Self-paced Listening Research Articles

Variability in sentence comprehension in aphasia in German

An important aspect of aphasia is the observation of behavioral variability between and within individual participants. Our study addresses variability in sentence comprehension in German, by testing 21 individuals with aphasia and a control group and involving (a) several constructions (declarative sentences, relative clauses and control structures with an overt pronoun or PRO), (b) three response tasks (object manipulation, sentence-picture matching with/without self-paced listening), and (c) two test phases (to investigate test–retest performance). With this systematic, large-scale study we gained insights into variability in sentence comprehension. We found that the size of syntactic effects varied both in aphasia and in control participants. Whereas variability in control participants led to systematic changes, variability in individuals with aphasia was unsystematic across test phases or response tasks. The persistent occurrence of canonicity and interference effects across response tasks and test phases, however, shows that the performance is systematically influenced by syntactic complexity.

THE EFFECTS OF L1–L2 PHONOLOGICAL MAPPINGS ON L2 PHONOLOGICAL SENSITIVITY

AbstractThis study examines the effects of asymmetrical mappings of L2 sounds to L1 sounds on real-time processing of L2 phonology. L1-Korean participants completed a self-paced listening (SPL) task paired with a picture verification (PV) task, in which an English sentence was presented word by word along with a picture that matched or mismatched the sentence. In the critical region, an L2 vowel was deliberately replaced with the wrong vowel for two types of English vowel pairs: Type 1: English vowel pairs showing a one-to-one mapping to Korean counterparts (e.g., English: /i/ and /æ/ to Korean /i/ and /æ/, respectively); and Type 2: English vowel pairs showing a two-to-one mapping to a Korean counterpart (e.g., English /i/ and /ɪ/ to Korean /i/). We analyzed response times (RTs) and PV accuracy. Longer RTs were observed for Type 1 errors than Type 2 errors, indicating lower sensitivity to L2 vowels with two-to-one mapping to an L1 vowel. Also, PV accuracy was lower for the sentences containing Type 2 errors. These results suggest that asymmetrical L2-L1 sound mapping can affect learners’ processing of L2 phonological knowledge, which in turn can negatively affect their comprehension.

Thematic role assignment in the L1 acquisition of Tagalog: Use of word order and morphosyntactic markers

ABSTRACTIt is a common finding across languages that young children have problems in understanding patient-initial sentences. We used Tagalog, a verb-initial language with a reliable voice-marking system and highly frequent patient voice constructions, to test the predictions of several accounts that have been proposed to explain this difficulty: the frequency account, the Competition Model, and the incremental processing account. Study 1 presents an analysis of Tagalog child-directed speech, which showed that the dominant argument order is agent-before-patient and that morphosyntactic markers are highly valid cues to thematic role assignment. In Study 2, we used a combined self-paced listening and picture verification task to test how Tagalog-speaking adults and 5- and 7-year-old children process reversible transitive sentences. Results showed that adults performed well in all conditions, while children’s accuracy and listening times for the first noun phrase indicated more difficulty in interpreting patient-initial sentences in the agent voice compared to the patient voice. The patient voice advantage is partly explained by both the frequency account and incremental processing account.

Auditory comprehension of control structures in German individuals with aphasia using self-paced listening, visual world eye tracking and an object manipulation task

Auditory comprehension of control structures in German individuals with aphasia using self-paced listening, visual world eye tracking and an object manipulation task

Subject–verb agreement and verbal short-term memory: A perspective from Greek children with specific language impairment

This study investigated the performance of school age Greek-speaking children with SLI on verbal short-term memory (VSTM) and Subject–Verb (S-V) agreement in comparison to chronological age controls and younger typically developing children. VSTM abilities were assessed by means of a non-word repetition task (NRT) and an elicited production task, an off-line grammaticality judgment (GJ) task, and an on-line self-paced listening task were employed to examine S-V agreement abilities. The study found significant between-group differences in the NRT and the off-line GJ task. No significant between-group differences were found for the S-V agreement production task and for reaction times of the on-line task. The authors argue that the children with SLI showed increased grammatical sensitivity in S-V agreement and relate their lower performance on the off-line GJ task to the task’s metalinguistic demands. The findings suggest that deficits in VSTM constitute a robust marker for SLI and claim that S-V agreement can be acquired by SLI individuals with apparent limitations in VSTM.

Mechanisms underlying syntactic comprehension deficits in vascular aphasia: new evidence from self-paced listening

Sixty-one people with aphasia (pwa) and 41 matched controls were tested for the ability to understand sentences that required the ability to process particular syntactic elements and assign particular syntactic structures. Participants paced themselves word-by-word through 20 examples of 11 spoken sentence types and indicated which of two pictures corresponded to the meaning of each sentence. Sentences were developed in pairs such that comprehension of the experimental version of a pair required an aspect of syntactic processing not required in the corresponding baseline sentence. The need for the syntactic operations required only in the experimental version was triggered at a “critical word” in the experimental sentence. Listening times for critical words in experimental sentences were compared to those for corresponding words in the corresponding baseline sentences. The results were consistent with several models of syntactic comprehension deficits in pwa: resource reduction, slowed lexical and/or syntactic processing, abnormal susceptibility to interference from thematic roles generated non-syntactically. They suggest that a previously unidentified disturbance limiting the duration of parsing and interpretation may lead to these deficits, and that this mechanism may lead to structure-specific deficits in pwa. The results thus point to more than one mechanism underlying syntactic comprehension disorders both across and within pwa.

Short-term memory, working memory, and syntactic comprehension in aphasia

Sixty-one people with aphasia were tested on 10 tests of short-term memory (STM) and for the ability to use syntactic structure to determine the meanings of 11 types of sentences in three tasks—object manipulation, picture matching, and picture matching with self-paced listening. Multilevel models showed relationships between measures of the ability to retain and manipulate item and order information in STM and accuracy and reaction time (RT), and a greater relationship between these STM measures and accuracy and RT for several more complex sentence types in individual tasks. There were no effects of measures of STM that reflect the use of phonological codes or rehearsal on comprehension. There was only one effect of STM measures on self-paced listening times. There were double dissociations between performance on STM and individual comprehension tasks, indicating that normal STM is not necessary to perform normally on these tasks. The results are most easily related to the view that STM plays a facilitatory role in supporting the use of the products of the comprehension process to accomplish operations related to tasks.

The hidden effect of hearing acuity on speech recall, and compensatory effects of self-paced listening

Objective: The purpose of this research was to determine whether negative effects of hearing loss on recall accuracy for spoken narratives can be mitigated by allowing listeners to control the rate of speech input. Design: Paragraph-length narratives were presented for recall under two listening conditions in a within-participants design: presentation without interruption (continuous) at an average speech-rate of 150 words per minute; and presentation interrupted at periodic intervals at which participants were allowed to pause before initiating the next segment (self-paced). Study sample: Participants were 24 adults ranging from 21 to 33 years of age. Half had age-normal hearing acuity and half had mild- to-moderate hearing loss. The two groups were comparable for age, years of formal education, and vocabulary. Results: When narrative passages were presented continuously, without interruption, participants with hearing loss recalled significantly fewer story elements, both main ideas and narrative details, than those with age-normal hearing. The recall difference was eliminated when the two groups were allowed to self-pace the speech input. Conclusion: Results support the hypothesis that the listening effort associated with reduced hearing acuity can slow processing operations and increase demands on working memory, with consequent negative effects on accuracy of narrative recall.

Children’s On-line Processing of Scrambling in Japanese

This study investigates the on-line processing of scrambled sentences in Japanese by preschool children and adults using a combination of self-paced listening and speeded picture selection tasks. The effects of a filler-gap dependency, reversibility, and case markers were examined. The results show that both children and adults had difficulty in comprehending scrambled sentences when they were provided as reversible sentences. The reversibility effect was significant for children, whereas the interaction of reversibility and a filler-gap dependency was significant for adults. However, this does not indicate that children's parsing is fundamentally different from that of adults. For those children who processed the nominative and accusative case markers equally fast, the reactivation of the dislocated constituent was observed in the gap position. These results suggest that children's processing is basically the same as adults' in that their sentence processing is incremental and they parse a gap to form a filler-gap dependency.

Effects of word frequency and modality on sentence comprehension impairments in people with aphasia.

It is well known that people with aphasia have sentence comprehension impairments. The present study investigated whether lexical factors contribute to sentence comprehension impairments in both the auditory and written modalities using online measures of sentence processing. People with aphasia and non brain-damaged controls participated in the experiment (n = 8 per group). Twenty-one sentence pairs containing high- and low-frequency words were presented in self-paced listening and reading tasks. The sentences were syntactically simple and differed only in the critical words. The dependent variables were response times for critical segments of the sentence and accuracy on the comprehension questions. The results showed that word frequency influences performance on measures of sentence comprehension in people with aphasia. The accuracy data on the comprehension questions suggested that people with aphasia have more difficulty understanding sentences containing low-frequency words in the written compared to auditory modality. Both group and single-case analyses of the response time data also indicated that people with aphasia experience more difficulty with reading than listening. Sentence comprehension in people with aphasia is influenced by word frequency and presentation modality.

Spoken Sentence Processing in Young and Older Adults Modulated by Task Demands: Evidence From Self-Paced Listening

Young and older adult listeners paced themselves through recorded sentences, under instructions to recall the sentence verbatim or to respond to comprehension probes. Sentences varied in syntactic complexity and speech rate. Young and older adults paused longer after major syntactic boundaries, an effect that was constant across speech rates but became more pronounced with increasing syntactic complexity. These effects were moderated by listeners' expectations of what they were to do with the linguistic input and by their recent experience with particular tasks. Older adults tended to pause longer in the recall condition, especially when it preceded the comprehension condition. Young adults paused differentially longer at major syntactic boundaries in the comprehension condition, but only when the comprehension condition preceded the recall condition. These findings are discussed in the context of two competing theories of syntactic processing.

On-line syntactic processing in aphasia: Studies with auditory moving window presentation

Twenty-eight aphasic patients with left hemisphere strokes and matched control subjects were tested on an auditory moving windows task in which successive phrases of a sentence were presented in response to subjects’ self-paced button presses and subjects made timed judgments regarding the plausibility of each sentence. Pairs of sentences were presented that differed in syntactic complexity. Patients made more errors and/or took longer in making the plausibility judgments than controls, and were more affected than controls by the syntactic complexity of a sentence in these judgments. Normal subjects showed effects of syntactic structure in self-paced listening. On-line syntactic effects differed in patients as a function of their comprehension level. High-performing patients showed the same effects as normal control subjects; low performing patients did not show the same effects of syntactic structure. On-line syntactic effects also differed in patients as a function of their clinical diagnosis. Broca’s aphasic patients’ on-line performances suggested that they were not processing complex syntactic structures on-line, while fluent aphasics’ performances suggested that their comprehension impairment occurred after on-line processing was accomplished. The results indicate that many aphasic patients retain their ability to process syntactic structure on-line, and that different groups of patients with syntactic comprehension disorders show different patterns of on-line syntactic processing.

Adult Aging and Listening Patterns for Spoken Prose: Spontaneous Segmentation Versus Self-Paced Listening

Young and older adults were allowed to control the delivery rate of spoken prose for later recall using two methods. In one method (spontaneous segmentation), participants were allowed to interrupt speech passages whenever they wished. In the other method (self-paced listening), speech passages were presented in segments, with participants allowed to initiate presentation of subsequent segments via a key-press. Older adults' segment sizes in the spontaneous segmentation condition were unchanged when the passages were presented for a second time. By contrast, pause latencies to initiating subsequent segments in the self-paced listening condition were affected by experience with the passage. Results suggested that the segment sizes selected in the spontaneous segmentation condition were driven by the linguistic structure and prosody of the speech, rather than reflecting ineffective metamemory on the part of the older adults.

Resource allocation during spoken discourse processing: effects of age and passage difficulty as revealed by self-paced listening.

The allocation of processing resources during spoken discourse comprehension was studied in a manner analogous to self-paced reading using the auditory moving window technique (Ferreira, Henderson, Anes, Weeks, & McFarlane, 1996). Young and older participants listened to spoken passages in a self-paced segment-by-segment fashion. In Experiment 1, we examined the influence of speech rate and passage complexity on discourse encoding and recall performance. In Experiment 2, we examined the influence of speech rate and presentation mode (self-paced vs. full-passage presentation) on recall performance. Results suggest that diminished memory performance in the older adult group relative to the young adult group is attributable to age-related differences in how resources were allocated during the initial encoding of the spoken discourse.