Sentence Comprehension Test Research Articles

Sentence comprehension in semantic dementia: a longitudinal case study

Sentence comprehension abilities were investigated in a patient with semantic dementia who was administered tests of semantic knowledge and sentence comprehension over a 5-year period. Results showed that despite a severe and continual degradation in semantic knowledge, syntactic comprehension abilities remained largely intact. Evidence was also found for a codependency between semantics and syntax in a task in which knowledge about conceptual number influenced subject-verb agreement in the patient and in control participants. Results are discussed in relation to the nature of the sentence comprehension impairment in semantic dementia and with reference to the modularity of the components of the language processing system.

Idiom comprehension in Alzheimer’s disease: the role of the central executive

Idiom comprehension of 15 patients with mild probable Alzheimer's disease was examined by means of a sentence-to-picture matching task. Patients had to choose between two pictures, one representing the figurative and the other the literal interpretation. They were also submitted to a literal sentence comprehension test and to a pencil-and-paper dual task. Whereas literal comprehension was normal in seven subjects and mildly impaired in the others, idiom comprehension was very poor in all of them and correlated with the performance on the dual task. When the idiom test was repeated using an unrelated situation as an alternative to the picture representing the figurative meaning, performance significantly improved. It was hypothesized that the response in the sentence-to-picture matching task in the case of idioms requires sentence processing followed by the suppression of the literal interpretation. Alzheimer's disease patients proved to be unable to inhibit the literal meaning, although they had not lost the idiomatic meaning. In a second experiment, 15 Alzheimer's disease patients with a comparable level of cognitive impairment were submitted to the same idiom comprehension test, and to a test of verbal explanation of the idioms. The results showed significantly better performance in the oral task than in the sentence-to-picture matching task. In oral explanation, however, Alzheimer's disease patients also produced some literal interpretation whenever this represented a possible situation in the real world. We suggest that, during idiom interpretation, the literal meaning needs to be suppressed in order to activate the figurative meaning, and we stress the fact that both linguistic and extralinguistic factors must be taken into account to explain idiom interpretation.

Working memory and online syntactic processing in Alzheimer's disease: studies with auditory moving window presentation.

Twenty patients with dementia of the Alzheimer's type (DAT) and 20 controls were tested on six tests of working memory and a test of online auditory sentence comprehension in which listening times for each phrase in the sentence, as well as the time required for an end-of-sentence plausibility judgment, were measured. The sentences differed in syntactic complexity. Patients had lower working memory scores than controls and performed more poorly on the plausibility judgments. However, patients were not more affected than controls by the syntactic complexity of a sentence in these judgments, and both groups showed similar effects of syntactic structure in the listening-time data. The increase in listening times at syntactically capacity-demanding points in complex sentences, compared with comparable points in matched simpler sentences, did not correlate with measures of working memory. The results indicate that early-stage DAT patients are not impaired in their ability to assign syntactic structure and to use it to determine aspects of sentence meaning, despite their reduced working memories. This provides evidence for a specialization within working memory for syntactic processing.

Improved function and perfusion with pharmacological blood pressure elevation

20 A few studies have reported improved function in acute stroke with pharmacological elevation of mean arterial pressure (MAP), but statistical correlations between function and MAP have not been documented. We studied 10 acute-subacute stroke patients before, during, and after MAP elevation (using IV phenylephrine and oral agents), with detailed cognitive tests and serial MR perfusion and diffusion scans to identify relationships between MAP, deficits, and regional perfusion. Cognitive assessment included tests of word and sentence comprehension and naming (for dominant hemisphere stroke), and tests of copying and spatial attention (for nondominant stroke). Separate forms of each test, matched in difficulty, were administered daily. Blinded reviewers measured volume of hypoperfused regions on “time to peak” maps. Results: 5 patients showed striking correlations between MAP and 1 or more cognitive tests: in 4 aphasic patients MAP was highly correlated with both naming and word comprehension (r=.88–96; p Conclusions: In selected patients with recent stroke, raising MAP can be associated both with improvement in specific domains of cognition and with improved regional cerebral perfusion.

Improved function and perfusion with pharmacological blood pressure elevation

20 A few studies have reported improved function in acute stroke with pharmacological elevation of mean arterial pressure (MAP), but statistical correlations between function and MAP have not been documented. We studied 10 acute-subacute stroke patients before, during, and after MAP elevation (using IV phenylephrine and oral agents), with detailed cognitive tests and serial MR perfusion and diffusion scans to identify relationships between MAP, deficits, and regional perfusion. Cognitive assessment included tests of word and sentence comprehension and naming (for dominant hemisphere stroke), and tests of copying and spatial attention (for nondominant stroke). Separate forms of each test, matched in difficulty, were administered daily. Blinded reviewers measured volume of hypoperfused regions on “time to peak” maps. Results: 5 patients showed striking correlations between MAP and 1 or more cognitive tests: in 4 aphasic patients MAP was highly correlated with both naming and word comprehension (r=.88–96; p<.0005-.002 across cases); in 1 case of nondominant stroke MAP was associated with copying score (r=.90; p<.04). Another 3 patients showed fairly high correlations between MAP and naming (r=.67; .78; .94, respectively) that did not reach significance (p=.06–0.12) likely due to too few data points. For each of these 8 cases increased MAP was associated with improved language or visuospatial function, and subsequent falls in MAP were associated with deterioration in function. The last 2 patients showed no significant MAP elevation with therapy and showed no substantial change in function. In 8/8 patients who showed increased MAP and improved cognition, serial MR perfusion scans demonstrated reduction of regional hypoperfusion while MAP (and function) increased. In 1 case, when MAP fell and function deteriorated, repeat perfusion scan showed reversal of the prior improved perfusion. Both (2/2) patients with no increase in MAP or function showed no improvement of perfusion with therapy. Conclusions: In selected patients with recent stroke, raising MAP can be associated both with improvement in specific domains of cognition and with improved regional cerebral perfusion.

The Relationship Between Measures of Working Memory and Sentence Comprehension in Patients With Alzheimer’s Disease

Patients with dementia of the Alzheimer's type (DAT) and age- and education-matched older volunteers were tested on a battery of working memory tests, as well as on two tests of sentence comprehension. Patients had reduced spans and impaired central executive processes in working memory but showed normal effects of phonological and articulatory variables on span. On the sentence comprehension tasks, DAT patients showed effects of the number of propositions in a sentence but not of syntactic complexity. Impairment in the central executive processes of working memory in DAT patients was correlated with the effect of the number of propositions in a sentence on the sentence comprehension tasks. The results suggest that patients with DAT have working memory impairments that are related to their ability to map the meanings of sentences onto depictions of events in the world.

Reciprocal and Transmission Models of Teaching in E2L with Young Learners

An activity‐oriented approach to learning has frequently been advocated for teaching young learners. Hardly any studies have considered how this approach affects second language learning. Through a longitudinal study, a methods experiment was conducted with 156 5‐year‐old children from one large Maltese school. The effects of a reciprocal model (exemplified through an activity‐oriented approach) were compared with a transmission model of teaching (exemplified through a skills‐oriented approach) on the learning of English as a second language when introduced to young children. Multiple analyses of variance were used to analyse the effects of sex, age, teacher training and occasions of testing on five developing language skills: receptive vocabulary (assessed using British Picture Vocabulary Scales); receptive language (sentence comprehension test); reading accuracy and comprehension (Macmillan's Individual Reading Analysis); recall of information; sentence length (The Bus Story) and accuracy of word‐reading (The Keywords Reading List). The pattern of results obtained is discussed along with implications for classroom practices.

Respirator performance ratings for speech intelligibility.

A respirator degrades speech intelligibility and thus interferes with the ability of the wearer to communicate. The magnitude of this degradation is not well-studied and can vary as a function of numerous parameters. This study investigated the performance degradation of speech intelligibility in low-level noise for different speaker-listener distances and message sets (single words or predictable sentences) that occurred while wearing a respirator compared with not wearing a respirator. Thirteen speaker-listener pairs with normal hearing and speech were used. Speaker-listener separation distances were 0.61, 1.22, 1.83, 2.44, 3.05, and 3.66 m (2, 4, 6, 8, 10, and 12 ft) for the respirator condition and 1.22, 2.44, 3.05, 6.1, 9.15, and 12.2 m (4, 8, 10, 20, 30, and 40 ft) for the no-respirator condition. The means of the scores were used to determine the speech performance rating for both the single-word and sentence comprehension tests. The performance rating expresses the percentage of performance that can be expected while wearing a respirator compared with not wearing a respirator. Scores were interpolated linearly at distances at which no data were obtained. As expected, the speech performance rating was higher for the sentence comprehension test than for the single-word comprehension test at each distance. At a distance of 12.2 m, the speech performance rating for the sentence comprehension was 70%. For the single-word comprehension test, the speech performance rating was zero for distances greater than 9.1 m.

Teasing Apart the Contribution of Memory and Language Impairments in Alzheimer's Disease

Sentence comprehension is a complex activity that depends on many different component skills, including the ability to understand individual words, integrate the meanings of adjacent words, and interpret grammatical structures. Tests of sentence comprehension, such as sentence-picture matching, require patients to use all of these linguistic abilities and to remember the meaning of a sentence while performing the task. Therefore, it is often difficult to determine, in cases of comprehension impairment, precisely why a sentence is misunderstood. This is particularly true for patients with Alzheimer's disease, who have both severe semantic and working memory disorders. This paper presents data from an online (cross-modal naming) sentence comprehension test designed to minimize the memory requirements of test performance-while still assessing the ability of patients to integrate the meanings of two nouns and a verb in a sentence. This task has the advantages of measuring comprehension as the sentence is processed and not requiring the subjects to reflect on, or make judgments about, the sentence meaning afterward. The results suggest that patients with Alzheimer's disease can successfully process sentences with relatively complex meanings as they hear them. Therefore, these patients' sentence comprehension deficits are likely due to an inability to maintain active information in memory and not due to a purely semantic impairment.

Zinsbegrip en Zinsproductie bij Broca- En Wernicke-Patienten

In this article I present the results of a comparison between six Dutch agrammatic aphasics and six Wernicke's aphasies on a sentence comprehension test and a sentence ordering test. One aim was to establish whether the Wernicke's aphasies suffer from a syntactic disorder, and whether this disorder resembles the syntactic disorder of agrammatics. A second aim was to see whether the problems observed in production are similar to the problems observed in comprehension and vice versa. The results show that Wernicke's aphasies suffer from a syntactic impairment, although the impairment differs from that in agrammatics. Specifically, agrammatics seem impaired in their ability to construct adequate syntactic representations, whereas Wernicke's aphasies seem to have an impairment in the syntactic information of the verbs. Finally, in agrammatism, it seems that only argument movement is problematic in both production and comprehension, while for the Wernicke's aphasies there is also a problem with verb movement in comprehension.

Syntactic bootstrapping in children with specific language impairment.

Syntactic bootstrapping was assessed in six children with normally developing language (NL) and six children with specific language impairment (SLI), ages 6 and 8, respectively. Children earned normal range non-verbal IQs and were matched by raw scores on a test of sentence comprehension. They were asked to listen to sentences containing novel verbs and to act out the meanings with toys. The SLI children earned reliably lower scores, but their errors suggested processing limitations rather than deficits in syntactic representation.

Components in the breakdown of verbal communication in Alzheimer's disease

Abstract A retrospective study was conducted on 66 Alzheimer patients and 66 age, education- and sex-matched healthy controls. The broad aim was to gain further understanding of the verbal communication disorders of Alzheimer patients by comparing two tests for their sensitivity to Alzheimer's disease; namely an «active» and a «passive» oral language test; respectively a classic Semantically cued Word Generation (SWG), and a Sentence Comprehension Test, the Token Test (TT). The results show that nearly half of our Alzheimer patients are below cut-off on each test, that only a quarter were impaired both on TT on SWG (often patients impaired on one test were not impaired on the other), and that the two tests were poorly correlated in both healthy controls and Alzheimer patients. Nevertheless, the two tests have a comparable specificity in telling Alzheimer patients apart from matched healthy controls. The different processing sub-components for word generation and sentence comprehension and the impact Alzhe...

Speech production, syntax comprehension, and cognitive deficits in Parkinson's disease

Speech samples were obtained that were analyzed for voice onset time (VOT) for 40 nondemented English speaking subjects, 20 with mild and 20 with moderate Parkinson's disease. Syntax comprehension and cognitive tests were administered to these subjects in the same test sessions. VOT disruptions for stop consonants in syllable initial position, similar to those noted for Broca's aphasia, occurred for nine subjects. Longer response times and errors in the comprehension of syntax as measured by the Rhode Island Test of Sentence Comprehension (RITLS) also occurred for these subjects. Anovas indicate that the VOT overlap subjects had significantly higher syntax error rates and longer response times on the RITLS than the VOT nonoverlap subjects— F(1, 70) = 12.38, p < 0.0008; F(1, 70) = 7.70, p < 0.007, respectively. The correlation between the number of VOT timing errors and the number of syntax errors was significant. ( r = 0.6473, p < 0.01). VOT overlap subjects also had significantly higher error rates in cognitive tasks involving abstraction and the ability to maintain a mental set. Prefrontal cortex, acting through subcortical basal ganglia pathways, is a component of the neural substrate that regulates human speech production, syntactic ability, and certain aspects of cognition. The deterioration of these subcortical pathways may explain similar phenomena in Broca's aphasi. Results are discussed in relation to “modular” theories.

Neuropsychological reasons for a transformational analysis of verbal passive

Experimental findings from the neuropsychological study of language are used to evaluate grammatical theories. Data from tests of sentence comprehension by agrammatic aphasic patients reveal a pattern of selectivity that is used as a means for assessing competing syntactic hypotheses. In particular, it is argued that agrammatic linguistic behavior provides evidence for a transformational analysis of verbal passive. This is so because the patients failed to comprehend properly verbal passives and structures involving Wh-movement, but succeeded in tasks that required the proper comprehension of lexical passive. Grammatical theories in which such a performance pattern can be readily described — namely, theories that allow for generalizations such as Move-alpha — pass a test of psychological reality in that they are compatible with patterns of language breakdown observed following brain damage. By contrast, syntactic frameworks in which all passives are derived by lexical rules cannot account for this performance pattern without the introduction of ad hoc devices. Neurolinguistic findings are thereby shown to restrict the class of biologically feasible grammars.

Adjacency, animacy, and intensionality as cues to oral and written sentence comprehension

Subjects of verbs in English sentences may be indicated by any one of a number of cues. In some cases, the subject of the verb is determined by semantic constraints, as when the verb requires an animate noun phrase as subject; in other cases the subject is determined by syntactic factors, as in the case of third person singular verb markers; and, as is commonly the case in informal language, the most immediately preceding noun phrase is the subject of the verb. These three types of cues, semantic (here described as extensional), syntactic (here labeled intensional), and adjacency are investigated in a series of tests of sentence comprehension using university undergraduates as subjects.

Pragmatic-mode mediation of sentence comprehension among aphasic bilinguals and hispanophones

A test of sentence comprehension administered in four input-output modality combinations to a group of aphasic bilinguals and monolingual hispanophones provides evidence that aphasics tend to use pragmatic-mode (in the sense of Givón, 1979, On understanding-grammar, New York, Academic Press) strategies in approaching this task. When five factors were identified and dichotomized with respect to the pragmatic-mode-syntactic-mode dimension, the patients performed significantly better on items classified as pragmatic than on those classified as syntactic, in both languages. The results support a vertical/hierarchical view of aphasic language dissolution.

Partially hearing and hearing children's speaking, writing and comprehension of sentences

Partially hearing, deaf, and hearing children's ability to say, write, and comprehend the same sentences, from the Sentence Comprehension Test (1979), were compared. It was hypothesized that writing sentences would be more difficult than saying the same sentences in all of the three groups. It was further hypothesized that the partially hearing would form an intermediate group between the hearing and deaf. The partially hearing made more errors in both the spoken and written conditions than the hearing who were 2 years younger. The number of phonetic and visual spelling errors made by the three groups were compared.

The manileft tiwithout a trace: A case study of aphasic processing of empty categories

Abstract We present the case of an aphasic patient who shows a selective impairment in interpreting syntactic structures on a test of sentence comprehension involving object manipulation. KG makes errors in assigning the antecedents of phonologically empty NPs called traces (Chomsky, 1982 a,b) in sentences like John seems to Bill to be shaving. He is significantly better at choosing the correct antecedent of another type of empty NP, namely subject- and object- controlled PRO (John persuaded Bill to shave, John promised Bill to shave). He has no trouble choosing the correct antecedents of overt pronouns and reflexives and shows no difficulty with syntactic structures that do not contain an empty category. His difficulty with trace is apparent in sentences which have a certain degree of complexity. He also misassigns the antecedent of subject-controlled PRO under one condition: when an overt reflexive or pronoun has PRO as its antecedent (John promised Bill to shave himself). The pattern of impairment suggests that KG cannot utilise one part of a parser/interpreter specifically devoted to the identification and co-indexation of empty categories when other processing demands are high, due to a specific impairment to this component, a capacity limitation, or both. The data support a theory of syntactic structure and parsing which incorporates different types of empty categories.

Assessing the receptive language development of you ng children from Panjabi-speaking homes: the Panjabi Bilingual Version of the Sentence Comprehension Test

The development of the Panjabi Bilingual Version of the Sentence Comprehension Test is described. Comparison data on samples of children aged three to five years are reported.

Assessing young children's receptive language development

The revised edition of the Sentence Comprehension Test is described. Details are presented concerning the test's reliability and validity. Comparison data on samples of children aged three to five years are reported.