Semantic but not Phonological Short-Term Memory Supports Sentence Elaboration in Narrative Production: Evidence from Left Hemisphere Acute Stroke

Abstract

Event Abstract Back to Event Semantic but not Phonological Short-Term Memory Supports Sentence Elaboration in Narrative Production: Evidence from Left Hemisphere Acute Stroke Randi C. Martin1*, Tatiana Schnur2 and Jolie Anderson1 1 Rice University, United States 2 Baylor College of Medicine, United States Introduction Prior research has suggested that a reduced semantic short-term memory (STM) capacity leads to a reduced ability to produce noun phrases containing prenominal adjectives, whereas a reduced phonological STM capacity has no relation to noun phrase elaboration (Martin & Freedman, 2001). These results suggest that speakers hold lexical-semantic representations of words in mind when planning noun phrases and retrieve the phonological representations sequentially when producing the phrase. However, these findings derive from a few case studies using a constrained picture description task. Here we evaluated whether this relation between semantic STM and noun phrase elaboration holds for a larger sample size, using a more naturalistic narrative production task with patients tested at the acute phase of stroke. Patients told the Cinderella story and narratives were scored according to the Quantitative Production Analysis (QPA; Rochon et al., 2000). We assessed the relation of semantic and phonological STM to both noun phrase elaboration and verb phrase elaboration measures, given that verb phrases often contain noun phrase arguments. To address the possibility that any correlations reflect only overall severity, we also assessed the correlation with proportion of closed class words, where no correlation with semantic STM was predicted. Method 17 patients were tested within 72 hrs. of a left-hemisphere ischemic stroke. To rule out semantic or phonological deficits as the source of STM deficits, participants were screened to score better than 2 standard deviations below the patient mean on a picture-word matching task for trials with either semantic or phonological foils (Martin et al., 1999). Semantic STM was assessed using the category probe task, in which subjects judge whether a probe word is in the same category as any list word, and phonological STM was assessed with a digit matching span measure (Allen et al., 2012). QPA measures included subject noun phrase (SNP) elaboration and verb phrase (VP) elaboration, which reflect the number of content words in the SNP and VP beyond the head noun and verb, and proportion closed class words out of all narrative words. Results As predicted, the semantic STM measure correlated with SNP elaboration (r=.50, p = .042) and had a marginal correlation with VP elaboration (r=.42, p =.066) but did not correlate with proportion closed class words (r=.10, p=.685). The same pattern was obtained when partialling out a measure of semantic knowledge. In contrast, the phonological STM measure did not correlate with the QPA measures (SNP elaboration: r=.14, p =.60; VP elaboration: r=.24, p = .38; proportion closed class words: r=.001, p = .83). The same pattern was obtained when partialling out a measure of phonological processing ability. Discussion The present results confirm previous findings suggesting a role for semantic and not phonological STM in planning multiple words during production. As such, they are consistent with theoretical claims that such planning has a greater scope at the semantic than the phonological level. Future work will address whether improvements in semantic but not phonological STM lead to greater sentence elaboration during recovery of narrative production post-stroke. Figure 1 Acknowledgements This research was supported by a grant from the Moody Endowment to Rice University (Tatiana Schnur, PI). References Allen, C. M., Martin, R. C., & Martin, N. (2012). Relations between short-term memory deficits, semantic processing and executive function. Aphasiology, 26, 428-461. Martin, R. C., & Freedman, M. L. (2001). Short-term retention of lexical-semantic representations: Implications for speech production. Memory, 9, 261-280. Martin, R., Lesch, M., & Bartha, M. (1999). Independence of input and output phonology in word processing and short-term memory. Journal of Memory and Language, 41, 3-29. Rochon, E., Saffran, E., Berndt, R., & Schwartz, M. (2000). Quantitative analysis of aphasic sentence production: Further development and new data. Brain and Language, 3, 193-218. Keywords: Narrative production, short-term memory, acute stroke, noun phrase elaboration, Aphasia Conference: 54th Annual Academy of Aphasia Meeting, Llandudno, United Kingdom, 16 Oct - 18 Oct, 2016. Presentation Type: Platform Sessions Topic: Academy of Aphasia Citation: Martin RC, Schnur T and Anderson J (2016). Semantic but not Phonological Short-Term Memory Supports Sentence Elaboration in Narrative Production: Evidence from Left Hemisphere Acute Stroke. Front. Psychol. Conference Abstract: 54th Annual Academy of Aphasia Meeting. doi: 10.3389/conf.fpsyg.2016.68.00056 Copyright: The abstracts in this collection have not been subject to any Frontiers peer review or checks, and are not endorsed by Frontiers. They are made available through the Frontiers publishing platform as a service to conference organizers and presenters. The copyright in the individual abstracts is owned by the author of each abstract or his/her employer unless otherwise stated. Each abstract, as well as the collection of abstracts, are published under a Creative Commons CC-BY 4.0 (attribution) licence (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/) and may thus be reproduced, translated, adapted and be the subject of derivative works provided the authors and Frontiers are attributed. For Frontiers’ terms and conditions please see https://www.frontiersin.org/legal/terms-and-conditions. Received: 28 Apr 2016; Published Online: 15 Aug 2016. * Correspondence: Prof. Randi C Martin, Rice University, Houston, Tx, United States, rmartin@rice.edu Login Required This action requires you to be registered with Frontiers and logged in. To register or login click here. Abstract Info Abstract The Authors in Frontiers Randi C Martin Tatiana Schnur Jolie Anderson Google Randi C Martin Tatiana Schnur Jolie Anderson Google Scholar Randi C Martin Tatiana Schnur Jolie Anderson PubMed Randi C Martin Tatiana Schnur Jolie Anderson Related Article in Frontiers Google Scholar PubMed Abstract Close Back to top Javascript is disabled. Please enable Javascript in your browser settings in order to see all the content on this page.