Sentence Completion Task Research Articles

The Dorsolateral (DLPFC) and Ventrolateral (VLPFC) Prefrontal function in healthy first degree relatives of Bipolar I (BD I) patients: evidence from offline testing

Event Abstract Back to Event The Dorsolateral (DLPFC) and Ventrolateral (VLPFC) Prefrontal function in healthy first degree relatives of Bipolar I (BD I) patients: evidence from offline testing Anastasia-Tessa Christodoulou1* 1 Institute of Psychiatry, United Kingdom Background: Trait cognitive dysfunction in BD I may be an expression of genetic vulnerability. The aim of this study was to investigate the DLPFC and VLPFC function in BD I patients and their first degree relatives compared to healthy controls. Methods: 47 euthymic BD I patients, 59 healthy (No lifetime Axis I or II diagnosis) and 96 controls were matched for age, gender and level of education and assessed on measures of response inhibition and initiation (Hayling Sentence Completion task), rule discovery and cognitive set shifting (Wisconsin Card Sorting test), verbal working memory (N-back sequential letter task) and current Full Scale IQ (WAIS-R; FSIQ). Level of symptomatology was measured with the Hamilton Depression Rating Scale (HDRS) and the Young Mania Rating Scale (YMRS). Results: No difference was found in FSIQ. BD I patients underperformed both their healthy first degree relatives as well as the controls on both initiation and response inhibition measures, verbal working memory and cognitive set shifting. Healthy first degree relatives were impaired in measures of response inhibition but not cognitive set shifting, rule discovery or verbal working memory. Conclusions:BD I patients and their first degree relatives were both impaired on tests of response inhibition mediated by the VPFC (BA45/47) suggesting a possible shared genetic predisposition. Regarding deficits found in BD I patients mediated by the DLPFC, during rule discovery (BA 9/46) and VLPFC for set shifting (BA 47/12) in addition to verbal working memory (BA9, 46) associated with the manipulation of information and increased memory load activating parietal cortices (BA 40) they may relate specifically to the clinical expression of the illness. Absence of those deficits in their healthy first degree relatives may explain both the lack of any lifetime Axis I diagnosis and BD. Conference: 41st European Brain and Behaviour Society Meeting, Rhodes Island, Greece, 13 Sep - 18 Sep, 2009. Presentation Type: Poster Presentation Topic: Poster presentations Citation: Christodoulou A (2009). The Dorsolateral (DLPFC) and Ventrolateral (VLPFC) Prefrontal function in healthy first degree relatives of Bipolar I (BD I) patients: evidence from offline testing. Conference Abstract: 41st European Brain and Behaviour Society Meeting. doi: 10.3389/conf.neuro.08.2009.09.115 Copyright: The abstracts in this collection have not been subject to any Frontiers peer review or checks, and are not endorsed by Frontiers. They are made available through the Frontiers publishing platform as a service to conference organizers and presenters. The copyright in the individual abstracts is owned by the author of each abstract or his/her employer unless otherwise stated. Each abstract, as well as the collection of abstracts, are published under a Creative Commons CC-BY 4.0 (attribution) licence (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/) and may thus be reproduced, translated, adapted and be the subject of derivative works provided the authors and Frontiers are attributed. For Frontiers’ terms and conditions please see https://www.frontiersin.org/legal/terms-and-conditions. Received: 08 Jun 2009; Published Online: 08 Jun 2009. * Correspondence: Anastasia-Tessa Christodoulou, Institute of Psychiatry, London, United Kingdom, tessa_christodoulou@hotmail.com Login Required This action requires you to be registered with Frontiers and logged in. To register or login click here. Abstract Info Abstract The Authors in Frontiers Anastasia-Tessa Christodoulou Google Anastasia-Tessa Christodoulou Google Scholar Anastasia-Tessa Christodoulou PubMed Anastasia-Tessa Christodoulou Related Article in Frontiers Google Scholar PubMed Abstract Close Back to top Javascript is disabled. Please enable Javascript in your browser settings in order to see all the content on this page.

Thematic roles in Alzheimer's disease: Hierarchy violations in psychological predicates

The nature of the verb deficit in Alzheimer's disease (AD) was investigated with a special focus on thematic-role assignment, employing verbs whose argument realization follows canonical thematic hierarchy, with Agent and Theme as main roles (e.g., The hunter killed the deer), and verbs whose argument realization deviates from canonical hierarchy, such as psych verbs (e.g., fear, frighten). Subject- Experiencer verbs (e.g., fear) do not assign an Agent role to the subject position of the sentence, but instead assign the role of Experiencer to that position. Object- Experiencer verbs (e.g., frighten) deviate from canonical thematic hierarchy in two ways. Like fear verbs, the frighten verbs do not assign the role of Agent. Moreover, they assign the role of Theme to the subject position and the role of Experiencer to the object position, thus resulting in the non-canonical Theme < Experiencer argument realization. Ten AD patients, 11 matched elderly controls, and 49 young controls performed a sentence completion task in which they had to choose a verb that would render the sentence grammatical and meaningful. AD patients showed no problems with canonical structures, but performed worse than controls in psych verb sentences, demonstrating greater difficulty with object- Experiencer sentences. Results suggest that AD patients may have an impairment in more fine-grained aspects of verb-semantic representation, such as thematic roles.

So many options, so little time: The roles of association and competition in underdetermined responding

How do we make decisions when faced with multiple options? In the domain of language, some evidence suggests that we exert cognitive control in order to respond in such underdetermined situations when a good option is hard to find but not when we must select among competing options. However, this conclusion, and conclusions about the neural substrates supporting underdetermined responding, are made on the basis of measures that confound retrieval and selection demands. The present study introduces measures based on latent semantic analyses that better capture the underlying theoretical constructs of association strength and competition. These measures revealed independent effects of retrieval and selection demands on reaction times in verb generation and sentence completion tasks. These results challenge existing accounts of underdetermined responding and highlight the need for unconfounded measures of association strength and competition in studies of localization. We propose a new model governed by both absolute and relative activation levels of alternative responses.

Children's production of verb-phrase anaphora in a spoken task

To investigate the influence of semantic/pragmatic variables on children's production of verb-phrase anaphora (VPA), a spoken sentence completion task (e.g., John is throwing a ball and ... Mary is too) was administered to four-, seven- and ten-year-olds. The frequency of VPA production was affected by whether the two clauses had the same or different polarity and by whether the actions were portrayed as simultaneous or sequential. These effects interacted in complex ways with age and with the presentation order of the polarity types. We speculate that developmental changes in the influence of semantic/pragmatic factors may be linked to increases with age in the strength of syntactic priming effects.

Agreement and attraction in Russian

We assessed whether and under what conditions noncanonical agreement patterns occur in Russian, with the goal of understanding the factors involved in normal agreement. Russian is a morphosyntactically rich language in which agreement involves features for number, gender, and case. If consistent, overt specification of number and gender agreement features supports agreement processes in language production, agreement should be less vulnerable to number and gender attraction than in languages with sparse agreement morphology. A related question was the degree to which notional number influences agreement patterns in morphologically rich languages. We varied the grammatical and notional number properties of sentence subjects and examined the effects on the predicate in sentence completion tasks using native Russian speakers. Noncanonical agreement occurred, but at rates lower than those observed in English and other languages without rich number morphology. Noncanonically plural predicates occurred more often after notionally plural subjects, suggesting notional number agreement, but the incidence was also lower than in languages with sparser agreement morphology. Gender attraction was almost nonexistent. The results suggest that morphology arbitrates grammatical agreement processes and reduces the impact of variations in notional number.

Fronto-temporal Interactions during Overt Verbal Initiation and Suppression

The Hayling Sentence Completion Task (HSCT) is known to activate left hemisphere frontal and temporal language regions. However, the effective connectivity between frontal and temporal language regions associated with the task has yet to be examined. The aims of the study were to examine activation and effective connectivity during the HSCT using a functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) paradigm in which participants made overt verbal responses. We predicted that producing an incongruent response (response suppression), compared to a congruent one (response initiation), would be associated with greater activation in the left prefrontal cortex and an increase in the effective connectivity between temporal and frontal regions. Fifteen participants were scanned while completing 80 sentence stems. The congruency and constraint of sentences varied across trials. Dynamic Causal Modeling (DCM) and Bayesian Model Selection (BMS) were used to compare a set of alternative DCMs of fronto-temporal connectivity. The HSCT activated regions in the left temporal and prefrontal cortices, and the cuneus. Response suppression was associated with greater activation in the left middle and orbital frontal gyri and the bilateral precuneus than response initiation. Left middle temporal and frontal regions identified by the conventional fMRI analyses were entered into the DCM analysis. Using a systematic BMS procedure, the optimal DCM showed that the connection from the left middle temporal gyrus, which was driven by verbal stimuli per se, was significantly increased in strength during response suppression compared to initiation. Greater effective connectivity between left temporal and prefrontal regions during response suppression may reflect the transfer of information from posterior temporal regions where semantic and lexical information is stored to prefrontal regions where it is manipulated in preparation for an appropriate response.

Conflicting cues and competition between notional and grammatical factors in producing number and gender agreement: Evidence from Hebrew

The present study investigated the process of producing subject–predicate agreement for conceptually driven distinctions which are morphologically specified, such as natural gender and number, and arbitrary morphological specification of gender and number. The study was conducted in Hebrew, in which agreement rules are very prevalent and include both gender and number agreement between the subject and the predicate. This feature of Hebrew makes it possible to directly compare processes within one language and to better generalize the findings across languages. Using a sentence completion task for complex noun phrases, we tested the effect of conceptual versus grammatical features of the number (Exp. 1 and 2) and gender (Exp. 3 and 4) of the local (Exp.1 and 3) and head (Exp. 2 and 4) nouns on the probability of agreement errors in producing the predicate. The results revealed that the notional meaning of the local noun does not affect the frequency of producing agreement errors although, with almost the same set of stimuli, manipulation of the notional meaning of the head noun does affect this frequency. These results are discussed in connection with Bock et al.’s [Bock, K., Eberhard, K., M., Cutting, J. C., Meyer, A. S., & Schriefers, H. (2001). Some attractions of verb agreement. Cognitive Psychology, 43, 83–128] two-mechanism model for the implementation of agreement.

Genetic Variation in the DAOA (G72) Gene Modulates Hippocampal Function in Subjects at High Risk of Schizophrenia

Strong evidence exists for an association between genetic variation in the gene DAOA (D-amino acid oxidase activator, also known as G72) and risk for schizophrenia. Preliminary evidence in healthy control subjects has implicated genetic variation in the DAOA gene in the modulation of hippocampal complex and prefrontal cortex activation. Assessment was performed on 61 subjects at high genetic risk of schizophrenia for familial reasons. All subjects were genotyped for two closely linked single nucleotide polymorphisms in the DAOA gene complex, M23 (rs3918342) and M24 (rs1421292), that have previously shown association with schizophrenia. The effect of genotype on brain activation was assessed with functional magnetic resonance imaging data gathered during performance of the verbal initiation section of the Hayling Sentence Completion Task. Differences between DAOA genotype groups were seen in the activation of the left hippocampus and parahippocampus in the contrast of sentence completion versus rest. In addition the DAOA genotype groups differed in their recruitment of right inferior prefrontal cortex in relation to increasing task difficulty. The effects of genotype on brain activation could not be explained in terms of differences in grey matter density. These results support the view that genetic variation in the DAOA gene influences hippocampal complex and prefrontal cortex function, an effect that might be particularly prominent in the context of enhanced genetic risk for schizophrenia.

Cognitive vulnerability indicators in bipolar disorder and schizophrenia

Materials and methods Participants were 17 BD and 15 SZ relatives (BD-R and SZR) respectively and 23 controls. All participants underwent assessment of Full Scale IQ (Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale Revised, WAIS-R), verbal memory and learning (California Verbal Learning test, CVLT), working memory (N-back), inhibition (Hayling Sentence Completion Task, HSCT), verbal fluency (Controlled Oral Word Association, COWA), working memory and inhibition (alphabet and number words tasks). Lack of lifetime Axis I and II disorders was screened using Structured Clinical Interview for DSM-IV (SCID-I/II) and symptomatology was assessed with the Hamilton Depression Rating Scale (HDRS), Young Mania Rating Scale (YMRS) and Brief Psychiatric Rating Scale (BPRS).

Deficit in a Neural Correlate of Reality Monitoring in Schizophrenia Patients

Patients who suffer from the devastating psychiatric illness schizophrenia are plagued by hallucinations, bizarre behavior, and delusional ideas, such as believing that they are controlled by malevolent outside forces. A fundamental human cognitive operation that may contribute to these hallmark symptoms is the ability to maintain accurate and coherent self-referential processing over time, such as occurs during reality monitoring (distinguishing self-generated from externally perceived information). However, the neural bases for a disturbance in this operation in schizophrenia have not been fully explored. Using functional magnetic resonance imaging, we asked clinically stable schizophrenia patients to remember whether or not they had generated a target word during an earlier sentence completion task. We found that, during accurate performance of this self-referential source memory task, the schizophrenia subjects manifest a deficit in rostral medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC) activity--a brain region critically implicated in both the instantiation and the retrieval of self-referential information in healthy subjects. Impairment in rostral mPFC function likely plays a key role in the profound subjective disturbances that characterize schizophrenia and that are the aspect of the disorder most troubling to patients and to society at large.

Hypofrontality in subjects at high genetic risk of schizophrenia with depressive symptoms

Background Subjects at high risk of schizophrenia for genetic reasons were found to demonstrate increased levels of depressive symptoms compared to controls. The current study sought to investigate the neural correlates of depression in these subjects. We hypothesised abnormal activation of dorsolateral prefrontal regions in those at high risk with depression. Methods Depression was rated according to DSM-IV criteria. FMRI data was available from 90 high risk subjects, comprising 78 not depressed (HRD−) and 12 depressed (HRD+) subjects. Activation during the Hayling Sentence Completion Task was compared to 25 healthy control subjects without depression. Results The HRD+ group demonstrated reduced activation of the right middle/superior frontal gyrus compared to both healthy controls and the HRD− group. Increased left superior temporal gyrus activation was also found in the HRD+ group versus the HRD− group. These results survived controlling for the presence of positive psychotic symptoms at the time of the scan. Conclusion Reduced activation of dorsolateral prefrontal regions, widely reported in established schizophrenia and seen here in people at high familial risk with depressive features, may be related to the presence of affective symptoms of the disorder rather than to the presence of positive psychotic symptoms. Since studies have indicated that depressive symptoms antecede illness, these findings may be relevant to the early features of developing psychosis.

Central coherence in women with bulimia nervosa

To examine the concept of central coherence in women with bulimia nervosa (BN) and address similarities and difference with those with anorexia nervosa (AN) METHOD: Forty two women with BN and 42 matched healthy women, completed neuropsychological testing measuring aspects of central coherence: Rey-Osterrieth Complex Figure (RCFT), Embedded Figures Test (EFT), Block Design Test (BD), Homograph Reading Test (HRT), and Sentence Completion Task (SCT). The BN group showed superiority in local processing as measured by EFT and lesser relative advantage from segmentation in BD, and difficulties in global processing in both visual and verbal domains as examined by RCFT, HRT, and SCT. Anxiety levels were associated with low central coherence indices in RCFT. People with BN displayed a profile consistent with the weak central coherence hypothesis. Their pattern of cognitive performance resembles that seen in AN although some differences are apparent.

An examination of the concept of central coherence in women with anorexia nervosa

To examine central coherence (local and global processing) in women with anorexia nervosa (AN). 42 women with AN and 42 healthy women (HC) completed neuropsychological testing measuring visuospatial and verbal aspects of central coherence: Rey-Osterrieth Complex Figure (RCFT), Embedded Figures Test (EFT), Homograph Reading Test (HRT), and Sentence Completion Task (SCT). People with AN displayed superior performance on the EFT and poorer performance in RCFT with the exception of accuracy in the copy trial. Long hesitations in the SCT were observed. Verbal coherence tasks were not sensitive enough to detect coherence anomalies in AN. Women with AN have strengths in tasks requiring local processing (EFT) and weaknesses on tasks benefited by global processing (RCFT and SCT). These results are consistent with the weak central coherence account. This trait might play a role in the maintenance of AN and can be addressed in specific clinical interventions.

Ego development, psychopathology, and parenting problems in substance-abusing mothers.

The authors examined maternal ego development in relation to psychopathology and parenting problems in a sample of substance abusing mothers. Given predilections at higher levels of ego development for introspection and guilt, the authors expected mothers at higher levels to report more psychopathology. Given predilections at lower levels of ego development for dichotomous perceptions and limited conceptions of causation, the authors expected mothers at low levels to report more problematic parenting behaviors. Intelligence was expected to correlate but not overlap with ego development. Subjects were 182 mothers who expressed interest in a randomized clinical trial for a new parenting intervention. Measures included the Washington University Sentence Completion Task--Short Form, the Parental Acceptance-Rejection Questionnaire, the Brief Symptom Inventory and the Kaufman Brief Intelligence Test. Results of correlation and multivariate analyses of variance confirmed predictions. Implications for future development of interventions for substance abusing mothers are discussed.

Correlations between fMRI activation and individual psychotic symptoms in un-medicated subjects at high genetic risk of schizophrenia

Background:It has been proposed that different types of psychopathology in schizophrenia may reflect distinguishable pathological processes. In the current study we aimed to address such associations in the absence of confounders such as medication and disease chronicity by examining specific relationships between fMRI activation and individual symptom severity scores in un-medicated subjects at high genetic risk of schizophrenia.Methods:Associations were examined across two functional imaging paradigms: the Hayling sentence completion task, and an encoding/retrieval task, comprising encoding (at word classification) and retrieval (old word/new word judgement). Symptom severity was assessed using the positive and negative syndrome scale (PANSS). Items examined were hallucinations, delusions, and suspiciousness/persecution.Results:Associations were seen in the anterior middle temporal gyrus in relation to hallucination scores during the sentence completion task, and in the medial temporal lobe in association with suspiciousness/persecution scores in the encoding/retrieval task. Cerebellar activation was associated with delusions and suspiciousness/persecution scores across both tasks with differing patterns of laterality.Conclusion:These results support a role for the lateral temporal cortex in hallucinations and medial temporal lobe in positive psychotic symptoms. They also highlight the potential role of the cerebellum in the formation of delusions. That the current results are seen in un-medicated high risk subjects indicates these associations are not specific to the established illness and are not related to medication effects.

Self-Referential Cognition and Empathy in Autism

BackgroundIndividuals with autism spectrum conditions (ASC) have profound impairments in the interpersonal social domain, but it is unclear if individuals with ASC also have impairments in the intrapersonal self-referential domain. We aimed to evaluate across several well validated measures in both domains, whether both self-referential cognition and empathy are impaired in ASC and whether these two domains are related to each other.Methodology/Principal FindingsThirty adults aged 19-45, with Asperger Syndrome or high-functioning autism and 30 age, sex, and IQ matched controls participated in the self-reference effect (SRE) paradigm. In the SRE paradigm, participants judged adjectives in relation to the self, a similar close other, a dissimilar non-close other, or for linguistic content. Recognition memory was later tested. After the SRE paradigm, several other complimentary self-referential cognitive measures were taken. Alexithymia and private self-consciousness were measured via self-report. Self-focused attention was measured on the Self-Focus Sentence Completion task. Empathy was measured with 3 self-report instruments and 1 performance measure of mentalizing (Eyes test). Self-reported autistic traits were also measured with the Autism Spectrum Quotient (AQ). Although individuals with ASC showed a significant SRE in memory, this bias was decreased compared to controls. Individuals with ASC also showed reduced memory for the self and a similar close other and also had concurrent impairments on measures of alexithymia, self-focused attention, and on all 4 empathy measures. Individual differences in self-referential cognition predicted mentalizing ability and self-reported autistic traits. More alexithymia and less self memory was predictive of larger mentalizing impairments and AQ scores regardless of diagnosis. In ASC, more self-focused attention is associated with better mentalizing ability and lower AQ scores, while in controls, more self-focused attention is associated with decreased mentalizing ability and higher AQ scores. Increasing private self-consciousness also predicted better mentalizing ability, but only for individuals with ASC.Conclusions/SignificanceWe conclude that individuals with ASC have broad impairments in both self-referential cognition and empathy. These two domains are also intrinsically linked and support predictions made by simulation theory. Our results also highlight a specific dysfunction in ASC within cortical midlines structures of the brain such as the medial prefrontal cortex.

Semantic indeterminacy in object relative clauses

This article examined whether semantic indeterminacy plays a role in comprehension of complex structures such as object relative clauses. Study 1 used a gated sentence completion task to assess which alternative interpretations are dominant as the relative clause unfolds; Study 2 compared reading times in object relative clauses containing different animacy configurations to unambiguous passive controls; and Study 3 related completion data and reading data. The results showed that comprehension difficulty was modulated by animacy configuration and voice (active vs. passive). These differences were well correlated with the availability of alternative interpretations as the relative clause unfolds, as revealed by the completion data. In contrast to approaches arguing that comprehension difficulty stems from syntactic complexity, these results suggest that semantic indeterminacy is a major source of comprehension difficulty in object relative clauses. Results are consistent with constraint-based approaches to ambiguity resolution and bring new insights into previously identified sources of difficulty.

Explaining frequency of verb morphology in early L2 speech

In speech, early L2 learners of English have been observed to supply forms of copula be more frequently than auxiliary be, and both more frequently than affixal regular past –ed and 3rd person singular present tense –s in contexts where morphological marking is required for native speakers. Early learners also use a construction not found in input: be + bare V (e.g. I’m read), allow constructions involving be to have a range of meanings not found in target English, and rarely overgeneralise –ed and –s to inappropriate contexts. The present study considers the kind of mental representation that L2 learners must have that would lead to the observed performance. A ‘nativist’ account is proposed. It is argued that the mental grammars of early L2 learners are organised in the same way as the grammars of native speakers, this following necessarily from the architecture of the language faculty. They differ minimally in the nature of their Vocabulary entries for verb morphology. This difference correlates with an early under-determination of syntactic representations where ‘uninterpretable’ syntactic features are absent from syntactic expressions. Evidence from a sentence completion task conducted with low proficiency speakers whose L1s are Chinese and Spanish is used to test this claim.

Is Field Dependence or Independence a Predictor of EFL Reading Performance?

In this study it was hypothesized that field dependence or independence would introduce systematic variance into Iranian EFL learners' overall and task-specific performance on task-based reading comprehension tests. One thousand, seven hundred, forty-three freshman, sophomore, junior, and senior students, all majoring in English at various Iranian universities and colleges, took the Group Embedded Figures Test (GEFT). The resulting 582 field-independent (FI) and 707 field-dependent (FD) students then took the 1990 version of the IELTS. Using SPSS commands for collapsing continuous variables into groups and participants’ IELTS scores (based on the 25th, 50th, and 75th percentiles), four proficiency groups were identified for each cognitive style. From each proficiency group, 36 FD and 36 FI individuals were selected through a matching process. The resulting sample of 288 participants took the Task-Based Reading Test (TBRT) designed for the study. Data analysis revealed that individuals’ cognitive styles resulted in a significant difference in their overall test performance in the proficient, semiproficient, and fairly proficient groups, but not in the low-proficient group. The findings also indicated that cognitive style resulted in a significant difference in participants' performance on true-false, sentence completion, outlining, scanning, and elicitation tasks in all proficiency groups.

Neural correlates of Dutch Verb Second in speech production

Dutch speakers with agrammatic Broca’s aphasia are known to have problems with the production of finite verbs in main clauses. This performance pattern has been accounted for in terms of the specific syntactic complexity of the Dutch main clause structure, which requires an extra syntactic operation (Verb Second), relative to the basic Subject–Object–Verb order surfacing in Dutch subordinate clauses. We report an fMRI study into the question whether this syntactic complexity is reflected in increased brain activation correlated with the production of Dutch main clause word order, in speakers without language impairment. Nineteen healthy subjects performed a covert sentence completion task, during which main and subordinate clauses were alternately elicited in a block design. Results show a left middle to superior frontal cluster of activation correlated to production of Verb-Second over Verb-Final clauses, with no activation in the opposite contrast. This activation pattern is counter to what might be expected from the frequency distribution of main and subordinate clauses. We conclude that the Verb-Second deviation from the basic Dutch SOV word order costs extra neural resources and that this also underlies the agrammatic problems with the production of finite verbs in Dutch main clauses.