Production of Sentential Negation in German and Italian Non-fluent Aphasia.

The ability of persons with non-fluent aphasia (PWAs) to produce sentential negation has been investigated in several languages, but only in small samples. Accounts of (morpho)syntactic impairment in PWAs have emphasized various factors, such as whether the negative marker blocks or interferes with verb movement, the position of the Negation Phrase in the syntactic hierarchy or the interpretability of negation. This study investigates the ability of German- and Italian-speaking PWAs to construct negative sentences, as well as the role of verbal working memory (WM) capacity and education in task performance and production of sentential negation.

Language Assessment in Multilingualism and Awake Neurosurgery.

Multilingualism has become a worldwide phenomenon that poses critical issues about the language assessment in patients undergoing awake neurosurgery in eloquent brain areas. The accuracy and sensitivity of multilingual perioperative language assessment procedures is crucial for a number of reasons: they should be appropriate to detect deficits in each of the languages spoken by the patient; they should be suitable to identify language-specific cortical regions; they should ensure that each of the languages of a multilingual patient is tested at an adequate and comparable level of difficulty. In clinical practice, a patient-tailored approach is generally preferred.

Modelling picture naming in aphasia: The relationship between consistency and predictability of responses.

Objective: Two aspects of aphasic picture naming were examined: that is, the extent to which the accuracy of the response to the same stimulus is replicated in a successive examination, and , that is, the extent to which accuracy depends on the characteristics of each stimulus.

Methods: Thirty-eight aphasic participants were examined twice. The response pattern was the same across the 2 presentations (response stability) for 36 participants, who were classified into 3 groups according to the prevailing error-type (lexical-semantic, phonological, or a balance between the two error-types): Their item-consistency was quantified with Cohen's kappa.

Time reference in nonfluent and fluent aphasia: a cross-linguistic test of the PAst DIscourse LInking Hypothesis.

Recent studies by Bastiaanse and colleagues found that time reference is selectively impaired in people with nonfluent agrammatic aphasia, with reference to the past being more difficult to process than reference to the present or to the future. To account for this dissociation, they formulated the PAst DIscourse LInking Hypothesis (PADILIH), which posits that past reference is more demanding than present/future reference because it involves discourse linking. There is some evidence that this hypothesis can be applied to people with fluent aphasia as well.

Pure word deafness following left temporal damage: Behavioral and neuroanatomical evidence from a new case.

Pure Word Deafness (PWD) is a rare disorder, characterized by selective loss of speech input processing. Its most common cause is temporal damage to the primary auditory cortex of both hemispheres, but it has been reported also following unilateral lesions. In unilateral cases, PWD has been attributed to the disconnection of Wernicke's area from both right and left primary auditory cortex.

The dissociability of lexical retrieval and morphosyntactic processes for nouns and verbs: A functional and anatomoclinical study.

Nouns and verbs can dissociate following brain damage, at both lexical retrieval and morphosyntactic processing levels. In order to document the range and the neural underpinnings of behavioral dissociations, twelve aphasics with disproportionate difficulty naming objects or actions were asked to apply phonologically identical morphosyntactic transformations to nouns and verbs. Two subjects with poor object naming and 2/10 with poor action naming made no morphosyntactic errors at all.

Can tDCS enhance item-specific effects and generalization after linguistically motivated aphasia therapy for verbs?

Background: Aphasia therapy focusing on abstract properties of language promotes both item-specific effects and generalization to untreated materials. Neuromodulation with transcranial Direct Current Stimulation (tDCS) has been shown to enhance item-specific improvement, but its potential to enhance generalization has not been systematically investigated. Here, we test the efficacy of ACTION (a linguistically motivated protocol) and tDCS in producing item-specific and generalized improvement in aphasia.

Neural bases of orthographic long-term memory and working memory in dysgraphia.

Spelling a word involves the retrieval of information about the word's letters and their order from long-term memory as well as the maintenance and processing of this information by working memory in preparation for serial production by the motor system. While it is known that brain lesions may selectively affect orthographic long-term memory and working memory processes, relatively little is known about the neurotopographic distribution of the substrates that support these cognitive processes, or the lesions that give rise to the distinct forms of dysgraphia that affect these cognitive processes. To examine these issues, this study uses a voxel-based mapping approach to analyse the lesion distribution of 27 individuals with dysgraphia subsequent to stroke, who were identified on the basis of their behavioural profiles alone, as suffering from deficits only affecting either orthographic long-term or working memory, as well as six other individuals with deficits affecting both sets of processes.

Thematic role assignment in the posterior parietal cortex: A TMS study.

Verbs denote relations between entities acting a role in an event. Thematic roles are essential to the correct use of verbs and involve both semantic and syntactic aspects. We used repetitive Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation (rTMS) to study the involvement of three different left parietal sites in the understanding of thematic roles.

Verb production tasks in the measurement of communicative abilities in aphasia.

Background: The neurofunctional correlates of verbs and nouns have been the focus of many theoretically oriented studies. In clinical practice, however, more attention is typically paid to nouns, and the relative usefulness of tasks probing nouns and verbs is unclear. The routine administration of tasks that use verbs could be a relevant addition to current batteries.

Awake surgery between art and science. Part II: language and cognitive mapping.

Direct cortical and subcortical stimulation has been claimed to be the gold standard for exploring brain function. In this field, efforts are now being made to move from intraoperative naming-assisted surgical resection towards the use of other language and cognitive tasks. However, before relying on new protocols and new techniques, we need a multi-staged system of evidence (low and high) relating to each step of functional mapping and its clinical validity.

Distinguishable neurofunctional effects of task practice and item practice in picture naming: a BOLD fMRI study in healthy subjects.

Practice of language tasks results in improved performance and BOLD signal changes. We distinguish changes correlated with repeated exposure to a picture naming task, from changes associated with naming specific items trained during practice. Task practice affected trained and untrained items, yielding left-sided BOLD deactivations in extrastriate, prefrontal and superior temporal areas (consistent with their putative role in perceptual priming, articulatory planning and phonological lexical retrieval, respectively).

Temporal stability and representational distinctiveness: key functions of orthographic working memory.

A primary goal of working memory research has been to understand the mechanisms that permit working memory systems to effectively maintain the identity and order of the elements held in memory for sufficient time as to allow for their selection and transfer to subsequent processing stages. Based on the performance of two individuals with acquired dysgraphia affecting orthographic working memory (WM; the graphemic buffer), we present evidence of two distinct and dissociable functions of orthographic WM. One function is responsible for maintaining the temporal stability of letters held in orthographic WM, while the other is responsible for maintaining their representational distinctiveness.

The role of Broca's area in speech perception: evidence from aphasia revisited.

Motor theories of speech perception have been re-vitalized as a consequence of the discovery of mirror neurons. Some authors have even promoted a strong version of the motor theory, arguing that the motor speech system is critical for perception. Part of the evidence that is cited in favor of this claim is the observation from the early 1980s that individuals with Broca's aphasia, and therefore inferred damage to Broca's area, can have deficits in speech sound discrimination.

A computer-aided evaluation of error patterns in aphasic speech.

The objective of this research is to provide an improved automated computational tool to study aphasic production. Using the speech production of Italian aphasic patients, the present study demonstrates the possibility of applying an integrated algorithm to automatically assess and generate error patterns typical of aphasic speech. Philological studies and aphasia studies share one common point: errors (or variants) are informative, and the intention of the authors (in the case of philology) or of the patients (in the case of aphasiology) is to be established.

Reversed concreteness effect for nouns in a subject with semantic dementia.

Selective sparing of abstract relative to concrete words has been documented only exceptionally in aphasia, following bilateral temporal damage. In this paper we present a new case with sparing of abstract word processing and impairment of concrete words due to selective atrophy of the left anterior temporal regions.In our subject, the reversal of the concreteness effect was restricted to nouns.

Posterior cerebral artery infarcts and semantic category dissociations: a study of 28 patients.

In this study we analysed the relationship between damage in the territory of the posterior cerebral artery and semantic knowledge, with special reference to category dissociations. Twenty-eight posterior cerebral artery stroke patients (18 left, 8 right and 2 bilateral posterior cerebral artery infarctions) completed a neuropsychological battery aimed at assessing semantic knowledge. The battery included picture naming, word-picture matching, a verbal semantic questionnaire and a picture reality decision task.

The effect of a silybin-vitamin e-phospholipid complex on nonalcoholic fatty liver disease: a pilot study.

Oxidative stress leads to chronic liver damage. Silybin has been conjugated with vitamin E and phospholipids to improve its antioxidant activity. Eighty-five patients were divided into 2 groups: those affected by nonalcoholic fatty liver disease (group A) and those with HCV-related chronic hepatitis associated with nonalcoholic fatty liver disease (group B), nonresponders to treatment.

Spelling and dysgraphia.

Early cognitive models of spelling assumed that orthographic word representations are linear, ordered sequences of abstract letter identities (graphemes), activated only by word meaning information, and in some cases proposed that activating phonological information is a necessary stage of the spelling process. Over the past 20 years, studies on dysgraphia have shown that orthographic representations are autonomous from phonological representations and, just like the latter, are directly activated from semantics. The selection of an orthographic form for output relies on the convergence of activation from lexical-semantic information and from sublexical phoneme-grapheme conversion procedures.

Hyperproduction of fibrin and inefficacy of antithrombin III and alpha2 macroglobulin in the presence of bacterial porins.

Bacterial porins enhance the thrombin activity upon chromogen substrate chromozym. Should porin-dependent enhancement of thrombin activity take place also upon fibrinogen in vivo, this might greatly increase the fibrin production which, in turn, might lead to blood vessel obstruction. In this study, we demonstrate fibrin hyperproduction in a simplified coagulative system, consisting of fibrinogen and thrombin-pure molecules, in the presence of bacterial porins.

Patterns of comprehension performance in agrammatic Broca's aphasia: a test of the Trace Deletion Hypothesis.

We tested the core prediction of the Trace Deletion Hypothesis (TDH) of agrammatic Broca's aphasia, which contends that such patients' comprehension performance is normal for active reversible sentences but at chance level for passive reversible sentences. We analyzed the comprehension performance of 38 Italian Broca's aphasics with verified damage to Broca's area, who completed sentence-to-picture matching tasks using active and passive reversible sentences as stimuli. The results failed to confirm the predictions made by TDH: only a small minority (15%) performed at chance on passive sentences and better than chance on active sentences.

The categorical distinction of vowel and consonant representations: evidence from dysgraphia.

Subject GSI presents with a graphemic buffer deficit following a massive left fronto-parietal lesion. His errors involved essentially only consonants (98.2%).

Interactivity and continuity in normal and aphasic language production.

Current research in cognitive modelling has assumed that the interactive nature of processing during language production has been supported by fits to the behaviour of brain-damaged patients. In this paper, several previously proposed theories of word production, all based on the interactive spreading-activation theory of Dell (1986), are evaluated in the context of picture naming. Using a new corpus of data from 50 Italian aphasic patients, we find that patient patterns do not seem to demand an interactive theory.

The relationships between morphological and phonological errors in aphasic speech: data from a word repetition task.

Current theories of single-word processing predict that in some cases brain damage should selectively impair morphological processes, resulting in the selective occurrence of morphological errors. However, such a selective pattern of errors has never been documented, and the available case studies report the systematic association of morphological and phonological (segmental) errors in the same subject. The number of relevant case reports is very small, however.

The neural correlates of grammatical gender: an fMRI investigation.

In an fMRI experiment, subjects saw a written noun and made three distinct decisions in separate sessions: Is its grammatical gender masculine or feminine (grammatical feature task)? Is it an animal or an artifact (semantic task)? Does it contain a /tch/ or a /k/ sound (phonological task)? Relative to the other experimental conditions, the grammatical feature task activated areas of the left middle and inferior frontal gyrus and of the left middle and inferior temporal gyrus. These activations fit in well with neuropsychological studies that document the correlation between left frontal lesions and damage to morphological processes in agrammatism, and the correlation between left temporal lesions and failure to access lexical representations in anomia. Taken together, these data suggest that grammatical gender is processed in a left frontotemporal network.