Aphasic Speakers Research Articles

Corrective demonstrations and embodied resources for modeling speech sounds in aphasia speech-language therapy

This paper analyzes the way speech-language therapists instruct and correct aphasic speakers regarding the pronunciation of linguistic items and model pronunciation through auditory, verbal, visual, and tactile resources, thus configuring it as an embodied, multisensory experience. The data analysis shows that correction of a patient's productions is first initiated by therapists audibly, through repetition of the target item with specific prosodic features, such as loudness and length. When this type of cue proves to be ineffective, therapists perform instructions and corrective demonstrations through visual and haptic cues: By using their body as an “instructional tool,” they represent, with gestures and facial expressions, features of the target sound. They can also touch a patient's face to help them to correctly realize specific articulatory movements. This paper focuses on the hierarchy of embodied resources that are mobilized by therapists, in an ordered and incremental way, to model pronunciation. Moreover, it highlights the methods used to enhance patients' visual attention toward embodied resources and solve issues of bodily coordination. More broadly, this paper highlights the complex embodied nature of speaking and, by focusing on a pathological situation and a therapeutic setting, shows what participants treat as relevant for producing speech sounds in interaction.

Neural correlates of thematic role assignment for passives in Standard Indonesian.

Previous studies of multiple languages have found processing differences between patient-first and agent-first word orders. However, the results are inconsistent as they do not identify a specific ERP component as a unique correlate of thematic role processing. Furthermore, these studies generally confound word order with frequency, as patient-first structures tend to be infrequent in the languages that have been investigated. There is evidence that frequency at the sentence level plays a significant role in language processing. To address this potential confounding variable, we will test a language where the non-canonical sentences are more frequent and are comparable to the canonical sentences, namely Standard Indonesian. In this language, there is evidence from acquisition, corpus, and clinical data indicates that the use of passive is frequent and salient. One instance of this difference can be demonstrated by the fact that it has been suggested that frequency may be the reason why Indonesian-speaking aphasic speakers do not have impairments in the comprehension of passives, whereas speakers of other languages with aphasia often do. In the present study, we will test 50 native speakers of Indonesian using 100 sentences (50 active and 50 passive sentences). If the neural correlates of thematic role processing are not observed in the critical region of the sentence (the prefix of the verb), this would suggest that the previous results were indeed influenced by frequency, but if we find that specific ERPs are connected to the hypothesized syntactic operations, this would further reinforce the existing evidence of the increased cognitive load required to process more syntactically complicated sentences.

Effects of delay, length, and frequency on onset RTs and word durations: Articulatory planning uses flexible units but cannot be prepared

ABSTRACT There is debate regarding whether most articulatory planning occurs offline (rather than online) and whether the products of off-line processing are stored in a separate articulatory buffer until a large enough chunk is ready for production. This hypothesis predicts that delayed naming conditions should reduce not only onset RTs but also word durations because articulatory plans will be buffered and kept ready. We have tested this hypothesis with young control speakers, an aphasic speaker , and an age and education-matched speaker, using repetition, reading and picture-naming tasks. Contrary to the off-line hypothesis, delayed conditions strongly reduced onset RTs, but had no benefit for word durations. In fact, we found small effects in the opposite direction. Moreover, frequency and imageability affected word durations even in delayed conditions, consistent with articulatory processing continuing on-line. The same pattern of results was found in CS and in control participants, strengthening confidence in our results. There is debate regarding whether most articulatory planning occurs offline (rather than online) and whether the results of off-line processing are stored in a separate articulatory buffer until a large enough chunk is ready for production. This hypothesis predicts that delayed naming conditions should reduce not only onset RTs but also word durations because articulatory plans will be buffered and kept ready. We have tested young control speakers, an aphasic speaker, and an age and education matched speaker, using repetition, reading and picture naming tasks. Contrary to the off-line hypothesis, delayed conditions strongly reduced onset RTs, but had no benefit for word durations. In fact, we found small effects in the opposite direction. Moreover, frequency and imageability affected word durations even in delayed conditions, consistent with articulatory processing continuing on-line. The same pattern of results was found in CS and in control participants, strengthening confidence in our results.

The Impact of Blended Learning on Student’s Achievement at Lebanese French University

Language is a phenomenon that has a central point within the field of linguistics. Among many aspects that are usually tackled within linguistics, the comprehension and the production of language are analyzed as well. Therefore, the two mentioned processes have a specific focus within the domain of linguistics. The ability to produce and comprehend language is usually examined by the speech input and output of speakers with brain damage. The current research tries to highlight a linguistic investigation by focusing on the speech comprehension and production of individuals with aphasia. That is why the aim of this research is to analyze the linguistic matters of spoken language input and output that are usually weakened as an outcome of brain damage such as stroke. In addition, the present work tries to reveal possible characteristics of aphasic speakers that show clear difficulties during speech input and output due to brain injury. The method of the study consists of semi-structured interviews with aphasic speakers that are collected by visiting a number of different public and private hospitals and physiotherapy centers in Erbil. The tests are done by using picture presentation techniques and a questionnaire related to background information of the participants. Aphasic individuals are shown a number of different types of pictures and are asked to answer specific questions related to the events within the pictures. Their linguistic state is then examined by analyzing their answer syntactically and semantically.

Facilitating Word Retrieval in Aphasia: Which Type of Cues for Which Aphasic Speakers?

Background: Even if both phonological and semantic cues can facilitate word retrieval in aphasia, it remains unclear if their respective effectiveness varies according to the underlying anomic profile.Aim: The aim of the present facilitation study is to compare the effect of phonological and semantic cues on picture naming accuracy and speed in different types of anomia.Methods: In the present within-subject design study, 15 aphasic persons following brain damage underwent picture naming paradigms with semantic cues (categorically- or associatively related) and phonological cues (initial phoneme presented auditorily, visually or both).Results: At the group level, semantic cueing was as effective as phonological cueing to significantly speed up picture naming. However, while phonological cues were effective regardless of the anomic profile, semantic cueing effects varied depending on the type of anomia. Participants with mixed anomia showed facilitation after both semantic categorical and associative cues, but individuals with lexical-phonological anomia only after categorical cues. Crucially, semantic cues were ineffective for participants with lexical-semantic anomia. These disparities were confirmed by categorical semantic facilitation decreasing when semantic/omission errors prevailed in the anomic profile, but increasing alongside phonological errors.Conclusion: The effectiveness of phonological vs semantic cues seems related to the underlying anomic profile: phonological cues benefit any type of anomia, but semantic cues only lexical-phonological or mixed anomia.

ЎЗБЕК ТИЛИДАГИ АГРАММАТИК АФАЗИЯДА ОТ ВА ФЕЪЛЛАРНИНГ ИФОДАЛАНИШИ

Noun and verb retrieval in Uzbek agrammatic aphasia is studied through picture naming experiment. Healthy and brain-damaged individuals participated in the study. Neuro linguistic studies showed difference in noun and verb impairment in aphasia. Majority of studies reported that noun processing is easier than verb processing for aphasic speakers. The results of the current study showed no noun-verb dissociation in Uzbek agrammatic aphasia. However, a small effect of age of acquisition on noun production and image ability effect on verb production is observed.

Use of Autobiographical Sentence Generation to Treat Anomia: Case Studies of Two Mandarin-Speaking Bilinguals with Primary Progressive Aphasia (PPA)

Use of Autobiographical Sentence Generation to Treat Anomia: Case Studies of Two Mandarin-Speaking Bilinguals with Primary Progressive Aphasia (PPA)

Noun and Verb Morphology in Swahili Individuals with Aphasia

Noun and Verb Morphology in Swahili Individuals with Aphasia

Cascading activation in spoken production: Evidence from phonetic analysis of aphasic speech

Cascading activation in spoken production: Evidence from phonetic analysis of aphasic speech

Losing A Language: A Qualitative Study of Code-Switching Among Taiwanese-Chinese Bilingual Aphasic Speakers with Selective Recovery Pattern

This study aimed to investigate whether Taiwanese-Mandarin bilingual aphasia with selective recovery patterns lose knowledge of the inaccessible language or the control of the language they speak. Four patients were requested to narrate pictures in two separated language settings. The speech data collected in the clinical setting were compared with ten healthy bilingual adults’ speech data. The healthy bilingual adults did not code-switch in L2 but L1, which may be due to the language shift phenomenon in their lives. There were quantitative and qualitative differences of code-switching between the two groups. For the quantitative differences, the greater amount of code-switching observed in patients indicated that they did not lose knowledge of the inaccessible language, but rather the control of the language they spoke, and this may result from the impairment of the control mechanisms. Also, for the qualitative differences, the healthy adults code-switched more on nouns than verbs because those were frequently-used nouns in L2, and there were no equivalent translations in L1 ; on the contrary, the patients code-switched more on verbs than nouns and this may be due to the mapping word and referent is less transparent for verbs than it is for concrete nouns

The involvement of left inferior frontal and middle temporal cortices in word production unveiled by greater facilitation effects following brain damage

In stroke-induced aphasia, left hemispheric lesions generally disturb the word production network. The left inferior frontal gyrus (LIFG) and the left middle temporal gyrus (LMTG) are involved in word production, but their respective contribution remains ambiguous. Previous investigations have largely focused on semantic interference to gather information about word production. Here we assessed the sensitivity of twenty-five aphasic speakers with either LIFG or LMTG lesions and matched controls to both semantic facilitation and interference in word production using the picture-word (PWP) and the blocked-cyclic naming (BCNP) paradigms. In the PWP (Exp. 1), semantic facilitation was exaggerated in participants with LIFG damage as compared to age-matched controls. In the BCNP (Exp. 2), repetition priming on production speed was larger in participants with LMTG damage than in controls, without any decrease of semantic errors. In the light of the results in the PWP, the LIFG appears to be a necessary structure to shape semantic facilitation. It might play an important role in properly adjusting the lexical selection threshold within the word production network. The results in the BCNP suggest that the LMTG conveys semantic-to-lexical connections likely involved in repetition priming and in mapping concepts to their correct lexical label. As consequences, participants with LIFG lesions possibly rely more on strategic vs automatic processes to efficiently select lexical entries in semantically competitive contexts, whereas participants with LMTG might exploit residual semantic-to-lexical activation.

Una ruta dual en el procesamiento morfológico: evidencia de los neologismos en la afasia sensorial

Since several years ago, there is a debate about morphological processing. We have two different perspectives, one simple and another dual. The key difference is that latter accepts the existence of specific rules to morphological processing, while that simple one postulates that there is not rules because all complex morphologically words are stored in mental lexicon. In this paper, our goal is to analyze the neologisms created by four sensorial aphasic speakers to determine if constructions follow specific morphological rules or not. First, we collected data through interviews; second, we identified neologisms using syntactic criteria and, then, we analyze its composition according to grammatical rules of Spanish. Our results suggest that sensorial aphasic speakers do respect the morphological rules when they create this sort of neologisms. Finally, evidence show that exist a dual-route to morphological processing to verbs in Spanish.

The lexical or sub-lexical locus of facilitation by phonemic cueing in aphasic speakers: the effect of onset cohort size

ABSTRACTBackground: While the facilitation of word production by phonological cueing is used in clinical practice to evaluate the integrity of the lexical representations in anomia, the mechanisms by which phonological cueing facilitates oral production remain poorly understood. Most interpretations in psycholinguistic studies favor the phonological (sub-lexical) hypothesis, whereas results from studies on aphasia report evidence suggesting a lexical locus.Aims: This study aims to directly test the impact of phonological cues on lexical retrieval in participants with aphasia by manipulating the size of the cohort of nouns sharing the onset provided by the cue.Methods & Procedure: Fourteen aphasic participants presenting either a lexico-semantic or a phonological anomic profile performed a noun/object picture-naming task preceded by congruent or incongruent phonological cues. We manipulated the size of the lexical cohort of the words starting with the cue, reasoning that if phonological cues facilitate at the lexical level, a cue corresponding to a small number of words should be more effective than a cue compatible with a larger cohort.Outcomes & Results: The cue only improved accuracy in participants with lexico-semantic impairment, with a reduction of errors as a function of the cohort size (facilitation restricted to cues associated with a small onset cohort). In contrast, the cue onset cohort size only affects production latencies in participants with phonological impairment (shorter latencies for cues related to a small noun-onset cohort size).Conclusions: The observed effect of the cohort size associated with the cue favors a lexical locus of facilitation by phonological cueing. The fact that this effect is observed in different groups corresponding to different underlying impairments in error and in latencies suggests that the analyses of latencies reflect spared processes, whereas the analyses of errors tap into the impaired process.

An analysis of topics and vocabulary in Chinese oral narratives by normal speakers and speakers with fluent aphasia

ABSTRACTThis study analysed the topic and vocabulary of Chinese speakers based on language samples of personal recounts in a large spoken Chinese database recently made available in the public domain, i.e. Cantonese AphasiaBank (http://www.speech.hku.hk/caphbank/search/). The goal of the analysis is to offer clinicians a rich source for selecting ecologically valid training materials for rehabilitating Chinese-speaking people with aphasia (PWA) in the design and planning of culturally and linguistically appropriate treatments. Discourse production of 65 Chinese-speaking PWA of fluent types (henceforth, PWFA) and their non-aphasic controls narrating an important event in their life were extracted from Cantonese AphasiaBank. Analyses of topics and vocabularies in terms of part-of-speech, word frequency, lexical semantics, and diversity were conducted. There was significant overlap in topics between the two groups. While the vocabulary was larger for controls than that of PWFA as expected, they were similar in distribution across parts-of-speech, frequency of occurrence, and the ratio of concrete to abstract items in major open word classes. Moreover, proportionately more different verbs than nouns were employed at the individual level for both speaker groups. The findings provide important implications for guiding directions of aphasia rehabilitation not only of fluent but also non-fluent Chinese aphasic speakers.

Eye-tracking the effect of word order in sentence comprehension in aphasia: evidence from Basque, a free word order ergative language

ABSTRACTAgrammatic speakers of languages with overt grammatical case show impaired use of the morphological cues to establish theta-role relations in sentences presented in non-canonical word orders. We analysed the effect of word order on the sentence comprehension of aphasic speakers of Basque, an ergative, free word order and head-final (SOV) language. Ergative languages such as Basque establish a one-to-one mapping of the thematic role and the case marker. We collected behavioural and gaze-fixation data while agrammatic speakers performed a picture-matching task with auditorily presented sentences with different word orders. We found that people with aphasia (PWA) had difficulties in assigning theta-roles in Theme-Agent order. This result is in line with processing accounts. Contrary to previous findings, our data do not suggest a systematic delay in the integration of morphological information in the PWA group, but strong reliance on the ergative case morphology and difficulties assigning thematic roles into the determiner phrases.

Effects of attentional and lexical priming on syntactic production in aphasia: eye-tracking while speaking

Effects of attentional and lexical priming on syntactic production in aphasia: eye-tracking while speaking

Language in individuals with left hemisphere tumors: Is spontaneous speech analysis equally good as formal testing?

Language in individuals with left hemisphere tumors: Is spontaneous speech analysis equally good as formal testing?

Training-related changes of brain activation for speech production in healthy speakers – a longitudinal fMRI study to mimic aphasia therapy

ABSTRACTBackground: Re-learning of lexical entries is fundamental to rehabilitation of the common word finding deficits in language disorders after brain damage. Previous studies examined and compared neural correlates of speech production and word learning in aphasic and healthy speakers, but longitudinal control studies were rarely set out to mimic the lexical confusion and therapeutic remediation in aphasia.Aims: Thus, we aimed to examine functional brain organisation before (familiar word naming), during (learning phase) and after (consolidation phase) standardised training of speech production modulated by aphasia therapy.Methods & Procedures: During the first functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) measurement, participants were asked to name pictures using familiar words; during learning and in the consolidation phase, they were asked to name pictures using newly acquired pseudowords. To examine differential involvement of brain areas dependent on learning and consolidation success, we followed up activations for finally correctly learned (CoL) items between fMRI measurements, and compared activation during naming of CoL versus finally not learned (NoL) items at each measurement.Outcomes & Results: Naming accuracy of participants improved significantly. Although performance increase until the second fMRI measurement was minor, brain activation was present for CoL in comparison to NoL items in right hemisphere homologues of fronto-temporal language-related areas in this phase. Comparing learning with consolidation phases for pseudowords, naming CoL items was accompanied by activation in areas related to monitoring and selection between multiple lexical competitors, and in the right posterior middle temporal gyrus. Conversely, activation specific to the consolidation phase, and also to CoL items in that phase, consisted of a widely distributed network involving areas associated with motor, language and consolidation processes. Activation in right supramarginal and left superior temporal gyrus was related to individual learning success.Conclusions: We were able to demonstrate phase- and performance-dependent activation differences in various areas of the speech production network, which were in part correlated with learning success. The observed similarities to therapy-induced activation changes in aphasia reveal that the novel paradigm is useful in mimicking therapy and may uncover compensatory mechanisms specific to aphasia.

An Exploratory Investigation of E-Rest: Teletherapy for Chronically Aphasic Speakers.

Delivering aphasia therapy via telecommunication may provide a means to deliver intensive therapy in a cost-effective way. Teletherapy, remotely-administered (language) treatment, may support the repetitive drill practices that people with chronic aphasia need to perform when learning to compensate for their lasting language difficulties. The use of teletherapy may allow speech and language pathologists (SLPs) to focus in-person sessions more strongly on the generalisation of therapy effects to daily life. This single subject study is an investigation whether a teletherapy application called e-REST meets the criteria of accessibility, user-friendliness, as well as effectiveness. e-REST, the teletherapy version of the Dutch and adapted Reduced Syntax Therapy, teaches chronically aphasic speakers of Dutch who experience difficulties in sentence production to convey their messages in a kind of telegraphic style. The results obtained suggest that it is reasonable to conduct a larger study into the user-friendliness, accessibility, effectiveness, and cost-effectiveness of e-REST.

Acquired dyslexia in Serbian speakers with Broca’s and Wernicke’s aphasia

This study examined patterns of acquired dyslexia in Serbian aphasic speakers, comparing profiles of groups with Broca’s versus Wernicke’s aphasia. The study also looked at the relationship of reading and auditory comprehension and between reading comprehension and reading aloud in these groups. Participants were 20 people with Broca’s and 20 with Wernicke’s aphasia. They were asked to read aloud and to understand written material from the Serbian adaptation of the Boston Diagnostic Aphasia Examination. A Serbian Word Reading Aloud Test was also used. The people with Broca’s aphasia achieved better results in reading aloud and in reading comprehension than those with Wernicke’s aphasia. Those with Wernicke’s aphasia showed significantly more semantic errors than those with Broca’s aphasia who had significantly more morphological and phonological errors. From the data we inferred that lesion sites accorded with previous work on networks associated with Broca’s and Wernicke’s aphasia and with a posterior-anterior axis for reading processes centred on (left) parietal-temporal-frontal lobes.