Sentence processing in aphasia

Question 1

features of non-fluent aphasia

Answer 1

Prosody disturbed and often phonetic disturbance

Slow effortful production

Produce less expressive language than typical speakers

May omit words

May have agrammatism

Auditory comprehension may appear preserved in conversation

Question 2

what is agrammatism

Answer 2

Deficit in syntactic processing

Affects input and output processing

Asyntactic comprehension and production

Question 3

what is asyntactic production?

Answer 3

Short, simplified phrase length

Content words: mainly nouns and some high frequency verbs

Few function words

Lack of inflectional morphology (e.g. plurals)

Question 4

features of fluent aphasia

Answer 4

Typical prosody and no phonetic difficulties

Syntax appears normal may produce paragrammatic errors e.g word/morpheme substitutions and blends

Lexical retrieval errors affecting V and N: semantic, unrelated, circumlocutions

Possible phonemic paraphasias and jargon

Auditory comprehension may be impaired

Question 5

which is more complex? short or long sentences

Answer 5

long sentences

Question 6

which is more complex? active or passive sentences

Answer 6

Passive sentences are more complex than active sentences since passive in unexpected and therefore hard to process

Question 7

what is the mapping theory?

Answer 7

words have thematic roles

Question 8

what is a thematic role

Answer 8

Thematic role = the ‘meaning’ role that a word or phrase plays in each sentence (e.g. agent, verb, patient)

Question 9

who came up with the model of sentence production

Answer 9

Garret, 1984

Question 10

4 levels in sentence production model

Answer 10

message level

functional level

positional level

phonetic level

Question 11

what happens at the message level

Answer 11

ouline of event, idea or message to be conveyed

Question 12

what happens at the functional level

Answer 12

Identifies predicate argument structure, driven by syntactic processes

Semantic representations retrieved

Question 13

what happens at the positional level

Answer 13

Syntactic frame produced with phonological forms of words inserted into frame

Question 14

what happens at the phonetic level

Answer 14

Phonological forms are slotted into phonological frame

Question 15

when are thematic roles assigned?

Answer 15

between message and functional level

Question 16

when are grammatical elements added

Answer 16

at the positional level

Question 17

what are sentence processing deficits

Answer 17

Verb processing (inc. verb semantics and verb retrieval)

Assigning thematic roles

Integrating semantic and syntactic information

Generating an accurate syntactic structure

Question 18

what is the core meaning of a verb

Answer 18

Specifies general aspects of the event (e.g. ‘eat’ involved food)

Imposes selection restrictions over verb arguments (e.g. you cannot ‘eat’ the food)

Question 19

2 types of verbs

Answer 19

transitive

intransitive

Question 20

what is a transitive verb

Answer 20

Requires obligatory arguments (e.g. “John lifted” doesn’t make sense on its own)

Question 21

what is an intransitive verb

Answer 21

Does not require an argument (e.g. Ruby danced)

Question 22

what is a predicate-argument structure

Answer 22

Verb = predicate, arguments = dictated by semantics

A good PA structure doesn’t make assumptions about what the other person knows

Question 23

what is thematic information

Answer 23

Specifies the arguments that combine with the verb and their role in the event

thematic roles

obligatory vs optional arguments

Question 24

what are the thematic roles for the verb ‘to sell’

Answer 24

agent - seller

patient - object sold

goal - buyer

Question 25

what is an agent?

Answer 25

Animate being (usually), causing an action or change of state

Question 26

what is a patient?

Answer 26

The entity which undergoes the effect of the action or change of state

Question 27

types of verb impairment

Answer 27

verb retrieval impairment impaired verb syntax knowledge impaired thematic aspects of verbs

Question 28

what is verb retrieval impairment a common feature of

Answer 28

agrammatism

Question 29

assessment of verb retrieval impairment

Answer 29

Single word production verbs  Ability to produce sentences with no support and compare to production when verb is supplied

Question 30

features of impaired verb syntax knowledge

Answer 30

Lack of affixes (Present 3rd person singular (-s) and past tense (-ed)) Difficulty with production of irregular past tense Can occur with impairment in mapping thematic knowledge

Question 31

features of thematic knowledge impairment (10)

Answer 31

Verb omission Incorrect ordering of nouns  Relative preservation of function words and inflections More nouns than verbs in output Verb form limited to base form ( -ing) Effect of number of verb arguments on production? Giving a verb will not help as deficit is not in verb retrieval but in verb argument knowledge Limited structural complexity Comprehension of verbs will also be impaired Reversible sentences particularly difficult

Question 32

assessment of impaired thematic aspects of verbs (6)

Answer 32

Picture description (CAT) Verb naming (CAT) Procedural narrative (e.g. “how do you make a cup of tea?”) Story re-telling Thematic roles in production (TRIP) Object & Action Naming Battery (Druks, 2000)

Question 33

sentence comprehension: are reversible or non-reversible sentences easier to understand?

Answer 33

NR easier to process

Question 34

sentence comprehension: are sentences with or without pragmatic bias easier to understand?

Answer 34

PB: “the woman feeding the horse is singing” -> easier to understand since horses don’t sing No PB: “the woman hugging the man is tall” PB easier than no PB

Question 35

difficulties in sentence comprehension specific to Broca's aphasia

Answer 35

Syntactic deficit with embedded clauses (Caramazza & Zurif, 1976) Difficulties with simple SVO sentence comprehension (Schwartz et. al., 1980) - The cat chases the dog (need to understand thematic roles here to comprehend why) = Difficulty with parsing and interpreting word order

Question 36

things to test to test sentence comprehension

Answer 36

Reversible and non-reversible sentences Canonical structures such as SVO Moved arguments (i.e. passive voice) Embedded clauses

Question 37

published tests for sentence comprehension

Answer 37

PALPA 55 and 56, Written and spoken sentence comprehension (Kay, Lesser and Coltheart, 1992) Comprehensive Aphasia Test (Swinburn et. al., 2005) Sentence processing resource pack (Marshall et. al., 1999)

Question 38

therapy techniques for sentence comprehension

Answer 38

Verb naming at single word level Therapies involving assigning correct thematic roles Mapping therapies (Rochon et. al., 2005) Verb Noun association therapy (Webster & Gordon, 2009) Verb Network Strengthening Test (VNeST) (Edmonds et. al., 2019) Generating sentences in response to questions (e.g. Constraint Induced Aphasia Therapy CIAT - Cherney et. al., 2008) Cuespeak exercises

Question 39

what are sentence therapy essentials according to Hickin et. al., 2021

Answer 39

Producing verb as part of sentence Using pictures to stimulate sentence production Using written cues Focus on thematic roles and how they map onto syntax