neighbourhood density) and their similarity (semantic distance) to the target in a speeded picture-naming task. Semantic neighbourhood density and similarity as continuous variables were used to assess lexical selection for which competitive and noncompetitive mechanisms have been proposed. Previous studies found mixed effects of semantic neighbourhood variables, leaving this issue unresolved. Here, we demonstrate interference of semantic neighbourhood similarity with less accurate naming responses and a higher likelihood of producing semantic errors and omissions over accurate responses for words with semantically more similar (closer) neighbours. No main effect of semantic neighbourhood density and no interaction between semantic neighbourhood density and similarity was found. We assessed further whether semantic neighbourhood density can affect naming performance if semantic neighbours exceed a certain degree of semantic similarity. Semantic similarity between the target and each neighbour was used to split semantic neighbourhood density into two different density variables: The number of semantically close neighbours versus distant neighbours. The results showed a significant effect of close, but not of distant, semantic neighbourhood density: Naming pictures of targets with more close semantic neighbours led to longer naming latencies, less accurate responses, and a higher likelihood for the production of semantic errors and omissions over accurate responses. The results show that word inherent semantic attributes such as semantic neighbourhood similarity and the number of coactivated close semantic neighbours modulate lexical selection supporting theories of competitive lexical processing.
One of the most important social cognitive skills in humans is the ability to “put oneself in someone else’s shoes,” that is, to take another person’s perspective. In socially situated communication, perspective taking enables the listener to arrive at a meaningful interpretation of what is said (sentence meaning) and what is meant (speaker’s meaning) by the speaker. To successfully decode the speaker’s meaning, the listener has to take into account which information he/she and the speaker share in their common ground (CG). We here further investigated competing accounts about when and how CG information affects language comprehension by means of reaction time (RT) measures, accuracy data, event-related potentials (ERPs), and eye-tracking. Early integration accounts would predict that CG information is considered immediately and would hence not expect to find costs of CG integration. Late integration accounts would predict a rather late and effortful integration of CG information during the parsing process that might be reflected in integration or updating costs. Other accounts predict the simultaneous integration of privileged ground (PG) and CG perspectives. We used a computerized version of the referential communication game with object triplets of different sizes presented visually in CG or PG. In critical trials (i.e., conflict trials), CG information had to be integrated while privileged information had to be suppressed. Listeners mastered the integration of CG (response accuracy 99.8%). Yet, slower RTs, and enhanced late positivities in the ERPs showed that CG integration had its costs. Moreover, eye-tracking data indicated an early anticipation of referents in CG but an inability to suppress looks to the privileged competitor, resulting in later and longer looks to targets in those trials, in which CG information had to be considered. Our data therefore support accounts that foresee an early anticipation of referents to be in CG but a rather late and effortful integration if conflicting information has to be processed. We show that both perspectives, PG and CG, contribute to socially situated language processing and discuss the data with reference to theoretical accounts and recent findings on the use of CG information for reference resolution.
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.