Interplay of Semantic Plausibility and Word Order Canonicity in Sentence Processing of People With Aphasia Using a Verb-Final Language.

Purpose: The Western Aphasia Battery is widely used to assess people with aphasia (PWA). Sequential Commands (SC) is one of the most challenging subtests for PWA. However, test items confound linguistic factors that make sentences difficult for PWA.

Effects of linguistic context and noise type on speech comprehension.

Introduction: Understanding speech in background noise is an effortful endeavor. When acoustic challenges arise, linguistic context may help us fill in perceptual gaps. However, more knowledge is needed regarding how different types of background noise affect our ability to construct meaning from perceptually complex speech input.

Efficacy of Aphasia Group Conversation Treatment via Telepractice on Language and Patient-Reported Outcome Measures.

Purpose: Conversation treatment for people with aphasia (PwA) can lead to significant changes in language impairment and quality of life. The COVID-19 pandemic has resulted in the greater use of telepractice treatment delivery. However, there is little evidence regarding the efficacy of telepractice conversation groups.

Sentence Production in a Discourse Context in Latent Aphasia: A Real-Time Study.

Purpose: The purpose of this study was to improve our understanding as to which factors determine online, spoken sentence production abilities of adults with latent aphasia in a discourse context.

Method: Discourse samples of the story of Cinderella elicited from AphasiaBank were analyzed with speech analysis software. Participants comprised people with latent and anomic aphasia as well as neurotypical controls (10 per group).

Demystifying the Complexity of Aphasia Treatment: Application of the Rehabilitation Treatment Specification Systemx.

A considerable body of research supports the use of behavioral communication treatment as the standard of care for aphasia. In spite of robust progress in clinical aphasiology, many questions regarding optimal care remain unanswered. One of the major challenges to progress in the field is the lack of a common framework to adequately describe individual treatments, which, if available, would allow comparisons across studies as well as improved communication among researchers, clinicians, and other stakeholders.

Applying the Rehabilitation Treatment Specification System to Functional Communication Treatment Approaches for Aphasia.

There are many different approaches to the rehabilitation of patients with aphasia, a communication disorder that affects a person's understanding and expression of spoken and written language. One approach called "functional communication interventions" aims to enhance communication success as opposed to solely improving linguistic abilities. This approach encompasses many skills (eg, gesturing) and factors (eg, access to communication supports) that support sending and receiving messages in "real-world" daily activities and environments.

A Randomized Controlled Trial of the Effects of Group Conversation Treatment on Monologic Discourse in Aphasia.

Purpose: Evidence has shown that group conversation treatment may improve communication and reduce social isolation for people with aphasia. However, little is known about the impact of conversation group treatment on measures of discourse. This project explored the impact of conversation treatment on measures of monologic discourse.

Effects of animacy and sentence type on silent reading comprehension in aphasia: An eye-tracking study.

The present study examined how healthy aging and aphasia influence the capacity for readers to generate structural predictions during online reading, and how animacy cues influence this process. Non-brain-damaged younger (n =24) and older (n =12) adults (Experiment 1) and individuals with aphasia (IWA; n =11; Experiment 2) read subject relative and object relative sentences in an eye-tracking experiment. Half of the sentences included animate sentential subjects, and the other half included inanimate sentential subjects.

Perceptual span in individuals with aphasia.

Background: Perceptual span refers to the field of effective vision during reading comprehension. It is determined by many factors, including reading proficiency. No studies have investigated the perceptual span in people with reading comprehension impairments due to aphasia.

What Drives Task Performance During Animal Fluency in People With Alzheimer's Disease?

Background: Animal fluency is a widely used task to assess people with Alzheimer's disease (AD) and other neurological disorders. The mechanisms that drive performance in this task are argued to rely on language and executive functions. However, there is little information regarding what specific aspects of these cognitive processes drive performance on this task.

Efficacy of Group Conversation Intervention in Individuals with Severe Profiles of Aphasia.

An estimated 390,000 to 520,000 individuals with severe aphasia (IWSA) currently live in the United States. IWSA experience profound social isolation, which is associated with a wide range of negative health outcomes, including mortality. Treatments for severe aphasia frequently focus on compensatory communication approaches or a discrete communication act rather than on participation-based treatment.

Temporal and Episodic Analyses of the Story of Cinderella in Latent Aphasia.

Purpose The purpose of this study was to improve our understanding of the language characteristics of people with latent aphasia using measures that examined temporal (i.e., real-time) and episodic organization of discourse production.

Two to Tango or the More the Merrier? A Randomized Controlled Trial of the Effects of Group Size in Aphasia Conversation Treatment on Standardized Tests.

Purpose Group conversation treatment has the potential to improve communication and reduce social isolation for people with aphasia. This project examined how 2 conflicting hypotheses-treatment dosage and group dynamics-affect treatment outcomes. Method Forty-eight participants with chronic aphasia were randomly assigned to either a dyad, a large group, or a delayed control group.

Effects of Lexical Variables on Silent Reading Comprehension in Individuals With Aphasia: Evidence From Eye Tracking.

Purpose: Previous eye-tracking research has suggested that individuals with aphasia (IWA) do not assign syntactic structure on their first pass through a sentence during silent reading comprehension. The purpose of the present study was to investigate the time course with which lexical variables affect silent reading comprehension in IWA. Three lexical variables were investigated: word frequency, word class, and word length.

Corpus-Based Transitivity Biases in Individuals with Aphasia.

Background: This study investigated whether individuals with aphasia (IWA) retain verb biases in expressive language. Verb biases refer to the likelihood that a given verb will occur in different sentence structures. We focused on the likelihood of verbs occurring in transitive and intransitive structures.

Cross-Linguistic Differences in a Picture-Description Task Between Korean- and English-Speaking Individuals With Aphasia.

Purpose: The purpose of the study was to examine cross-linguistic differences in a picture-description task between Korean- and English-speaking individuals with Broca's and anomic aphasia to determine whether a variation exists in the use of verbs and nouns across the language and aphasia groups.

Method: Forty-eight individuals (male = 29; female = 19) participated in the study (n = 28 for aphasic group and n = 20 healthy controls). Data for English speakers were obtained from the Aphasia Bank Project.

Effects of Steady-State Noise on Verbal Working Memory in Young Adults.

Purpose: We set out to examine the impact of perceptual, linguistic, and capacity demands on performance of verbal working-memory tasks. The Ease of Language Understanding model (Rönnberg et al., 2013) provides a framework for testing the dynamics of these interactions within the auditory-cognitive system.

Online Sentence Reading in People With Aphasia: Evidence From Eye Tracking.

Purpose: There is a lot of evidence that people with aphasia have more difficulty understanding structurally complex sentences (e.g., object clefts) than simpler sentences (subject clefts).

Effects of animacy on processing relative clauses in older and younger adults.

Sentences with object relative clauses are more difficult to process than sentences with subject relative clauses, but the processing penalty associated with object relatives is greater when the sentential subject is an animate than when it is an inanimate noun. The present study tested the hypothesis that older adults are more sensitive to this type of semantic constraint than younger adults. Older and younger adults (n = 28 per group) participated in a self-paced listening study.

Sentence comprehension in older adults: evidence for risky processing strategies.

Unlabelled: BACKGROUND/STUDY CONTEXT: Previous research has suggested that older adults compensate for age-related declines in sentence comprehension ability by reading more slowly. The purpose of this study was to investigate the hypothesis that older adults adopt a riskier strategy than younger adults, in which they rely on expectations based on probabilistic cues.

Methods: Older and younger adults read late closure sentences in a self-paced reading task (e.

Effects of Verb Bias and Syntactic Ambiguity on Reading in People with Aphasia.

Background: The Lexical Bias Hypothesis (Gahl, 2002) claims that people with aphasia have difficulty understanding sentences when the verb's argument structure bias conflicts with the sentence structure. This hypothesis can account for comprehension deficits that affect simple sentences, but the role of verb bias has not been clearly demonstrated in temporarily ambiguous sentences.

Aims: This study examined how verb bias affects comprehension of temporarily ambiguous and unambiguous sentences using self-paced reading.

Reading and listening in people with aphasia: effects of syntactic complexity.

Purpose: The purpose of this study was to compare online effects of syntactic complexity in written and spoken sentence comprehension in people with aphasia (PWA) and adults with no brain damage (NBD).

Method: The participants in Experiment 1 were NBD older and younger adults (n = 20 per group). The participants in Experiment 2 were 10 PWA.

Verb Transitivity Bias Affects On-line Sentence Reading in People with Aphasia.

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.

Effects of word frequency and modality on sentence comprehension impairments in people with aphasia.

Purpose: It is well known that people with aphasia have sentence comprehension impairments. The present study investigated whether lexical factors contribute to sentence comprehension impairments in both the auditory and written modalities using online measures of sentence processing.

Method: People with aphasia and non brain-damaged controls participated in the experiment (n = 8 per group).