The Time-Course of Lexical Activation During Sentence Comprehension in People With Aphasia

Ferrill, Michelle; Love, Tracy; Walenski, Matthew; Shapiro, Lewis P.

doi:10.1044/1058-0360(2012/11-0109)

Cited by 61 publications

(49 citation statements)

References 39 publications

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“…The fact that people with aphasia had longer overall reading times than the controls is broadly consistent with the claim that slowed lexical access interferes with sentence processing (e.g., Ferril et al, 2012; Love et al, 2008; Swinney et al, 1996). However, even if the effects of verb mismatch were spurious, the people with aphasia showed significant effects of mismatch at the same point in the sentence as non-brain-damaged controls.…”

Section: Discussionsupporting

confidence: 80%

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Verb transitivity bias affects on-line sentence reading in people with aphasia

DeDe

2013

Aphasiology

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Background Studies of sentence comprehension in non-disordered populations have convincingly demonstrated that probabilistic cues influence on-line syntactic processing. One well-studied cue is verb argument structure bias, which refers to the probability that a verb will occur in a particular syntactic frame. According to the Lexical Bias Hypothesis, people with aphasia have difficulty understanding sentences in which the verb’s argument structure bias conflicts with the sentence structure (e.g., a transitively biased verb in an intransitive sentence). This hypothesis may provide an account of why people with aphasia have difficulty understanding both simple and complex sentences. Aims The purpose of this study was to test the Lexical Bias Hypothesis using an on-line measure of written sentence comprehension, self-paced reading. Methods & Procedures The participants were ten people with aphasia and ten non-brain-damaged controls. The stimuli were syntactically simple transitive and intransitive sentences that contained transitively- or intransitively-biased verbs. For example, the transitively-biased verb “called” appeared in sentences such as “The agent called (the writer) from overseas to make an offer.” The intransitively-biased verb “danced” appeared in sentences such as “The couple danced (the tango) every Friday night last summer.” Outcomes & Results Both groups’ reading times for critical segments were longer when the verb’s transitivity bias did not match the sentence structure, particularly in intransitive sentences. Conclusions The results were generally consistent with the Lexical Bias Hypothesis, and demonstrated that lexical biases affect on-line processing of syntactically simple sentences in people with aphasia and controls.

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Section: Discussionsupporting

confidence: 80%

“…This would be consistent with Love and colleagues’ claim that sentence comprehension deficits reflect slowed lexical processing, on the assumption that slowed lexical access should affect the time course with which lexical biases are activated (e.g., Ferril, Love, Walenski, & Shapiro, 2012; Love, Swinney, Walenski, & Zurif, 2008)…”

Section: Introductionsupporting

confidence: 88%

Verb transitivity bias affects on-line sentence reading in people with aphasia

DeDe

2013

Aphasiology

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“…On average, participants with aphasia required twice as long as participants without aphasia to perform the experimental trials regardless of sentence stimulus condition. This finding is consistent with that of other researchers (e.g., Ferrill, Love, Walenski, & Shapiro, 2012) who have suggested that people with aphasia have slow processing speeds and highlights the need to allow ample processing time when interacting with people with aphasia.…”

Section: Processing Timesupporting

confidence: 92%

High-context images: Comprehension of main, background, and inferential information by people with aphasia

et al. 2014

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Background: Professionals often recommend using high-context images as expressive and receptive communication supports, even though researchers know little about the information people with aphasia can extract from these images. Aims: This study's purposes were to compare the accuracy and speed with which people with and without aphasia derive main action, background, and inferential information from high-context images. Methods & Procedures: Twenty people with and 20 people without neurological impairment selected high-context images to match spoken sentences conveying main action, background, or inferential information. Participants listened to each sentence presented twice and selected the target image from a field of four. Computation of nonparametric statistics allowed accuracy and speed comparisons between participant groups and among the three stimulus sentence conditions. Additionally, the researchers computed correlations between participants' standardised test scores and their accuracy and speed when performing the experimental task. Outcomes & Results: Task performance by participants without aphasia was more accurate and faster than that of participants with aphasia regardless of sentence condition. Both groups were most accurate and fastest given sentences conveying main actions. The participants with aphasia were significantly slower and less accurate when selecting high-context images to match sentences relaying background and inferential information than ones relaying main action information. This pattern differed from that of participants without aphasia who demonstrated a significant decrease in accuracy only for inferential sentences; they demonstrated significantly different response speeds among all sentence conditions. No significant correlations emerged between Western Aphasia Battery-Revised Aphasia Quotient scores or Cognitive Linguistic Quick Test Executive Functioning or Visual Spatial Domain scores and participants' accuracy or speed of experimental task performance. However, accuracy and speed in some of the sentence stimulus conditions correlated significantly with auditory comprehension subtest scores of the Comprehensive Aphasia Test. All significant correlations indicated that accuracy increased and response speed decreased as auditory comprehension scores increased. Conclusions: Participants with aphasia performed with less accuracy and were slower at responding than participants without aphasia. The fact that participants with aphasia took about twice as long to respond on average as participants without aphasia highlights the need for ample processing time when interacting with people with aphasia. However, despite their aphasia severity as measured by standardised testing, some participants performed well regardless of whether a stimulus sentence referenced main action, background, or inferential information. The results suggest that many people with aphasia can derive substantial information from high-context images.

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“…Downloaded by [Northwestern University] at 09:52 25 March 2015 Furthermore, the decrease in RT reported for the post-pronoun region in contexts where the depicted antecedent of the overt pronoun was the syntactic object along with the aphasic group's offline low-matching rates for the overt pronoun-object coindexation condition implies first of all that the aphasic processor gained momentarily access to the lexical bias of the overt pronoun in an implicit, at least not strategic fashion. The emergence of such effect on a late temporal window goes in line with former findings on lexical processing in Broca's aphasia showing a deficit in the timely activation of lexical form representations (Choy & Thompson, 2010;Ferrill, Love, Walenski, & Shapiro, 2012). The fact that such lexical bias did not impact matching decisions shows specifically impaired online integration of top-down discourse cues, despite comparatively spared bottom-up lexical integration.…”

Section: Downloaded By [Northwestern University] At 09:52 25 March 2015supporting

confidence: 69%

Pronoun processing in Broca’s aphasia: Discourse–syntax effects in ambiguous anaphora resolution

Peristeri¹,

Tsimpli²

2013

Aphasiology

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Background: The interpretation of ambiguous subject pronouns in a null subject language, like Greek, requires that one possesses grammatical knowledge of the two subject pronominal forms, i.e., null and overt, and that discourse constraints regulating the distribution of the two pronouns in context are respected. Aims: We investigated whether the topic-shift feature encoded in overt subject pronouns would exert similar interpretive effects in a group of seven participants with Broca's aphasia and a group of language-unimpaired adults during online processing of null and overt subject pronouns in referentially ambiguous contexts. Method & Procedures:An offline picture-sentence matching task was initially administered to investigate whether the participants with Broca's aphasia had access to the gender and number features of clitic pronouns. An online self-paced listening picture-verification task was subsequently administered to examine how the aphasic individuals resolve pronoun ambiguities in contexts with either null or overt subject pronouns and how their performance compares to that of language-unimpaired adults.Outcomes & Results: Results demonstrate that the Broca group, along with controls, had intact access to the morphosyntactic features of clitic pronouns. However, the aphasic individuals showed decreased preference for non-salient antecedents in object position during the online resolution of ambiguous overt subject pronouns and preferred to pick the subject antecedent instead. Conclusions: Broca's aphasic participants' parsing decisions in the online task reflect their difficulty with establishing topic-shifted interpretations of the ambiguous overt subject pronouns. The presence of a local topic-shift effect in the immediate temporal vicinity of the overt pronoun suggests that sensitivity to the marked informational status of overt pronouns is preserved in the aphasic individuals, yet, it is blocked under conditions of global sentential processing.

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The Time-Course of Lexical Activation During Sentence Comprehension in People With Aphasia

Cited by 61 publications

References 39 publications

Verb transitivity bias affects on-line sentence reading in people with aphasia

Verb transitivity bias affects on-line sentence reading in people with aphasia

High-context images: Comprehension of main, background, and inferential information by people with aphasia

Pronoun processing in Broca’s aphasia: Discourse–syntax effects in ambiguous anaphora resolution

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