Online Examination of Language Performance in Normal and Neurologically Impaired Adults

Abstract

This article describes how we and others have exploited online methodology to investigate normal and disordered language processing in adults. Online tasks can be used to measure effects occurring at various temporal points during ongoing processing and are often sensitive to fast-acting, automatic processes, as well as to processes that rely on the integration and interaction of several types of information. Online tasks can be compared to their offline counterparts, tasks such as sentence-picture matching, categorization, word generation and repetition. These tasks are often used by clinicians as part of their assessment and treatment repertoire and measure effects observed at the end-points of perhaps several processes. They can thus mask a patient's strengths (and weaknesses) in any single area, including subcomponents of the language domain. We review several online lexical and syntactic processing experiments and end with a discussion of the clinical benefits of this work.