Comprehension Of Passive Sentences Research Articles

Syntactic complexity differentially affects auditory sentence comprehension performance for individuals with age-related hearing loss.

This study examined whether older adults with hearing loss (HL) experience greater difficulties in auditory sentence comprehension compared to those with typical-hearing (TH) when the linguistic burdens of syntactic complexity were systematically manipulated by varying either the sentence type (active vs. passive) or sentence length (3- vs. 4-phrases). A total of 22 individuals with HL and 24 controls participated in the study, completing sentence comprehension test (SCT), standardized memory assessments, and pure-tone audiometry tests. Generalized linear mixed effects models were employed to compare the effects of sentence type and length on SCT accuracy, while Pearson correlation coefficients were conducted to explore the relationships between SCT accuracy and other factors. Additionally, stepwise regression analyses were employed to identify memory-related predictors of sentence comprehension ability. Older adults with HL exhibited poorer performance on passive sentences than on active sentences compared to controls, while the sentence length was controlled. Greater difficulties on passive sentences were linked to working memory capacity, emerging as the most significant predictor for the comprehension of passive sentences among participants with HL. Our findings contribute to the understanding of the linguistic-cognitive deficits linked to age-related hearing loss by demonstrating its detrimental impact on the processing of passive sentences. Cognitively healthy adults with hearing difficulties may face challenges in comprehending syntactically more complex sentences that require higher computational demands, particularly in working memory allocation.

Evaluating syntactic comprehension during awake intraoperative cortical stimulation mapping.

Electrocortical stimulation mapping (ECS) is widely used to identify essential language areas, but sentence-level processing has rarely been investigated. While undergoing awake surgery in the dominant left hemisphere, 6 subjects were asked to comprehend sentences varying in their demands on syntactic processing. In all 6 subjects, stimulation of the inferior frontal gyrus disrupted comprehension of passive sentences, which critically depend on syntactic processing to correctly assign grammatical roles, without disrupting comprehension of simpler tasks. In 4 of the 6 subjects, these sites were localized to the pars opercularis. Sentence comprehension was also disrupted by stimulation of other perisylvian sites, but in a more variable manner. These findings suggest that there may be language regions that differentially contribute to sentence processing and which therefore are best identified using sentence-level tasks. The functional consequences of resecting these sites remain to be investigated.

Use of Parsing Heuristics in the Comprehension of Passive Sentences: Evidence from Dyslexia and Individual Differences.

This study examined the comprehension of passive sentences in order to investigate whether individuals with dyslexia rely on parsing heuristics in language comprehension to a greater extent than non-dyslexic readers. One hundred adults (50 dyslexics and 50 controls) read active and passive sentences, and we also manipulated semantic plausibility. Eye movements were monitored, while participants read each sentence, and afterwards, participants answered a comprehension question. We also assessed verbal intelligence and working memory in all participants. Results showed dyslexia status interacted with sentence structure and plausibility, such that participants with dyslexia showed significantly more comprehension errors with passive and implausible sentence. With respect to verbal intelligence and working memory, we found that individuals with lower verbal intelligence were overall more likely to make comprehension errors, and individuals with lower working memory showed particular difficulties with passive and implausible sentences. For reading times, we found that individuals with dyslexia were overall slower readers. These findings suggest that (1) individuals with dyslexia do rely on heuristics to a greater extent than do non-dyslexic individuals, and (2) individual differences variables (e.g., verbal intelligence and working memory) are also related to the use of parsing heuristics. For the latter, lower ability individuals tended to be more consistent with heuristic processing (i.e., good-enough representations).

Children's syntactic parsing and sentence comprehension with a degraded auditory signal.

During sentence comprehension, young children anticipate syntactic structures using early-arriving words and have difficulties revising incorrect predictions using late-arriving words. However, nearly all work to date has focused on syntactic parsing in idealized speech environments, and little is known about how children's strategies for predicting and revising meanings are affected by signal degradation. This study compares comprehension of active and passive sentences in natural and vocoded speech. In a word-interpretation task, 5-year-olds inferred the meanings of novel words in sentences that (1) encouraged agent-first predictions (e.g., The blicket is eating the seal implies The blicket is the agent), (2) required revising predictions (e.g., The blicket is eaten by the seal implies The blicket is the theme), or (3) weakened predictions by placing familiar nouns in sentence-initial position (e.g., The seal is eating/eaten by the blicket). When novel words promoted agent-first predictions, children misinterpreted passives as actives, and errors increased with vocoded compared to natural speech. However, when familiar words were sentence-initial that weakened agent-first predictions, children accurately interpreted passives, with no signal-degradation effects. This demonstrates that signal quality interacts with interpretive processes during sentence comprehension, and the impacts of speech degradation are greatest when late-arriving information conflicts with predictions.

The processing of passive sentences in German

Abstract This study examines the processing and interpretation of passive sentences in German-speaking seven-year-olds, ten-year-olds, and adults. This structure is often assumed to be particularly difficult to understand, and not yet fully mastered in primary school (Kemp, Bredel, & Reich, 2008), i.e. in children aged between six and eleven. Few studies provide empirical data concerning this age range; it is therefore unknown whether this assumption is warranted. Against this background, we tested whether the three age groups differed in their off-line comprehension of passive sentences. In addition, we employed Visual World eye-tracking to measure processing difficulties that may differ between age groups and may not be reflected in the final interpretations. Previous studies on adult language processing in German and English have documented a preference to interpret sentences according to an agent-first strategy. Our results show that all three groups make use of this strategy, and that all of them are able to revise this interpretation once the first cue indicating a passive sentence is encountered (the auxiliary verb form wurde). We conclude that at least from age seven on, children have the linguistic and cognitive prerequisites to process the passive morphosyntax of German and to revise initial sentence misinterpretations.

Syntactic and semantic processing of passive BEI sentences in Mandarin Chinese: evidence from event-related potentials.

Scalp-recorded event-related potentials (ERPs) appear to be sensitive to sentence processing, especially in some particular aspects. ERP studies on inflectional Indo-European languages report that N400 (negativity around 400 ms), typically elicited by semantic anomalies, is absent when a sentence involves both syntactic and semantic violations. It has been considered that syntactic structure building takes precedence over semantic parsing, and lexical-semantic processing can be blocked by syntactic category incongruence. An ERP experiment was conducted to examine whether such syntactic primacy also exists equally in sentence comprehension in Mandarin Chinese, using the long passive sentences of bei constructions (bei is a preposition preceding a predicate verb and expressing a passive meaning) with either semantic or syntactic violations, combined violations of both, or no violations. Results showed that a broad negativity appeared in both purely semantic and combined violations in the time window of 300-500 ms, which implies that lexical-semantic parsing is not blocked by syntactic structure failure. Instead, it is of great significance to the comprehension of long passive sentences in Mandarin Chinese (see Video, Supplemental Digital Content1, http://links.lww.com/WNR/A592, which introduces the article).

Perspective-shifting are helpful for children in Chinese passive sentence comprehension

Passive sentences have been shown to be more difficult than active sentences for young children in English, German, Italian, Turkish, as well as Japanese, Korean. Many factors, such as syntactic structure, lexical-semantic, language experience, have been proved to affect passive sentence processing. In this paper, two experiments were carried out to investigate the role of perspective-shifting and animacy characteristics of agents and patients in processing passive sentences by 5~6 year-old Chinese children, using a sentence-picture matching task. The results were as follows: (1) Passive sentences were more difficult to comprehend than active sentences in Mandarin Chinese; (2) The ability of perspective-shifting played an important role in processing passive sentences. In sum, addressing sentences involving syntactic transformation is a complex cognitive activity for young children. Many factors, such as syntactic structure, lexical-semantic, language experience, and cognitive flexibility should be given full consideration.

Recovery of offline and online sentence processing in aphasia: Language and domain-general network neuroplasticity

This paper examined the effects of treatment on both offline and online sentence processing and associated neuroplasticity within sentence processing and dorsal attention networks in chronic stroke-induced agrammatic aphasia. Twenty-three neurotypical adults and 19 individuals with aphasia served as participants. Aphasic individuals were randomly assigned to receive a 12-week course of linguistically-based treatment of passive sentence production and comprehension (N = 14, treatment group) or to serve as control participants (N = 5, natural history group). Both aphasic groups performed two offline tasks at baseline and three months following (at post-testing) to assess production and comprehension of trained passive structures and untrained syntactically related and unrelated structures. The aphasic participants and a healthy age-matched group also performed an online eyetracking comprehension task and a picture-verification fMRI task, which were repeated at post-testing for the aphasic groups. Results showed that individuals in the treatment, but not in the natural history, group improved on production and comprehension of both trained structures and untrained syntactically related structures. Treatment also resulted in a shift toward more normal-like eye movements and a significant increase in neural activation from baseline to post-testing. Upregulation encompassed right hemisphere regions homologs of left hemisphere regions involved in both sentence processing and domain-general functions and was positively correlated with treatment gains, as measured by offline comprehension accuracy, and with changes in processing strategies during sentence comprehension, as measured by eyetracking. These findings provide compelling evidence in favor of the contribution of both networks within the right hemisphere to the restoration of normal-like sentence processing patterns in chronic aphasia.

Effects of Working Memory Load and Age on the Comprehension of Passive Sentences

The ability of older adults to comprehend sentences may decline due to the cognitive changes in working memory. Therefore, an increase in working memory demands during sentence comprehension would result in poorer performance among older adults. To test this hypothesis, the present study explored sentence comprehension as a result of manipulations of age and working memory loads using a sentence-picture matching task. 35 older adults and 35 younger adults were required to match Mandarin passive sentences (high working memory load) and active sentences (low working memory load) with pictures. Passive sentences were found to be more difficult than active sentences for all participants. Older adults responded to passive sentences more slowly than younger adults. However, no significant age difference was found in accuracy of responses. Accuracy on passive sentence comprehension was marginally correlated with syntactic complexity effect among older adults. Compared with younger adults, older adults seem to be more disrupted by the increased WM load in passive sentence comprehension, but they can compensate for the decline in the accuracy of comprehension by spending extra time on sentences with high WM load.

Passive sentence comprehension difficulties and its related factors in children with cochlear implants

ObjectivesThe purposes of this study were to investigate which syntactic structures, from active and passive sentences, sensitively differentiate children with cochlear implants (CIs) from children with normal hearing (NH), to explore the correlations among working memory (WM) and other factors for each group, and to examine predictors of the active and passive sentence scores for both groups. MethodsTwenty deaf children with CIs and 20 children with NH, aged 8–14 years, were included in this study. Sentence comprehension skills were measured using the picture-pointing comprehension task, which consisted of active and passive sentences. The WM capacity was tested by the digit forward, digit backward, word forward, and word backward span tasks. ResultsPassive sentence type was a significant predictor to differentiate between the two groups (p < .05). In the CI group, passive sentence scores were significantly correlated with age, duration of an implant use, receptive vocabulary scores, and WM scores (all p values < .05). In the stepwise regression analysis, WM capacity was a significant factor in predicting the passive sentence scores of children with CIs (p < .05). ConclusionPassive sentence type was a significant factor in distinguishing the CI group from the NH group. The WM capacity was an important predictor accounting for individual differences in processing complex sentence types for children with CIs. The results indicate that a complex syntactic form may serve as a clinically critical index in detecting higher-level cognitive and linguistic processing difficulties in good performers after implantation.

Successful passive sentence comprehension among Danish adolescents with autism spectrum disorders

Background and aims Language abilities vary greatly across children with autism spectrum disorders (ASD). In the present study, we investigate passive sentence comprehension, which has been underexplored among individuals with autism spectrum disorders and found to be delayed among other clinical populations. This study is the first to assess grammatical comprehension among Danish-speaking adolescents with autism spectrum disorders. Methods Fifteen Danish-speaking adolescents with autism (mean age: 14.9 years; age range: 13–18 years) participated in a picture selection task assessing comprehension of passive sentences relative to active sentences. We compared our findings for adolescents with autism spectrum disorders to those of 15 typically developing Danish-speaking adolescents matched for age and nonverbal reasoning as measured by the Matrix subtest of the WISC-IV/WAIS-IV. We also analyzed associations between passive comprehension and nonverbal reasoning. Results The results showed ceiling effects for both groups on all sentence types indicating that Danish adolescents with autism spectrum disorders do not face problems comprehending passive sentences. However, when considering variation within the autism spectrum disorder group, correct passive comprehension was highly significantly associated with nonverbal reasoning for the autism spectrum disorder group ( r = .75), while this was not the case for the typically developing adolescents. Analyses of the few errors produced showed a preference for Theta-role reversal errors in the autism spectrum disorder and the typically developing groups. Conclusions Danish-speaking adolescents with high-functioning autism spectrum disorders do not show impairment in passive sentence comprehension. Correlation analyses however show that for adolescents with autism spectrum disorders, passive sentence comprehension is associated with nonverbal reasoning. We discuss how these results can be viewed as consistent with the few previous studies on passive comprehension in individuals with autism spectrum disorders. Implications Our study provides additional cross-linguistic evidence that passive comprehension is not problematic for individuals with high-functioning autism spectrum disorders. The finding of the relationship between nonverbal reasoning and passive sentence comprehension may inform clinical best practices as children with autism spectrum disorders who underperform in measures of nonverbal reasoning may benefit from additional receptive language screening.

Neurocognitive sequela of non-canonical sentence comprehension in chronic agrammatic aphasia: eye movement and fMRI correlates of behavioral recovery

Neurocognitive sequela of non-canonical sentence comprehension in chronic agrammatic aphasia: eye movement and fMRI correlates of behavioral recovery

Recovery of Online Sentence Processing in Aphasia: Eye Movement Changes Resulting From Treatment of Underlying Forms.

The present study tested whether (and how) language treatment changed online sentence processing in individuals with aphasia. Participants with aphasia (n = 10) received a 12-week program of Treatment of Underlying Forms (Thompson & Shapiro, 2005) focused on production and comprehension of passive sentences. Before and after treatment, participants performed a sentence-picture matching task with active and passive sentences as eye movements were tracked. Twelve age-matched controls also performed the task once each. In the age-matched group, eye movements indicated agent-first predictive processing after hearing the subject noun, followed by rapid thematic reanalysis after hearing the verb form. Pretreatment eye movements in the participants with aphasia showed no predictive agent-first processing, and more accurate thematic analysis in active compared to passive sentences. After treatment, which resulted in improved offline passive sentence production and comprehension, participants were more likely to respond correctly when they made agent-first eye movements early in the sentence, showed equally reliable thematic analysis in active and passive sentences, and were less likely to use a spatially based alternative response strategy. These findings suggest that treatment focused on improving sentence production and comprehension supports the emergence of more normal-like sentence comprehension processes.

Passive Sentence Comprehension in Thai Agrammatic Speakers

Passive Sentence Comprehension in Thai Agrammatic Speakers

다문화 가정 아동의 사동문, 피동문 이해와 사동 및 피동 접미사 표현 능력

다문화 가정 아동의 사동문, 피동문 이해와 사동 및 피동 접미사 표현 능력

Variations in the recruitment of syntactic knowledge contribute to SES differences in syntactic development.

Average differences in children's language abilities by socioeconomic status (SES) emerge early in development and predict academic achievement. Previous research has focused on coarse-grained outcome measures such as vocabulary size, but less is known about the extent to which SES differences exist in children's strategies for comprehension and learning. We measured children's (N = 98) comprehension of passive sentences to investigate whether SES differences are more pronounced in overall knowledge of the construction or in more specific abilities to process sentences during real-time interpretation. SES differences in comprehension emerged when syntactic revision of passives was necessary, and disappeared when the need to revise was removed. Further, syntactic revision but not knowledge of the passive best explained the association between SES and a standardized measure of syntactic development. These results demonstrate that SES differences in syntactic development may result from how children recruit syntactic information within sentences.

An investigation on the comprehension of Persian passives in typical development and autism

Autism Spectrum disorders have attracted the attention of many researchers working on communicative and pragmatic competence, but much less attention has been paid to the investigation of narrow syntax in this condition. On the other hand, in the field of acquisition, passive sentences (and related constructions) are known to be a late acquisition, and have been argued to be a case of late maturation. In this paper we report results on the comprehension of passive sentences in Persian-speaking children with typical development and with Autism Spectrum Disorders. In our findings, not all ASD children perform in the same way, rather those considered to be high-functioning perform like the typically developing, and the low-functioning have a clearly poorer performance. These results shed some light on former studies (Perovic et al. 2007, Terzi et al. 2014), with seemingly inconsistent results due to the fact that heterogeneous populations were tested.

Processing Active / Passive Sentences in Turkish Agrammatic Aphasics

In this study, the comprehension of lexical processing in aphasia was evaluated. Five left brain damaged Turkish Broca's aphasic subjects performed a lexical decision task. At the very outset of the study, a Dichotic Listening Test was conducted so that the dominant hemisphere for word processing could be evaluated. In order to check the level of lexical processing, the visual lexical decision task and passive sentence comprehension task which contained twenty active and twenty passive sentences were conducted to examine whether the subjects could comprehend the selected expressions. The results showed that Turkish Broca's aphasic patients have no difficulty in understanding active sentences which has an agent as the first element in a sentence unlike passive equivalents in a theme agent order. In other words, the potential problem of comprehension is closely related to the word order of the target language in Broca's aphasic patients.

(Morpho)syntactic comprehension in agrammatic aphasia: Evidence from Greek

Background: A number of hypotheses have been formulated to account for comprehension data in agrammatic aphasia. They explain deficits in comprehending specific structures, such as semantically reversible non-canonical sentences, for example, Trace Deletion Hypothesis (TDH, Grodzinsky, 1986, 1990, 1995), or functional categories, for example, Tree Pruning Hypothesis (TPH, e.g., Friedmann, 2006); Tense Underspecification Hypothesis (TUH, Wenzlaff & Clahsen, 2004, 2005); Interpretable Features’ Impairment Hypothesis (IFIH; e.g., Varlokosta et al., 2006). Several studies, however, report evidence contradicting these theories (e.g., Caramazza, Capasso, Capitani, & Miceli, 2005; Dickey, Milman, & Thompson, 2008) and propose new accounts to explain the comprehension deficits in agrammatic aphasia, for example, Distributed Morphology Account (DMA, Dickey et al., 2008). Aims: Against the background above, this study investigates the ability of three Greek-speaking agrammatic individuals to comprehend a wide range of structures and functional categories: semantically reversible (canonical) active and (non-canonical) passive sentences, Complementizer Phrase, subject-verb Agreement, Tense, and Aspect. Methods & Procedures: We administered: (a) two sentence-picture matching tasks to test comprehension of reversible active and passive sentences, and Tense; (b) a sentence grammaticality judgement task to test judgement of Tense, Aspect, and subject-verb Agreement; and (c) a picture-pointing task to test comprehension of Complementizer Phrase. Outcomes & Results: (a) Two of the three agrammatic participants performed at chance on reversible passive sentences and above chance on active sentences. The third participant performed equally high on the two sentence types. Two participants performed at chance on Tense comprehension and one above chance. (b) The three participants were selectively or across-the-board impaired in judgement of Agreement, Tense, and Aspect. One of the two selectively affected participants had chance performance on Aspect and above chance performance on Agreement and Tense. The other one performed at chance on Aspect and Tense, and above chance on Agreement. The third participant's performance was equally poor on all three categories. (c) All three agrammatic participants performed above chance on the comprehension of Complementizer Phrase. Conclusions: In comprehension/judgement, canonical and non-canonical sentences do not dissociate in all agrammatic speakers, while functional categories associated with the verb morphology may be compromised in the face of relatively well-preserved categories that are located higher in the syntactic hierarchy. All three agrammatic participants support the DMA, and two of them support the TDH. Instead, none of them provided support to the TPH, TUH, and IFIH.

Task-modulated activation and functional connectivity of the temporal and frontal areas during speech comprehension

There is general consensus in the literature that a distributed network of temporal and frontal brain areas is involved in speech comprehension. However, how active versus passive tasks modulate the activation and the functional connectivity of the critical brain areas is not clearly understood. In this study, we used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to identify intelligibility and task-related effects in speech comprehension. Participants performed a semantic judgment task on normal and time-reversed sentences, or passively listened to the sentences without making an overt response. The subtraction analysis demonstrated that passive sentence comprehension mainly engaged brain areas in the left anterior and posterior superior temporal sulcus and middle temporal gyrus (aSTS/MTG and pSTS/MTG), whereas active sentence comprehension recruited bilateral frontal regions in addition to the aSTS/MTG and pSTS/MTG regions. Functional connectivity analysis revealed that during passive sentence comprehension, the left aSTS/MTG was functionally connected with the left Heschl’s gyrus (HG) and bilateral superior temporal gyrus (STG) but no area was functionally connected with the left pSTS/MTG; during active sentence comprehension, however, both the left aSTS/MTG and pSTS/MTG were functionally connected with bilateral superior temporal and inferior frontal areas. While these results are consistent with the view that the ventral stream of the temporo-frontal network subserves semantic processing, our findings further indicate that both the activation and the functional connectivity of the temporal and frontal areas are modulated by task demands.