Production Of Passive Sentences Research Articles

Effects of Lexical Priming on Priming Type and Presence of Distractors in Persons with Mild Cognitive Impairment

Objectives: The purpose of the study is to examine if the lexical priming effect is valid in persons with mild cognitive impairment (MCI). In addition, this study attempted to examine the correlation between working memory and sentence production ability for MCI and healthy adults (HA).Methods: Fifteen individuals with MCI and sixteen HA described action pictures in sentences following lexical (agent or theme) primes. Priming effect was analyzed in terms of priming type and presence of distractor.Results: 1) Persons with MCI did show significantly lower proportion of passive sentences compared to HA. Overall, the proportion of passives were significantly higher in the theme primed condition versus the agent primed condition. 2) The difference in the presence of distractor stimuli in the agent primed condition was significantly larger than in the theme primed condition. 3) It was observed that the better the working memory ability of MCI participants, the higher the production of active sentences when compared with passive sentences in the theme primed condition.Conclusion: Persons with MCI used word-driven information as a strategy of sentence production like HA did. In addition, MCI participants showed difficulty in production of complex structures such as passive sentences. In previous research, most of the studies examined the priming effect through structural priming tasks for HA and aphasia patients. The results of this study also showed the effect of lexical priming in persons with MCI, and the finding of lower production of passive sentences in persons with MCI compared to HA emphasized the linguistic deficits that may appear in individuals with MCI.

Lexical Priming Effects According to the Priming Type and Word Order Canonicity on Sentence Production in Persons with Aphasia: An Eye-Tracking Study

Objectives: The purpose of the study was to examine if persons with aphasia (PWA) can use word-level information as a sentence production strategy. Specifically, we examined the effect of lexical priming on the production of passive sentences, using an eye tracking-while-speaking paradigm. Methods: Twelve PWA and twelve healthy adults (HA) described transitive action pictures in sentences following lexical (agent or theme) primes. The priming effect was calculated using both off-line (syntactic production) and real-time (eye fixations) measures. Off-line priming effects were analyzed in terms of prime type (agent vs. theme) and word order canonicity, and the on-line analyses were conducted by the prime type and five speech regions. Results: 1) PWA did not show a significant difference from the HA group in the production of passive sentences under the theme prime condition. The proportion of passives was significantly higher in the theme prime condition compared to the agent prime condition and in canonical word order versus non-canonical word order. 2) PWA showed reduced eye fixations to the theme character compared to HA and showed evenly distributed fixations to both agent and theme characters. PWA did not show reliable differences in five speech regions. Conclusion: In off-line passive production, PWA showed preserved lexical priming effects; however, they did not show a significant prime effect on eye fixations. These findings suggest that PWA have relatively intact ability to use word-level cues on syntactic production during off-line sentence production.

Syntactic Priming Effects on Active and Passive Sentence Production in Persons with Aphasia: Evidence from an Eye-tracking Study

Syntactic Priming Effects on Active and Passive Sentence Production in Persons with Aphasia: Evidence from an Eye-tracking Study

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.

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.

The comprehension and production of verbal passives by Italian preschool-age children

ABSTRACTThis paper investigates the comprehension and the production of passive sentences in Italian-speaking children (aged 3 years, 4 months to 6 years, 2 months) analyzing both the variables observed in previous studies on other languages (verb type and presence of the by-phrase) versus an Italian-specific variable: the use of auxiliary venire “to come.” Because Italian venire is only possible in verbal passives, this property is crucial to determine whether children have full competence of the (verbal) passive structure. The high percentage of accuracy in the comprehension of sentences containing venire suggests that the eventive passive interpretation is fully available in child language, even in 3- to 4-year-old children. Moreover, young children produce passive sentences with either auxiliary venire or essere “to be,” also adding the by-phrase, thus proving unambiguously that children control verbal passive sentences from very early on.

Accessibility effects on production vary cross-linguistically: Evidence from English and Korean

Previous work on English suggests that accessibility of individual lexical items plays an important role in shaping speakers’ choice of sentence structure, providing evidence for lexically incremental production. In order to investigate the role of accessibility in cross-linguistic production, we manipulated accessibility in English and Korean via semantic priming in Experiment 1 and visual cueing in Experiment 2. We recorded English and Korean speakers’ speech and eye movements as they described pictured events. The production results show that English speakers’ choice of sentence structure was significantly affected by semantic priming or visual cueing, consistent with the findings of prior research: Priming the patient entity significantly increased the production of passive sentences. In contrast, Korean speakers’ choice of sentence structure was not influenced by accessibility of lexical items. Analyses of participants’ eye-movements are consistent with the production results. In Experiment 1, English speakers fixated the semantically primed entity in the visual scene, whereas Korean speakers did not. Even when the visual cueing manipulation drew Korean speakers’ focus of attention toward the cued entity in Experiment 2, Korean speakers’ choice of the first referent was not influenced by the lexical accessibility. These findings strongly suggest that lexically incremental production is not a universal production mechanism. In light of the typological differences between English and Korean, we suggest that the relative contributions of accessibility during language production are mediated by the grammatical constraints of a language.

Age-related changes in sentence production abilities and their relation to working-memory capacity: evidence from a verb-final language.

ObjectivesThis study investigated the best predictor to capture age-related changes in passive-sentence production using a constrained sentence-production paradigm and explored the role of working-memory capacity in relation to the task demands of the sentence-production tasks.MethodsA total of 60 participants participated in the study ranging in age from 21 to 86. All were administered a syntactic-priming and a sentence-completion task under either canonical or noncanonical word-order conditions.ResultsAge was significantly and negatively correlated with sentence-production tasks, and the most demanding condition with a noncanonical word order under the syntactic priming paradigm was the best predictor of aging. Working-memory capacity was significantly and positively correlated with all conditions, but the significant correlation remained only for the most demanding condition (the priming task with a noncanonical word order) after controlling for age.DiscussionSentence-production abilities were vulnerable to aging, and these effects manifested most clearly when the task demands were high enough to tax individuals’ cognitive capacity. Working-memory capacity partially accounted for age-related changes in sentence-production abilities.

Message formulation and structural assembly: Describing “easy” and “hard” events with preferred and dispreferred syntactic structures

When formulating simple sentences to describe pictured events, speakers look at the referents they are describing in the order of mention. Accounts of incrementality in sentence production rely heavily on analyses of this gaze-speech link. To identify systematic sources of variability in message and sentence formulation, two experiments evaluated differences in formulation for sentences describing “easy” and “hard” events (more codable and less codable events) with preferred and dispreferred structures (actives and passives). Experiment 1 employed a subliminal cuing manipulation and a cumulative priming manipulation to increase production of passive sentences. Experiment 2 examined the influence of event codability on formulation without a cuing manipulation. In both experiments, speakers showed an early preference for looking at the agent of the event when constructing active sentences. This preference was attenuated by event codability, suggesting that speakers were less likely to prioritize encoding of a single character at the outset of formulation in “easy” events than in “harder” events. Accessibility of the agent influenced formulation primarily when an event was “harder” to describe. Formulation of passive sentences in Experiment 1 also began with early fixations to the agent but changed with exposure to passive syntax: speakers were more likely to consider the patient as a suitable sentential starting point after cumulative priming. The results show that the message-to-language mapping in production can vary with the ease of encoding an event structure and of generating a suitable linguistic structure.

What goes wrong during passive sentence production in agrammatic aphasia: An eyetracking study

Background: Production of passive sentences is often impaired in agrammatic aphasia and has been attributed both to an underlying structural impairment (e.g., Schwartz, Saffran, Fink, Myers, & Martin, 1994) and to a morphological deficit (e.g., Caplan & Hanna, 1998; Faroqi-Shah & Thompson, 2003). However, the nature of the deficit in passive sentence production is not clear due to methodological issues present in previous studies. Aims: This study examined active and passive sentence production in nine agrammatic aphasic speakers under conditions of structural priming using eyetracking to test whether structural impairments occur independently of morphological impairments and whether the underlying nature of error types is reflected in on-line measures, i.e., eye movements and speech onset latencies. Methods & Procedures: Nine participants viewed and listened to a prime sentence in either active or passive voice, and then repeated it aloud. Next, a target picture appeared on the computer monitor and participants were instructed to describe it using the primed sentence structure. Outcomes & Results: Participants made substantial errors in sentence structure, i.e., passives with role reversals (RRs) and actives-for-passives, but few errors in passive morphology. Longer gaze durations to the first-produced noun for passives with RRs as compared to correct passives were found before and during speech. For actives-for-passives, however, this pattern was found during speech, but not before speech. Conclusions: The deficit in passive sentence production does not solely arise from a morphological deficit, rather it stems, at least in part, from a structural level impairment. The underlying nature of passives with RRs is qualitatively different from that of actives-for-passives, which cannot be clearly differentiated with off-line testing methodology.

Habilidades linguística e metalingüística diferenciadas no aprendizado em currículo bilíngue

The present paper adds to the bilingualism research by presenting data from an investigation involving Brazilian children who have learned English at a bilingual school, from the age of six onwards. The main goal was to investigate whether the linguistic and metalinguistic benefits normally attested for bilinguals with advanced proficiency would also be identified in a group of children that is only exposed to a second language in a formal context, for a total of 10 hours a week. In order to do that, we compared the production of passive sentences in Portuguese between the bilingual children and a group of monolingual speakers of Portuguese using a production task, in which children were required to create sentences by looking at pictures. Results indicate that the bilingual children produced a larger number of passive structures than the monolingual children, thus revealing differentiated metalinguistic skills as well as more cognitive control of linguistic processes. These data also corroborate the view that metalinguistic awareness and selective attention, which are skills normally more developed in individuals from bilingual families/ communities also apply to the children that use two linguistic codes to build knowledge, that is, children studying in bilingual curricula.

Psych verb production and comprehension in agrammatic Broca's aphasia

This study examined the factors that affect agrammatic sentence production by testing eight agrammatic aphasic participants' comprehension and production of active and passive sentences using two types of English psych verbs, those with an Experiencer-marked subject (Subject-Experiencer (SubExp)) and those with an Experiencer-marked object (Object-Experiencer (ObjExp)). The Argument Structure Complexity Hypothesis (ASCH, [ J. Neuroling. 16 (2003) 151]) posits that the verb (and sentence) production difficulties observed in agrammatic aphasia can be attributed, at least in part, to the argument structure properties of verbs, with verbs that are marked for more complex argument structure (in terms of the number and type of arguments) presenting greater difficulty than those with less complex argument structure entries. Based on previous linguistic analyses of psych verbs, ObjExp psych verbs are more complex than SubjExp verbs. Therefore, we predicted that the former would present greater production (but not comprehension) difficulty than the latter. Results showed above chance comprehension of all sentence types, with the exception of SubjExp passive constructions, in which the subject position is occupied by a non-Experiencer argument. In active sentence production, ObjExp verbs were more impaired than SubjExp verbs. However, the opposite pattern was noted for passive sentence production. While all participants had difficulty producing passive sentences of both types, they showed better performance on ObjExp verbs, as compared to SubjExp verbs, in which the Experiencer is in the subject position. Further, agrammatic aphasic speakers showed a preference for producing actives for SubjExp verbs and passives for ObjExp verbs, indicating that the thematic role requirements of selected verbs (e.g., Experiencer, Theme) influence production patterns, as they do in normal speakers. These data, as well as the error patterns seen in our patients, support the ASCH and suggest that sentence production, disrupted in agrammatic aphasia, is impaired to a greater extent when the argument structure properties of the verb increase in complexity.

The Production of Passives by Children with Specific Language Impairment Acquiring English or Cantonese.

The production of passive sentences by children with specific language impairment (SLI) was studied in two languages, English and Cantonese. In both languages, the word order required for passive sentences differs from the word order used for active sentences. However, English and Cantonese passive sentences are quite different in other respects. We found that English-speaking children with SLI were less proficient than both same-age and younger typically developing peers in the use of passives, though difficulty could not be attributed to word order or a reliance on active sentences. Cantonese-speaking children with SLI proved less capable than same-age peers but at least as proficient as younger peers in their use of passive sentences. The implications of these cross-linguistic differences are discussed.

Effect of lexical cues on the production of active and passive sentences in Broca’s and Wernicke’s aphasia

This study compared the sentence production abilities of individuals with Broca’s and Wernicke’s aphasia in an attempt to explore the extent to which impaired lexical retrieval impedes sentence production. The ability to produce active and passive reversible and non-reversible sentences was examined when varying amounts of lexical information was provided. The results showed that both Wernicke’s and Broca’s aphasic individuals were impaired in passive sentence production and that these difficulties were not overcome when lexical cues (the relevant nouns and uninflected verb) were provided. However when auxiliary and past tense morphemes were provided along with the verb stem, production of passive sentences improved drastically for both groups. Analysis of error patterns, however, revealed differences between the two groups, suggesting that Broca’s aphasic subjects may find passive sentences difficult due to problems with retrieving the relevant grammatical morphemes. Subjects with Wernicke’s aphasia may have been unable to automatically access the passive sentence structure.

Training Agrammatic Subjects on Passive Sentences: Implications for Syntactic Deficit Theories

We trained two subjects with chronic agrammatic aphasia on production of passive sentences using a computerized, iconic-based communication system. After training, one of the subjects demonstrated significant improvements in his abilities to comprehend and verbally produce English passive voiced sentences, including sentences with conjoined subjects and objects. These results suggest that agrammatism does not represent a fixed syntactic deficit.

Utilisation des voix active ou passive dans des tâches de choix et de production de phrases

Summary The use of passive sentences for describing pictures was studied in a choice situation (Exp. I) and in a production situation (Exp. II). Two variables were used : a) The context previous to the presentation of the image : context centered on the subject or on the object ; b) The sentence - type : animate subject - verb - inanimate object (SA-V-OI) or inanimate subject-verb-animate object (SI-V-OA). A tendency to choose the sentence (active or passive) in which the animate noun-phrase cornes first is observed in exp. I. The context facilitates the choice of passive sentences when the structure is SI-V-OA. In exp. II subjects produce more active sentences than passive ones and are influenced by the surface order of the noun-phrases. The context plays the same role as in exp. I : it facilitates the production of passive sentences with SI-V-OA structure and when it is centered on the animate object.