Sentence processing deficits: Theory and therapy

Byng, Sally

doi:10.1080/02643298808253277

Cited by 213 publications

(85 citation statements)

References 8 publications

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“…in which he was 70% accurate on reading concrete words compared with 10% accuracy on abstract words. Although comparable data have not been reported for J.G., both patients have been classified as "deep dyslexics" and "agrammatics" (Byng, 1988;Ostrin & Tyler, 1994;Patterson & Marcel, 1977;Tyler Ostrin, Cooke, & Moss, 1995).…”

Section: Jg and De: Evidence For Selective Problems Withmentioning

confidence: 90%

Abstract word deficits in aphasia: Evidence from semantic priming.

Tyler¹,

Moss²,

Jennings³

1995

Neuropsychology

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are nonfluent aphasic patients who appear to have selective problems with abstract words on a variety of standard tests. Such a pattern would normally be interpreted as indicating a central semantic deficit for abstract words. The authors show that this is not the case by means of a semantic priming task, which tests for implicit knowledge of the meanings of abstract and concrete words. Spoken word pairs that were either abstract or concrete synonyms (e.g., street-road or luck-chance) were presented, and it was found that both patients showed priming for the abstract and concrete pairs. The researchers followed up by asking the patients to produce definitions to spoken abstract and concrete words; these definitions were also normal. The priming and definition data suggest that the semantic representations of abstract words in these patients were relatively unimpaired. The researchers found that the patients have problems only with spoken abstract words in just those tasks where normal controls also have difficulty. In contrast, they clearly have deficits in reading abstract words aloud, which may be due to problems with output phonology. The implications of these data for claims concerning hemispheric differences in the representation of abstract and concrete words are discussed.There is considerable evidence from research with normal participants of a difference between abstract words-words such as truth, courage, usual, which refer to entities and events that cannot be experienced through the senses-and concrete words. Participants consistently perform better on concrete than on abstract words (e.g., Schwanenflugel, 1992); for example, lexical decision latencies are slower to abstract than concrete words, even when they are matched for familiarity and frequency (e.g., deGroot, 1989), and participants are slower to name an abstract than concrete word (e.g., Bleasdale, 1987).' Theoretical accounts of this pattern range from the dual coding hypothesis (Pavio, 1986), which emphasises the qualitative differences between abstract and concrete words, to the claim that the representations differ in amount rather than type of semantic information .Supporting evidence for the distinction between abstract and concrete words comes from the study of brain-damaged patients, where it has frequently been observed that many patients with acquired disorders of language have particular problems with abstract words (e.g., Franklin, 1989;Shallice & Warrington, 1975 Franklin, 1988), and in various comprehension tasks (Franklin, 1989;Franklin, Howard, & Patterson, 1994). 2When dissociations of this type are encountered-where performance on one type of word (e.g., concrete words) is relatively better than on another type of word (e.g., abstract words) and where this pattern holds across different input and output modalities-it is assumed that this reflects an impairment in the representation (rather than the access) of abstract words. On this kind of view, a selective impairment of abstract words arises because their underlying repre...

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Section: Jg and De: Evidence For Selective Problems Withmentioning

confidence: 90%

Abstract word deficits in aphasia: Evidence from semantic priming.

Tyler¹,

Moss²,

Jennings³

1995

Neuropsychology

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“…Signifi-cant progress has been made in analyzing cognitive mechanisms and their impairments in terms of ''box-and-arrow'' information-processing models, particularly in the domain of written and spoken language (e.g., Coltheart, Patterson, & Marshall, 1980;Coltheart, Sartori, & Job, 1987;Patterson, Coltheart, & Marshall, 1985). However, relatively few remediation studies have been based directly on cognitive analyses, and while these few have been relatively successful, the specific contribution of the cognitive model is often unclear (for examples and general discussion, see Byng, 1988;Caramazza, 1989;Hillis, 1993;Riddoch & Humphreys, 1994;Margolin, 1992;Mitchum & Berndt, 1990;Patterson, 1994;Seron & Deloche, 1989;Wilson & Patterson, 1990). The limited usefulness of box-and-arrow diagrams in this regard may stem from a general lack of attention paid to specifying the actual representations and computations that perform the task (Seidenberg, 1988, but see Coltheart, Curtis, Atkins, & Haller, 1993, for a recent exception).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Relearning after Damage in Connectionist Networks: Toward a Theory of Rehabilitation

1996

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Connectionist modeling offers a useful computational framework for exploring the nature of normal and impaired cognitive processes. The current work extends the relevance of connectionist modeling in neuropsychology to address issues in cognitive rehabilitation: the degree and speed of recovery through retraining, the extent to which improvement on treated items generalizes to untreated items, and how treated items are selected to maximize this generalization. A network previously used to model impairments in mapping orthography to semantics is retrained after damage. The degree of relearning and generalization varies considerably for different lesion locations, and has interesting implications for understanding the nature and variability of recovery in patients. In a second simulation, retraining on words whose semantics are atypical of their category yields more generalization than retraining on more typical words, suggesting a counterintuitive strategy for selecting items in patient therapy to maximize recovery. In a final simulation, changes in the pattern of errors produced by the network over the course of recovery is used to constrain explanations of the nature of recovery of analogous braindamaged patients. Taken together, the findings demonstrate that the nature of relearning in damaged connectionist networks can make important contributions to a theory of rehabilitation in patients.

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“…The patient we will be describing (JG) shows the "asyntactic" comprehension pattern in a sentence-picture matching task (Byng, 1988). He produces semantic errors in naming pictures (Bishop & Byng, 1984;Nickels & Howard, in press) and his spontaneous speech is agrammatic (Byng, 1988; and see following). In addition, he has been characterised as a deep dyslexic (Byng, 1988).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%