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An important aspect of aphasia is the observation of behavioral variability between and within individual participants. Our study addresses variability in sentence comprehension in German, by testing 21 individuals with aphasia and a control group and involving (a) several constructions (declarative sentences, relative clauses and control structures with an overt pronoun or PRO), (b) three response tasks (object manipulation, sentence-picture matching with/without self-paced listening), and (c) two test phases (to investigate test-retest performance). With this systematic, large-scale study we gained insights into variability in sentence comprehension. We found that the size of syntactic effects varied both in aphasia and in control participants. Whereas variability in control participants led to systematic changes, variability in individuals with aphasia was unsystematic across test phases or response tasks. The persistent occurrence of canonicity and interference effects across response tasks and test phases, however, shows that the performance is systematically influenced by syntactic complexity.
Although a relatively large number of studies on acquired language impairments have tested the case of derivational morphology, none of these have specifically investigated whether there are differences in how prefixed and suffixed derived words are impaired. Based on linguistic and psycholinguistic considerations on prefixed and suffixed derived words, differences in how these two types of derivations are processed, and consequently impaired, are predicted. In the present study, we investigated the errors produced in reading aloud simple, prefixed, and suffixed words by three German individuals with agrammatic aphasia (NN, LG, SA). We found that, while NN and LG produced similar numbers of errors with prefixed and suffixed words, SA showed a selective impairment for prefixed words. Furthermore, NN and SA produced more errors specifically involving the affix with prefixed words than with suffixed words. We discuss our findings in terms of relative position of stem and affix in prefixed and suffixed words, as well as in terms of specific properties of prefixes and suffixes.
Although a relatively large number of studies on acquired language impairments have tested the case of derivational morphology, none of these have specifically investigated whether there are differences in how prefixed and suffixed derived words are impaired. Based on linguistic and psycholinguistic considerations on prefixed and suffixed derived words, differences in how these two types of derivations are processed, and consequently impaired, are predicted. In the present study, we investigated the errors produced in reading aloud simple, prefixed, and suffixed words by three German individuals with agrammatic aphasia (NN, LG, SA). We found that, while NN and LG produced similar numbers of errors with prefixed and suffixed words, SA showed a selective impairment for prefixed words. Furthermore, NN and SA produced more errors specifically involving the affix with prefixed words than with suffixed words. We discuss our findings in terms of relative position of stem and affix in prefixed and suffixed words, as well as in terms of specific properties of prefixes and suffixes.
We report two experiments and Bayesian modelling of the data collected. In both experiments, participants performed a long-lag primed picture naming task. Black-and-white line drawings were used as targets, which were overtly named by the participants. Their naming latencies were measured. In both experiments, primes consisted of past participle verbs (er tanzt/er hat getanzt "he dances/he has danced") and the relationship between primes and targets was either morphological or unrelated. Experiment 1 additionally had phonologically and semantically related prime-target pairs as well as present tense primes. Both in Experiment 1 and 2, participants showed significantly faster naming latencies for morphologically related targets relative to the unrelated verb primes. In Experiment 1, no priming effects were observed in phonologically and semantically related control conditions. In addition, the production latencies were not influenced by verb type.
Sentence comprehension requires that the comprehender work out who did what to whom. This process has been characterized as retrieval from memory. This review summarizes the quantitative predictions and empirical coverage of the two existing computational models of retrieval and shows how the predictive performance of these two competing models can be tested against a benchmark data-set. We also show how computational modeling can help us better understand sources of variability in both unimpaired and impaired sentence comprehension.
Das 11. Herbsttreffen Patholinguistik mit dem Schwerpunktthema »Gut gestimmt: Diagnostik und Therapie bei Dysphonie« fand am 18.11.2017 in Potsdam statt. Das Herbsttreffen wird seit 2007 jährlich vom Verband für Patholinguistik e.V. (vpl) durchgeführt. Der vorliegende Tagungsband beinhaltet die Hauptvorträge zum Schwerpunktthema sowie Beiträge zu den Kurzvorträgen »Spektrum Patholinguistik« und der Posterpräsentationen zu weiteren Themen aus der sprachtherapeutischen Forschung und Praxis.
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.
We report two experiments and Bayesian modelling of the data collected. In both experiments, participants performed a long-lag primed picture naming task. Black-and-white line drawings were used as targets, which were overtly named by the participants. Their naming latencies were measured. In both experiments, primes consisted of past participle verbs (er tanzt/er hat getanzt “he dances/he has danced”) and the relationship between primes and targets was either morphological or unrelated. Experiment 1 additionally had phonologically and semantically related prime-target pairs as well as present tense primes. Both in Experiment 1 and 2, participants showed significantly faster naming latencies for morphologically related targets relative to the unrelated verb primes. In Experiment 1, no priming effects were observed in phonologically and semantically related control conditions. In addition, the production latencies were not influenced by verb type.
Agrammatic speakers of languages with overt grammatical case show impaired use of the morphological cues to establish theta-role relations in sentences presented in non-canonical word orders. We analysed the effect of word order on the sentence comprehension of aphasic speakers of Basque, an ergative, free word order and head-final (SOV) language. Ergative languages such as Basque establish a one-to-one mapping of the thematic role and the case marker. We collected behavioural and gaze-fixation data while agrammatic speakers performed a picture-matching task with auditorily presented sentences with different word orders. We found that people with aphasia (PWA) had difficulties in assigning theta-roles in Theme-Agent order. This result is in line with processing accounts. Contrary to previous findings, our data do not suggest a systematic delay in the integration of morphological information in the PWA group, but strong reliance on the ergative case morphology and difficulties assigning thematic roles into the determiner phrases.