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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.
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.
Background: Individuals with aphasia (IWA) show deficits in comprehending object-extracted declaratives while comprehension of subject-extracted structures is relatively preserved. It is a matter of debate whether this subject–object asymmetry also arises for comprehension of wh-questions. Successful comprehension of wh-questions critically entails correct resolution of a filler–gap dependency. Most previous studies have used only offline accuracy measures to investigate wh-question comprehension in aphasia. Online studies exploring syntactic processing in real time are needed in order to draw inferences about gap-filling abilities in IWA and to identify the point of breakdown in sentence comprehension.
Aims: This study aimed at investigating processing of subject and object who-questions in German-speaking IWA and in a group of controls by combining an offline and online method. We further aimed to explore the impact of case-marking cues on processing of wh-questions.
Methods & Procedures: Applying a variant of the visual world eye-tracking paradigm, we measured participants’ eye movements while they performed the same offline task, which is frequently used to assess comprehension of declaratives (sentence–picture matching).
Outcomes & Results: Concerning online processing of who-questions in controls, we found anticipation of the most likely post-verbal theta-role immediately after processing the case-marked wh-pronoun in both subject and object questions. In addition, we observed an unexpected advantage of object over subject questions in terms of processing time. The offline results for IWA revealed that there were three heterogeneous patterns: (a) symmetrical comprehension with equal impairments for both question types, (b) asymmetrical performance with better comprehension of subject than object who-questions, and (c) a reversed asymmetry with better comprehension of object as compared to subject questions. For online processing of both types of who-questions, IWA showed retained abilities in postulating the gap and in associating the filler with this gap, although they were slower as compared to controls. Moreover, similarly to controls, they anticipated the most likely post-verbal theta-role.
Conclusions: For controls, the findings provide evidence for rapid resolution of the filler–gap dependency and incremental processing of case-marking cues, reflected in early prediction of upcoming syntactic structure. We attribute faster processing of object questions to faster alignment of the anticipated element with a semantically more salient character. For IWA, the online data provide evidence for retained predictive abilities in processing of filler–gap dependencies in wh-questions, but prediction was delayed. This is most likely attributed to delayed integration of case-marking cues.
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.