Auditory Sentence Comprehension Research Articles

Articulatory and phonological deficits in short-term memory and their relation to syntactic processing

The relationships between sentence comprehension deficits and deficits in the articulatory or phonological components of short-term memory were investigated. Nonfluent agrammatic patients showed very poor comprehension of syntax while a group of nonfluent patients who were not agrammatic showed good comprehension, despite both groups showing similar degrees of deficits in an articulatory component of memory. The results imply that a disruption of inner rehearsal has little consequence for auditory sentence comprehension, and that the syntactic comprehension deficits of the agrammatic patients could not be attributed to their memory deficit. A patient with a disruption in phonological storage showed good comprehension for many sentences, but was impaired when a difficult syntactic structure was encountered early in a sentence. It was proposed that phonological storage serves to hold words in a phonological form when sentence processing cannot keep pace with sentence input. Although a role for phonological storage was postulated, the impressive degree of syntactic processing that could be carried out by patients with very restricted memory spans implies that there is little overlap between the memory systems disrupted in these patients and the working memory system presumed to be involved in sentence comprehension.

失語症者の聴覚的理解に及ぼす文脈・統語的性質の影響

A sentence comprehension test was performed to study the influence of context and syntactic structure on auditory sentence comprehension in aphasics. The subjects were 30 aphasics and 15 persons with no brain damage. The aphasics were divided into 6 groups according to clinical type (fluent/non-fluent) and total test score (low/medium/high). After the presentation of stories, a sentence comprehension test was given which consisted of 60 sentences varying in parameters of context (consistent/inconsistent with the presented stories) and syntactic structure (active/pas-sive). Results were as follows. 1) In non-brain-damaged subjects, both parameters had no influence, all sentences being equally easy to comprehend. 2) In aphasics, both parameters exerted significant influence on comprehension difficulty. a) Inconsistent sentences were more difficult to comprehend than consistent sentences ; this tendecy proved more marked in aphasics with lower scores. b) Passive sentences were more difficult to comprehend than active sentences.

Intonational marking of given and new information: some consequences for comprehension.

The role of intonation in conveying discourse relationships in auditory sentence comprehension was investigated in two experiments. Using the simple comprehension time paradigm, Experiment 1 found that sentences with accented new information were understood faster than sentences with a neutral intonation contour and that the presence of accent in context sentences facilitated comprehension of subsequent targets. Both experiments showed faster comprehension times in conditions in which accent placement was appropriate for the information structure of the sentence. In Experiment I, comprehension times were faster when the accent fell on the information focus than when it fell elsewhere in the sentence. In Experiment 2, faster times resulted when new information was accented and given information was not, compared to conditions in which this accent pattern was reversed. This effect held for both active and passive sentences, and whether the new information occurred in the subject or object position.

Error Patterns in Auditory Comprehension of Adult Aphasics

The error patterns of normal and aphasic adults on a sentence comprehension test were studied. For position of error, both normals and the three aphasic groups performed consistently with the expected error distribution. Neither sentence half was experienced as more difficult to process. All groups, both aphasic and normal, demonstrated error patterns for grammatical class and for surface structure linguistic constituent which were consistent with the expected error distributions. Exceptions were noted for the normals on the verb class and for the Wernicke's aphasics on the NP and VP linguistic constituents. Rank orderings of error proportions were similar across groups for both grammatical form class and linguistic constituent. The general findings lend support to the notion that, for auditory comprehension of sentences, aphasic patients differ quantitatively from normal adult speakers, but behave qualitatively similar to them.

Die Bedeutung der Afferenten, Verbo-Kinästhetischen Erregungen des Sprachapparates Für die Expressiven und Rezeptiven Sprachvorgänge bei Normalen und Sprachgestörten

Summary The author discusses results obtained with a method he developed to temporarily and mechanically exclude latent verbal motion (micromovements) in auditory comprehension of words and sentences, receptive reading and writing. The experiments were carried through with normal subjects and patients suffering from speech disturbance. By means of blowing hard into the mouth-piece of a glass-tube containing liquid, the subject is expected to raise this liquid to a given level within a fixed period of time. This method is superior to similar ones, through all muscle movement involved in speech and breathing processes connected therewith, being completely cut out. As a result of a series of experiments, the question as to whether receptive speech and thinking processes can occur despite complete temporary blocking of verbal-kinesthetic, afferent stimuli from the speech apparatus in normal and speech disturbed subjects (aphasics and deafmutes) can now be confirmed. In other words: normal subjects succeeded in comprehending words and sentences they heard and read while blowing into the tube, and they were able to repart them afterwards. The same applies to the aphasic, who within the limits of their receptive and expressive verbal capacity also showed positive results, despite the temporary blocking of their verbal-kinesthetic analyser, the function of which is of primary importance to these patients. Also experimental “deblocking” of disturbances in naming, repetition, and reading proved possible with aphasic patients, even under the increased difficulties of mechanically excluded, specific, latent, verbal motion. This means, that the participation of the verbal-kinesthetic analyser is not necessarily a precondition for the temporary restitution of certain verbal performances in aphasia. From this, the author concludes that despite the importance of verbalkinesthetic stimuli in the development of speaking and thinking processes, these neuromuscular, afferent stimuli (verbal-kinesthetic feedback) prove obsolete up to a degree, once the formation and storage of verbo-optical, verbo-auditive, and verbo-motor stereotypes (patterns, schemas) have reached a high degree of completion. Best proof for the justification of this assumption are the author's results obtained in experiments with a female subject suffering from congenital deafness, carried through with his blowing method. Additionally to her completely lacking the auditive analyser from birth, the function of the verbal-kinesthetic analyser, which played a dominant part in the development of her speech and thinking, was temporarily blocked. In this way, the auditive as well as the verbal-kinesthetic feedback were eliminated. Yet, the subject was still able to lip-read the words spoken to her by the experimentator while she was blowing, she understood their meaning, and could repart them afterwards; she was also able to read and comprehend texts shown to her while blowing. This shows that even with congenital deafness — provided an advanced stage of development has been reached in speech and thinking — the function of a single analyser (the optical analyser in this case) is sufficient to ensure various verbal and cognitive performances.