Sentence Production Task Research Articles

Task-related differences in temporo-parietal cortical activation during human phonatory behaviors

Functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) was used to investigate cortical activity related to differential control of the human phonatory system during a sentence production task. Our focus in this report was on activation of the temporo-parietal (TP) junctional region, suggested by recent models in speech production/perception to play a critical role between self-generated acoustic and associated somatosensory inputs related to the consequences of speech. Thirteen healthy participants produced multiple trials of phonetically balanced sentences during each of three performance conditions: “covert”, “whisper” and “voice”. An event-related, sparse sampling fMRI method was used to examine TP activity associated with sentence production during each condition. Results demonstrated differential responsiveness in the TP region bilaterally as a function of task conditions, with covert production generating the highest level of TP activation. These results suggest that the TP region is differentially responsive to phonation-specific production variables. Our finding that covert production instead of overt voicing resulted in the greatest activity in TP is consistent with recent reports demonstrating TP activation related to temporal ordering judgments and task-dependent memory use.

Production and comprehension of unaccusatives in aphasia

Background: Recent studies have reported impairments in the production of sentences containing unaccusative verbs (e.g., The ball bounced down the street) in agrammatic patients. In these sentences, the subject is the theme of the verb, resulting in a non‐standard order of thematic roles (often called non‐canonical thematic role order). Aims: We tested the hypothesis that aphasic patients would be affected by these features of unaccusatives in both production and comprehension, and that they would show similar deficits in sentences with unaccusative verbs and passive sentences, which also have non‐canonical thematic role order. Methods & Procedures: Single‐word naming, sentence production, and sentence–picture matching tasks were administered to a group of 9 aphasic participants and 12 age‐ and education‐matched control participants. Outcomes & Results: The aphasic patients performed less well than the controls, and there were effects of the presence of movement in both groups and an interaction between group and sentence type in the sentence production task. Conclusions: These findings support the view that non‐canonical thematic role order makes action naming, sentence production, and sentence comprehension more difficult, and that aphasic patients are more affected by the demands of these tasks than controls.

Verbal Fluency, Semantics, Context and Symptom Complexes in Schizophrenia

Lexical-semantic access and retrieval was examined in 15 adults diagnosed with schizophrenia and matched controls. This study extends the literature through the inclusion of multiple examinations of lexical-semantic production within the same patient group and through correlating performance on these tasks with various positive and negative clinical symptoms. On tasks of verbal fluency, meaning generation, sentence production using contextual information and confrontation naming, participants with schizophrenia made significantly more semantic errors on naming tasks; produced fewer meanings for homophones; produced fewer items on semantic, phonological, cued and switching fluency tasks; and produced more errors on sentence production tasks when compared to healthy controls. Significant correlations were also observed between ratings of psychomotor poverty and measures of semantic production and mental inflexibility. This study has provided additional evidence for deficits in lexical-semantic retrieval which are not due to underlying semantic store degradation, do not involve phonological based retrieval, and at the level of sentence generation appear to vary as a function of the contextual constraints provided.

The Argument-Structure Complexity Effect in Children With Specific Language Impairment: Evidence From the Use of Grammatical Morphemes in French

The hypothesis that the linguistic deficit presented by children with specific language impairment (SLI) is caused by limited cognitive resources (e.g., S. Ellis Weismer & L. Hesketh, 1996) was tested against the hypothesis of a limitation in linguistic knowledge (e.g., M. L. Rice, K. Wexler, & P. Cleave, 1995). The study examined the influence of the argument-structure complexity of a target sentence on the production of grammatical morphemes in French children with SLI compared with younger children matched for grammatical level in production (GL) and children of the same chronological age (CA). A sentence production task was used where the target sentences varied in terms of argument complexity and length. The results indicated that children with SLI used articles and auxiliaries in obligatory contexts significantly less often than both the GL and CA control groups: More complex argument structures elicited the highest number of grammatical morpheme omissions; this effect was larger in children with SLI than in the GL group and was independent of the length of the sentences, which failed to show any influence on the production of grammatical morphemes. These results support the hypothesis that grammatical-morpheme deficit in SLI depends at least in part on limited processing capacities.

Sentence production in students with dyslexia

While spoken language deficits have been identified in children with developmental dyslexia, microanalysis of sentence production proficiency in these children is a largely unexplored area. The current study examines proficiency of syntactic production in children and young adults with dyslexia and typically developing age-matched controls on a constrained sentence production task targeting two advanced argument structures, theme-experiencer verbs and irregular past participles. Participants aged between 8 and 22 years produced sentences that included three stimulus words, a proper name, an inanimate noun and a verb from one of three categories: control verbs (agent-patient verbs with regular morphology); theme-experiencer verbs, which require an inanimate subject in active sentences (e.g. The book bored Sarah); and irregular past participles, which require awareness of the syntactic requirements associated with the -en past participle ending, i.e. that this verb form cannot be used as a simple past tense (e.g. *Mary ___ hidden the candy). Students with dyslexia produced more dysfluent, ungrammatical and incomplete responses than normal readers; however, the developmental trajectories of the verb types varied between groups. Normal readers performed similarly with both experimental verb types, but those with dyslexia were particularly impaired using irregular past participles in sentences. The findings support a model of lexical representation in which development of grammar hinges on the acquisition of lexical knowledge. Furthermore, the data suggest that individuals with dyslexia may have difficulties with sentence formulation that persist into adulthood.

Verb generation in children and adolescents with acute cerebellar lesions

The aim of the present study was to examine verb generation in a larger group of children and adolescents with acute focal lesions of the cerebellum. Nine children and adolescents with cerebellar tumours participated. Subjects were tested a few days after tumour surgery. For comparison, a subgroup was tested also 1 or 2 days before surgery. None of the children had received radiation or chemotherapy at or before the time of testing. Eleven age- and education-matched control subjects participated. Subjects had to generate verbs to blocked presentations of photographs of objects. As control condition, the objects had to be named. Furthermore, dysarthria was quantified by means of a sentence production and syllable repetition task. Detailed analysis of individual 3D-MR images revealed that lesions affected cerebellar hemispheres in all children and adolescents. The right cerebellar hemisphere was affected in four and the left hemisphere in five subjects. In the present study, naming and verb generation accuracy were preserved in the majority of subjects with cerebellar lesions. No significant signs of learning deficits were observed, as reduction of reaction times over blocks was not different compared to controls. There was a trend of children and adolescents with right-hemispheric lesions to perform worse compared to controls. In this group, however, significant signs of dysarthria were present. In sum, no significant signs of disordered verb generation were observed in children and adolescents with acute cerebellar lesions. Findings suggest that the role of the cerebellum in verb generation may be less pronounced than previously suggested. Findings need to be confirmed in a larger group of subjects with acute focal lesions.

RECEPTIVE AND PRODUCTIVE VOCABULARY LEARNING: The Effects of Reading and Writing on Word Knowledge

This study investigates the effects of receptive and productive vocabulary learning on word knowledge. Japanese students studying English as a foreign language learned target words in three glossed sentences and in a sentence production task in two experiments. Five aspects of vocabulary knowledge—orthography, syntax, association, grammatical functions, and meaning and form—were each measured by receptive and productive tests. The study uses an innovative methodology in that each target word was tested in 10 different ways. The first experiment showed that, when the same amount of time was spent on both tasks, the reading task was superior. The second experiment showed that, when the allotted time on tasks depends on the amount of time needed for completion, with the writing task requiring more time, the writing task was more effective. If the second experiment represents authentic learning, then a stronger argument can be made to use productive vocabulary learning tasks over receptive tasks.I wish to acknowledge the generous input of the following people in the evolution of this paper: Paul Nation, Jonathan Newton, and Jim Dickie from Victoria University of Wellington, and the anonymous SSLA reviewers, for their helpful comments.

Incidence of dysarthria in children with cerebellar tumors: A prospective study

The present study investigated dysarthric symptoms in children with cerebellar tumors. Ten children with cerebellar tumors and 10 orthopedic control children were tested prior and one week after surgery. Clinical dysarthric symptoms were quantified in spontaneous speech. Syllable durations were analyzed in syllable repetition and sentence production tasks. Localization of the cerebellar lesions were defined after manual transfer from individual 2D-MR images onto 3D images of a spatially normalized healthy brain. Cerebellar children showed few and mild clinical signs of dysarthria. No difference was present in the sentence production task compared to controls. In five cerebellar children, syllables were prolonged in the syllable repetition task after surgery. Syllable duration normalized in an additional four-week session in all but one case. The MR-analysis showed that superior paravermal cerebellar areas likely involved in dysarthria in adults (paravermal lobules HVI, Crus I) were not significantly affected. In children, speech impairments appear to be rare after cerebellar surgery because tumors most commonly affect posterior–inferior and medial parts of the cerebellum while critical cerebellar regions are likely spared. The results suggest a similar localization of speech functions in the cerebellum in children and adults.

Constrained sentence production in probable Alzheimer disease

This study examines the speech of older adults with and without probable Alzheimer disease (PAD) when they produce sentences that include a verb and two nouns provided by the experimenter. Compared to healthy controls, individuals with mild PAD produced fewer correct responses as well as anomalous proportions of active and passive sentences. Responses were particularly impaired when canonical sentence structures had to be suppressed and unusual sentence structures generated. The sentence production accuracy of individuals with PAD correlated strongly with performance on a picture-naming task. The findings support a theory in which the ability to fully activate semantic representations is impaired in PAD, resulting in proportional impairments on single-word and sentence production tasks.

Preserved verb generation in patients with cerebellar atrophy

A role of the right cerebellar hemisphere has been suggested in linguistic functions. Nevertheless, studies of verb generation in cerebellar patients provide inconsistent results. The aim of the present study was to examine verb generation in a larger group of cerebellar patients with well-defined lesions. Ten subjects with degenerative cerebellar disorders and ten healthy matched controls participated. Subjects had to generate verbs to the blocked presentation of photographs of objects (i.e. four blocks of sixteen objects). As control condition, the objects had to be named. Furthermore, dysarthria was quantified by means of a sentence production and syllable repetition task. Volumetric analysis of individual 3D-MR scans was performed to quantify cerebellar atrophy. Cerebellar patients were slower in the sentence production and syllable repetition tasks, and cerebellar volume was decreased compared to controls. Despite cerebellar atrophy and dysarthria, the answers produced did not differ between patients and controls. In addition, both groups revealed the same amount of decrease in verbal reaction time over blocks (i.e. learning). The results suggest that the role of the cerebellum in verb generation is less pronounced than previously suggested.

Phonological priming and irregular past

It has been shown that the processing of irregular past-tense forms is affected by phonological factors that are inherent in the relationship of the past-tense forms to other words in the lexicon (rhyming families of irregulars) or to their base forms (vowel dominance effects). This paper addresses more ephemeral phonological effects. In a sentence-production task, the vowel of the base form or past-tense form of an irregular verb (e.g., /i ː/ of freeze or /o℧/ of froze) is primed by an identical vowel in the subject noun (e.g., base vowel cream, past-tense vowel chrome, unrelated vowel slot). For verbs with different vowels in the base form and past-tense form, phonological priming of the base vowel or of the past-tense vowel increases the rate of overregularization errors such as * freezed as compared to an unrelated vowel prime. For verbs with the same vowel in the base and past-tense forms (e.g., hit/hit), phonological priming has no effect on the rate of overregularization errors. It is argued that irregular forms are not produced in a specialized subnetwork for (irregular) past-tense forms, but are produced in the general lexical system simultaneous with general phonological processing. Implications for theories of inflectional morphology are discussed.

The persistence of optional complementizer production: Why saying “that” is not saying “that” at all

What kinds of processing mechanisms determine the forms of spoken sentences? Three experiments ( N=176) measured whether the mention of an optional that in a sentence-complement structure (“The mechanic mentioned (that) the car could use a tune-up”) can be primed by the prior production of a sentence that included a lexically or a lexically and syntactically similar that, using a recall-based sentence-production task. Results showed that target that-mention was influenced by primes with lexically and syntactically similar thats (sentence-complement primes with versus without thats), but not by primes with only lexically similar thats (transitive primes with determiner thats, “The company insured that farm for…,” or noun-complement primes with complementizer thats, “The theory that…”). Also, compared to neutral primes, sentence-complement primes without thats decreased target that-mention more than sentence-complement primes with thats increased it. This suggests that complementizer-persistence specifically and sentence-production generally includes an autonomous, lexically independent syntactic processing component.

Selective difficulties with spoken nouns and written verbs: A single case study

We describe an individual who exhibits greater difficulties in speaking nouns than verbs and greater difficulties in writing verbs than nouns across a range of both single word and sentence production tasks. This double dissociation of grammatical category by modality within a single individual represents an important challenge to the claim that all apparent category grammatical deficits can be reduced to the effects of the various semantic variables. The modality-specific nature of the findings clearly support the representation of grammatical category distinctions at post-semantic levels of representations and processing and they raise a number of questions regarding the specific instantiation of these distinctions within current theoretical frameworks of language production.

Prosodic Units in Speech Production

Four experiments demonstrate effects of prosodic structure on speech production latencies. Experiments 1 to 3 exploit a modified version of the Sternberg et al. (1978, 1980) prepared speech production paradigm to look for evidence of the generation of prosodic structure during the final stages of sentence production. Experiment 1 provides evidence that prepared sentence production latency is a function of the number of phonological words that a sentence comprises when syntactic structure, number of lexical items, and number of syllables are held constant. Experiment 2 demonstrated that production latencies in Experiment 1 were indeed determined by prosodic structure rather than the number of content words that a sentence comprised. The phonological word effect was replicated in Experiment 3 using utterances with a different intonation pattern and phrasal structure. Finally, in Experiment 4, an on-line version of the sentence production task provides evidence for the phonological word as the preferred unit of articulation during the on-line production of continuous speech. Our findings are consistent with the hypothesis that the phonological word is a unit of processing during the phonological encoding of connected speech.

The Marked Effect of Number on Subject–Verb Agreement

English speakers distinguish between one entity and more than one entity in virtually every utterance they produce. The distinction is present in the morphology of most nouns as well as in the basic grammatical dependency of subject–verb agreement. Three experiments employing a sentence production task explored the nature of the representation that underlies singular and plural count nouns in English and how that representation interacts with the processes that implement agreement during production. The results provide evidence that singular count nouns are unmarked or lack a grammatical feature for number while plural count nouns are marked or possess a feature. This asymmetry in markedness contributes to the greater incidence of plural agreement errors relative to singular errors observed in naturally occurring and experimentally elicited errors. In particular, the evidence suggests that agreement with singular count nouns is implemented by a default process whereas agreement with plural count nouns is implemented on the basis of unambiguous number information.

Contextual influences on children's spoken and written explanations

ABSTRACTThe relative influences of medium and context variables were investigated by comparing 7- and 8-year-old children's spoken and written explanations in varying contexts: a story task, a question task, a sentence completion task, and a whole sentence production task. In the story task, performance in a “purpose” condition (which provided a specific communicative purpose for the production of an explanation) was compared with performance in a “neutral” condition. The frequency of explanations containing correct causal expressions was significantly higher in the purpose condition than in the neutral condition and significantly lower in the story task than in the three more structured tasks. In contrast to these contextual influences, performance in the written medium was very similar to performance in the spoken medium.

Some Effects of Task Type on the Relation between Communicative Effectiveness and Grammatical Accuracy in Intensive ESL Classes

Two language characteristics, Communicative Effectiveness (CE) and Grammatical Accuracy (GA), were investigated in 130 grade 5 students in intensive ESL classes. Using different types of elicitation tasks in across-sectional study, it was found that CE and GA are not independent, but the relation between the variables differs as a function of task type. In a short-utterance sentence production task, CE and GA appear to develop simultaneously. In an extended-discourse story retell, GA reaches a plateau with some subjects while CE continues to develop. Suggestions for classroom application of these findings are discussed.

Grammatical morphology in language–impaired children acquiring English or German as their first language: A functional perspective

ABSTRACTFourteen matched pairs of German-speaking and English-speaking language-impaired children, aged 4;5–6;11, were tested for their knowledge of grammatical morphology and expressive vocabulary, using the Grammatical Closure subtest of the ITPA or its German adaptation, Grammatik in the PET, and the Expressive One-Word Picture Vocabulary Test or the Aktiver Wortschatztest. Children were matched pairwise on the basis of their chronological age, nonverbal IQ, and scores in a sentence imitation and a sentence production task. As predicted, the German-speaking language-impaired children earned higher scores in grammatical morphology and vocabulary than did the English-speaking children. These findings add to a growing body of literature that documents language-specific sensitivity to particular sorts of syntactic devices. They also suggest that the morphological difficulties seen in English-speaking language-impaired children stem in part from the minor functional role played by these forms during the early language learning years.

On the nature of conduction aphasia: A longitudinal case study

Abstract A longitudinal investigation is reported of an English-speaking conduction aphasic as an attempt to provide fresh insights into some unresolved issues pertaining to this syndrome. Data were collected from specially designed single word and sentence production tasks on picture naming, oral reading and repetition, conversational and expository speech, as well as standard aphasia test protocols on seven separate occasions over a six-month period. Significant changes took place gradually during the six-month recovery period that cannot be ascribed merely to an across-the-board decrease in the severity of his aphasic syndrome. The patient's naming and reading performance improved substantially over the first six months, whereas repetition remained disproportionately impaired. These findings are brought to bear on notions related to proposed subgroups of conduction aphasia and the evolution of aphasic syndromes.

Repetition and Associative Context Effects in Speech Production

An experiment is reported that addresses the impact of lexical constraint on the production characteristics (mean duration and peak amplitude) of a given target word within a sentence production task. Subjects produced aloud sentences from memory that contained a target word (e.g., cat) that was either a repetition of an earlier word in the sentence (e.g., cat), associatively related to an earlier word in the sentence (e.g., dog), or unrelated to an earlier word in the sentence (e.g., son). The position within the sentence and phonetic environment of the target were equated across conditions. The results indicated that the mean durations for the target word were shorter in the repetition condition, compared to the associatively related condition, which in turn produced shorter production durations compared to the unrelated condition. In addition, the peak amplitude measurements indicated that the repeated condition produced relatively lower peak amplitudes for the target word, compared to the remaining two conditions which did not differ.