Sentence Production Research Articles (Page 1)

Sentence production is impaired in many persons with aphasia (PWA). However, few effective treatments for sentence production exist. Recent research has advanced structural priming as a promising treatment for aphasia, but the underlying mechanisms of priming remain unclear. This study examined contributions of abstract syntactic and lexically boosted priming to sentence production improvements in PWA and underlying memory mechanisms. Twenty-four PWA and 16 age-matched controls completed baseline testing, three to six sessions of sentence production priming training, and 1-day and 1-week posttesting. Trained structures were passives and double-object datives. Participants were trained with same-verb and different-verb priming to assess lexical boost and abstract syntactic priming effects on treatment outcomes. The serial reaction time, fragmented picture, and picture pointing span tests were administered to assess contributions of implicit and explicit memory in predicting treatment gains. PWA and controls showed lasting improvements to both trained and untrained sentences following training. Critically, controls improved more strongly following same-verb priming, while PWA showed stronger gains following different-verb priming. High implicit memory scores facilitated greater treatment effects in both PWA and controls. Only controls showed positive effects of explicit memory. These results support structural priming as an effective sentence production treatment for PWA, especially when verbs are not matched between primes and target. We suggest lexical differentiation supports priming in PWA by allowing more efficient access and learning of abstract syntactic representations, which appears crucial to successful sentence production.

Objectives: This study investigated the effects of healthy aging on sentence production in narrative discourse and examined the role of cognitive abilities and Lifelong Learning (LLL) in mitigating age-related decline. Methods: Three hundred and seven Italian-speaking adults (26–89 years) completed a narrative task elicited from five picture stimuli, alongside assessments of verbal working memory, sustained attention, and inhibitory control. Morphological and morphosyntactic measures (morphological errors and omissions of content and function words) and syntactic variables (complete sentences, subordinate clauses, and passive sentences) were analyzed. Results: Aging was associated with increased morphological and morphosyntactic errors and reduced syntactic complexity. These effects were non-linear for the % of morphological errors, the % of omission of content words, and the % of complete sentences and were more pronounced after age 70. LLL was negatively associated with morphological and morphosyntactic errors and positively associated with sentence production. Verbal working memory and sustained attention explained additional variance only for omissions of function words, whereas the passive component of verbal working memory only explained additional variance for complete sentence production. Conclusions: These findings suggest that aging affects both simple and complex sentence production, with declines related to morphological errors and omissions. LLL appears to buffer against some grammatical declines, suggesting a role for educational engagement in maintaining syntactic abilities. Clinically, assessing complex sentence production and considering LLL may improve diagnosis and intervention for language disorders in older adults.

ABSTRACT This paper reviews prominent assessments of grammatical deficits in sentence production among individuals with aphasia. The first aim is to examine existing methods for assessing sentence production deficits and to evaluate the strengths and limitations of these approaches. Assessment methods are categorized into unconstrained and constrained types, and the review also examines three standardized constrained tests, all of which were developed in English. Unconstrained methods, such as discourse-based tasks, allow individuals to produce sentences freely in naturalistic contexts. While these tasks reflect everyday communication, they have limitations, most notably, the tendency for individuals to avoid complex syntactic structures, which may obscure specific deficits. In contrast, constrained tasks, such as single-picture descriptions, provide more controlled assessments of targeted syntactic structures but often rely on instructions and metalinguistic prompts that may increase cognitive load. The second goal of the review is to explore how agrammatic and paragrammatic speech – two prominent patterns of sentence-level impairment – are assessed through both constrained and unconstrained methods, as well as in three formal tests commonly used in the aphasia literature. The review concludes by emphasizing the need for novel assessment tools that integrate the strengths of both constrained and unconstrained approaches to more comprehensively capture sentence production deficits in aphasia.

Speaking begins with the generation of a preverbal message. While a common assumption is that the scope of message‐level planning (i.e., the size of message‐level increments) can be more extensive than the scope of sentence‐level planning, it is unclear how much information is typically encoded at the message level in advance of sentence‐level planning during spontaneous production. This study assessed the scope and granularity of early message‐level planning in English by tracking production of sentences with light versus heavy sentence‐final NPs. Speakers produced SVO sentences to describe pictures showing an agent acting on a patient. Half of the pictures showed one‐patient events, eliciting sentences with unmodified patient names (e.g., “The tailor is cutting the dress”), and half showed two‐patient events with a target patient and a non‐target patient. The presence of a non‐target patient required production of a prenominal or postnominal modifier to uniquely identify the target patient (e.g., “The tailor is cutting the long dress” / “the dress with sleeves”). Analyses of speech onsets and eye movements before speech onset showed strong effects of the complexity of the sentence‐final character, suggesting that early message‐level planning does not proceed strictly word by word (or “from left to right”) but instead includes basic information about the identity of both the sentence‐initial and sentence‐final characters. This is consistent with theories that assume extensive message‐level planning before the start of sentence‐level encoding and provides new evidence about the level of conceptual detail incorporated into early message plans.

ABSTRACT This study investigated whether preschool language profiles predict persistent stuttering and stuttering severity at school-age, and whether children who stutter (CWS) with specific language profiles respond differently to RESTART-DCM treatment versus the Lidcombe Program (LP). Data from 149 CWS in a longitudinal follow-up of the RESTART randomised trial were analysed. Four difference scores within individual language profiles at preschool age (3;0–6;3 years) were examined: word comprehension minus sentence comprehension quotient (∆WC-SC), word comprehension minus word production quotient (∆WC-WP), word production minus sentence production quotient (∆WP-SP), and sentence comprehension minus sentence production quotient (∆SC-SP). Outcome measures at school age (8–17 years) included Stuttering Severity Instrument scores from trained observers and subjective severity ratings from parents, speech-language pathologists, children, and teachers using Yairi & Ambrose’s eight-point scale. Results revealed that children with persistent stuttering (CWS-per) showed imbalanced language profiles at preschool age, particularly with sentence comprehension lagging behind word comprehension. In contrast, children with transient stuttering (CWS-tran) demonstrated balanced profiles. The word-sentence comprehension difference score significantly predicted persistent stuttering and stuttering severity at school age, especially in boys. Treatment type showed no significant effect. In conclusion, an imbalanced preschool language profile, specifically when sentence comprehension lags behind word comprehension, represents a risk factor for persistent stuttering at school age in boys. While this finding has clinical implications, no evidence suggested differential treatment benefits between RESTART-DCM and LP based on the preschool language profile.

Little research has studied verb inflection and argument structure complexity effects in teenagers with developmental language disorders (DLDs). However, verb production and comprehension deficits that characterize younger children with DLD might persist over time. Seventeen French-speaking teenagers with DLD and seventeen controls (typical language, TL group) were tested with fLEX, an application designed to assess lexical and inflectional production and comprehension of three different verb types: intransitives, transitives and ditransitives, i.e., verbs that require none, one or two overt complements. Participants performed three tasks: action naming, sentence production and sentence comprehension involving third singular and plural present tense. Both groups performed similarly on action naming. Subject–verb agreement errors characterized participants with DLD both in sentence production and comprehension; however, verb–argument structure had no effect on any of the tasks. These results characterize verb deficits in teenagers with DLD as affecting inflectional processes rather than lexical ones: they are found in production and comprehension, persist until adolescence and are thus a target for evaluation and intervention in French-speaking teenagers. Results are discussed from a cross-linguistic perspective and in light of current theories on DLD.

Humans are the only species with the ability to systematically combine words to convey an unbounded number of complex meanings. This process is guided by combinatorial processes thought to be unique to our species. Despite their centrality to human cognition, the neural mechanisms underlying these systems remain obscured by inherent limitations of non-invasive brain measures and a near total focus on comprehension paradigms. Here, we address these limitations with high-resolution neurosurgical recordings (electrocorticography) and a controlled sentence production experiment. We uncover distinct cortical networks encoding word-level and higher-order information. These networks exhibited a hybrid spatial organization: broadly distributed across traditional language areas, but with focal concentrations of sensitivity to semantic and structural contrasts in canonical language regions. In contrast to previous findings from comprehension studies, we find that these networks are largely non-overlapping, each processing information associated with one of three linguistic contrasts. Most strikingly, our data reveal an unexpected property of higher-order linguistic information: it is encoded independent of neural activity levels. These results show that activity magnitude and information content are dissociable, with important implications for studying the neurobiology of language.

For individuals with agrammatic aphasia, producing sentences with non-canonical word orders is a challenging feat. Studies on different languages report deficits in this area of sentence production: some citing problems related to retrieval of verb morphology while others pursue a more holistic approach by attributing the root of the deficit towards the process of thematic role assignment. It has been shown that agrammatic speakers of Standard Indonesian are relatively unimpaired in the use (in spontaneous speech) and comprehension of passive constructions. These studies suggest the high frequency of the passive structure in Standard Indonesian may play a role in its retrieval and processing. For the current study, we tested sentence production in agrammatic speakers of Standard Indonesian. The purpose of the present study is to assess the effects of syntactic frequency and word order on sentence production in agrammatic speakers of Standard Indonesian. Twelve agrammatic speakers were tested with a picture elicitation task. The participants had to produce active and passive, reversible and non-reversible sentences. No main effects of sentence type were observed; reversible and non-reversible active and passive sentences were produced with comparable accuracy. Despite this observation, the majority of errors produced were associated with role-reversals and verb inflection. Lack of a specific deficit in the production of structures with non-canonical word order suggests the impact of syntactic frequency on agrammatic sentence processing. As with previous studies on Indonesian sentence comprehension, the present results provide evidence for the preservation of the passive structure in agrammatic speakers of Standard Indonesian.

This study examines the linguistic skills that support the learning of science and social studies vocabulary words for second-grade Latino bilingual students. We used data from a cluster randomized study where second-grade classrooms within schools were randomly assigned to the intervention group (n = 13) or the control group (n = 13), with a total of 217 bilingual Latino students. Students in the intervention group received a researcher-developed explicit vocabulary intervention focused on science and social studies word learning. The control group received business-as-usual instruction. Using confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) and structural equation modeling (SEM), we examined the association of early language skills at pretest and their relation to word learning outcomes in science and social studies, as measured by the production of definitions and sentences post-intervention. The six language tasks assessed exhibited significant moderate correlations with one another and vocabulary outcomes, indicating a potential underlying relation. These indicator variables load into a singular latent factor when analyzed using CFA. Using SEM, the language factor (f1) significantly predicted student capacity to produce definitions and sentences. After accounting for the benefits of the intervention, these effects of f1 remained strongly associated to definitions and sentence production. Learning content vocabulary is significantly related to student language skills in Spanish and in English. This finding suggests that developing student language skills early facilitates the learning of curricular vocabulary words later. This finding has key implications for teaching and learning content vocabulary for bilingually developing students. Theoretical and practical applications for instruction of bilingual students are discussed. https://doi.org/10.23641/asha.29711267.

Abstract Recent studies showed contradictory results with regard to the implementation of proactive language control during bilingual sentence production. To add novel evidence to this debate, the current study investigated the blocked language order effect, a measure of proactive language control that has previously only been examined in single-word production. More specifically, bilingual participants completed a network description task, using their L1 in Blocks 1 and 3 and their L2 in Block 2. Results showed increased language intrusions in Block 3 compared to Block 1. This pattern indicates that proactive language control can be implemented during bilingual sentence production.

Aims: This systematic review investigates the effectiveness of verb production training in individuals with agrammatic Broca’s aphasia. It highlights verb retrieval and verb inflection treatments, evaluating their impact on naming accuracy, sentence production, and generalization. The ultimate goal of the present study is to systematically review and evaluate the effectiveness of verb production training methods—including both verb retrieval and verb inflection interventions—for improving communication outcomes in patients with agrammatic Broca’s aphasia. Methods: This review followed the PRISMA 2020 guidelines. Four databases (PubMed, Medline/EBSCOhost, Web of Science, and Google Scholar) were searched using PICO-based terms. Inclusion criteria consisted of peer-reviewed articles in English which exclusively focused on verb production training in agrammatic Broca’s aphasia with measurable outcomes. Exclusion criteria included studies on other aphasia types, non-intervention papers, and non-English or unavailable full texts. After removing duplicates and screening 1461 records, ten studies met the eligibility criteria. Results: Of the ten studies included, six focused on verb retrieval treatments and four on verb inflection treatment. Interventions varied widely, including semantic, gestural, and repetition-based methods for verb retrieval and morphosemantic and morphophonological treatments for verb inflection. While verb retrieval treatments improved naming of trained verbs, generalization to untrained items was inconsistent. Morphosemantic approaches to verb inflection outperformed morphophonological treatments and had broader generalization and improvements in narrative tasks, particularly with regular verb training. Overall, participant response varied depending on the nature of the impairment and treatment modality. Conclusion: Verb production training is effective in improving targeted linguistic abilities in agrammatic Broca’s aphasia, particularly when approaches are tailored to individual deficits. Morphosemantic and multimodal interventions demonstrate promising results. However, limited generalization to untrained contexts remains a key challenge, highlighting the need for future therapies that integrate semantic, syntactic, and real-life communicative components.

ABSTRACT Background Listening to and producing sentences is a cornerstone of typical language exchanges. Therapy for aphasic impairments has tended to focus on single-word processing, with comparatively few sentence-level therapies. Usage-based Construction Grammar is an approach to language in which frequency of use of grammatical constructions plays a central role in representation and processing of structures. We report findings from a usage-based sentence intervention: UTILISE (Unification Therapy Integrating LexIcon and SEntences). The intervention began by priming high-frequency constructions (e.g. I like it) via listening tasks and then practice of production. Subsequently, different lexical items were inserted to slots around the verb (e.g. I like coffee now) to increase communicative options. Aims To evaluate the impact of UTILISE on participants’ spoken sentence production and comprehension abilities. Methods & procedures Participants with chronic aphasia (n = 39) were recruited to a two-arm randomised control trial, with 33 participants completing the intervention. At trial entry, participants were randomised to Immediate/Deferred conditions, allowing for treatment/no treatment comparison. Two baseline measures were taken (four-week interval in the Immediate condition; eight-week interval in Deferred). A four-week therapy phase comprised two auditory processing tasks and one spoken sentence production task, delivered over 12 in-person sessions. Outcomes were measured immediately post-intervention and after an eight-week maintenance phase. Main outcome measures were: sentence production in narratives, measured as ratio of three-word combinations to total words in connected speech (Connectivity); spoken sentence comprehension (TROG-2) and quality of life (QoL) perceptions (SAQOL-39). Intervention acceptability was also evaluated, together with an untreated control task. Outcomes & results A between-group comparison of Connectivity and TROG-2 scores revealed no significant difference; however, when data were pooled across groups, linear mixed-effects models revealed gains following therapy in Connectivity, whereas increases in sentence comprehension (TROG-2) scores might be due to repeated exposure to the test. QoL perceptions improved, reaching significance on the SAQOL-39 communication sub-scale. Participants found the UTILISE intervention acceptable. Conclusions The study produced initial indications of the value of a usage-based sentence therapy, with increases in three-word combinations in connected speech, enhanced QoL ratings regarding communication, and high acceptability to participants. A number of factors may affect results: intervention was delivered at low-dose, and both production and comprehension measures represented distal measures. However, given these preliminary results, UTILISE has now been developed into an app enabling higher-dose intervention, and is currently under evaluation. Trial registration Prospectively registered on 13/09/2019 at ISRCTN14466044

Purpose: This study evaluated the communicative efficiency of an alternative display design for speech-generating devices using eye gaze. It compared sentence production efficiency with identical communicative symbols in a traditional grid design versus a novel circular display, focusing on production times and error rates. Materials and Methods: Participants produced two different sets of three-symbol sentences on two displays containing the same communicative symbols, grouped into semantic units by background color. One display used a standard grid design, while the other arranged symbols circularly around the screen’s center. Participants completed the sentences consecutively on both displays, with sentence production times and error rates recorded for comparison. Results: The circular display yielded significantly faster sentence production times compared to the grid design. However, error rates for sentence completion were similar between the two display types. Conclusions: The findings suggest that a circular display orientation may enhance communicative efficiency for speech-generating devices controlled by eye gaze, potentially improving communication outcomes. These results advocate for exploring alternative display designs beyond the conventional grid format.

Sentence production is a stage‐like process of mapping a conceptual representation to the linear speech signal via grammatical rules. While the typological diversity of languages is vast and thus must necessarily influence sentence production, psycholinguistic studies of diverse languages are comparatively rare. Here, we present data from a sentence planning and production study in Pitjantjatjara, an Australian Indigenous language that has highly flexible word order. Forty‐nine (N = 49) native speakers described pictures of two‐participant scenes while their eye‐movements were recorded. Participants produced all possible orders of agent, patient, and verb. There was a general preference to produce agent‐initial orders, but word order was influenced by the semantic properties of agent and patient referents (± human). Analyses of participants’ eye‐movements revealed early relational encoding of the entire event, whereby speakers distributed their attention between agent and patient referents in a manner that is different than typically observed in languages that have more restricted word order options. Relational encoding was influenced by the word order that participants eventually produced. The results provide evidence to suggest that sentence planning in Pitjantjatjara is a hierarchical process, in which early relational encoding creates a wholistic conceptualization of an event, possibly driven by pressure to decide upon one of many possible word orders.

With the rapid rise of short video platforms, short video marketing has become a new way to promote agricultural products. This study takes the short video dissemination of agricultural product Qianjiang lobster as an example to explore the effectiveness of short video marketing in depth. Studying the influencing factors of the marketing effectiveness of crayfish, a characteristic agricultural product, provides useful references and guidance for promoting the dissemination of agricultural product short videos and agricultural product short video marketing, which helps to promote the innovative development of the agricultural product industry. This research selects the accounts of TikTok platform to promote the short video of Qianjiang crawfish, builds the influencing factor model of the short video marketing effect of Qianjiang crawfish based on the 7Ps marketing theory, and uses the non parametric test method to empirically analyze 200 short video samples of Qianjiang crawfish. The research results indicate that eight influencing factors, including title sentence structure, topic, content theme, production category, background music, video duration, release time, and collection setting, have a significant impact on the marketing effectiveness of crayfish short videos.

Sentence production is the uniquely human ability to transform complex thoughts into strings of words. Despite the importance of this process, language production research has primarily focused on single words. It remains a largely untested assumption that the principles of word production generalize to more naturalistic utterances like sentences. Here, we investigate this using high-resolution neurosurgical recordings (ECoG) and an overt production experiment where ten patients produced six words in isolation (picture naming) and in sentences (scene description). We trained machine learning classifiers to identify the unique brain activity patterns for each word during picture naming, and used these patterns to decode which words patients were processing while they produced sentences. Our findings confirm that words share cortical representations across tasks, but reveal a division of labor within the language network. In sensorimotor cortex, words were consistently activated in the order in which they were said in the sentence. However, in prefrontal cortex, the order in which words were processed depended on the syntactic structure of the sentence. In non-canonical sentences (passives), we further observed a spatial code for syntactic roles, with subjects selectively encoded in inferior frontal gyrus (IFG) and objects selectively encoded in middle frontal gyrus (MFG). We suggest that these complex dynamics of prefrontal cortex may impose a subtle pressure on language evolution, potentially explaining why nearly all the world’s languages position subjects before objects.

Young children's comprehension of adverbial clauses is significantly affected by iconicity, which refers to whether the order of information in the sentence reflects the order of events in the real world. In contrast, clause order (main-subordinate vs. subordinate-main) and input frequency of specific adverbial clauses do not seem to play independent roles (De Ruiter et al., 2018). The present study tests children's sentence production across four different connective types (after, before, because, if) to determine whether the factors that underpin the comprehension of adverbial clauses also apply to production, which involves utterance planning and articulation. 42 four-year-old, 42 five-year-old, and 22 eight-year-old monolingual English-speaking children, along with 20 adult controls, completed a sentence completion task. The results showed that both four- and five-year-olds produced all type of sentences in iconic order ("She builds a tower, before she breaks her train"; "After she builds a tower, she breaks her train") more accurately than in non-iconic order. This suggests that while comprehension and production likely impose different demands on children, iconicity as a general semantic strategy benefits children's early processing of adverbial clauses. Moreover, the effect of iconicity persisted in older children's production, but only for their because- and if-sentences, which could be related to their semantic complexity and the pragmatic properties they encode.

ABSTRACTBackgroundPoor intelligibility is common in young children with developmental language disorders (DLDs). Relatedly, children with DLD and poor intelligibility, like children with DLD solely, have often also difficulties in other aspects of language abilities: such as making grammatical and cohesive sentences and telling narratives with an adequate plot structure. However, relatively few studies examined the relation between speech production, narrative cohesion, and narrative coherence in one and the same design.AimThis research was conducted to investigate the relation between speech production, narrative cohesion, and narrative coherence in children with DLDs and poor intelligibility.Methods and ProceduresOne hundred and forty‐nine 4‐to‐6‐year‐old children with DLD and poor intelligibility who were referred for special treatment to improve their speech production, were included in this study. Speech and language assessments were conducted at the start of the treatment, and the results of these assessments were used in the current study. For speech production, spontaneous language was analysed to derive measures for the production of consonants, vowels, and word structure. Additionally, a measure of nonword repetition was used. For narrative production, the Frog Story Test was used, resulting in a measure of narrative cohesion (sentence production) and a measure of narrative coherence (plot structure). Effects of hearing and chronological age on speech and language production were controlled for in the analyses.Outcomes and ResultsMediation analysis demonstrated that there was no direct effect of speech production on narrative coherence but the indirect effect was significant. The relation between speech production and narrative coherence was fully mediated by narrative cohesion, also when controlling for age and hearing capacity. Significant effects were also found for the relation between speech production and narrative cohesion and between narrative cohesion and narrative coherence.Conclusions and ImplicationsThis study confirms that the relation between speech production and narrative coherence in children with DLD and poor intelligibility is fully mediated by children's narrative cohesion performance. For clinical practice, these results show the importance of fostering both speech and language production capacities in strengthening the narrative performance of these children.WHAT THIS PAPER ADDSWhat is already known on the subject Children with developmental language disorder (DLD) and poor intelligibility show difficulties in both speech production and in narrative production. More precisely, they often show problems in making sentences and in generating a coherent story. The occurrence of problems both at the sentence level and at the plot structure level has been subject to several studies in children with poor intelligibility with and without additional diagnosis of DLD. However, it is not clear how and if speech production is related to narrative abilities. What this paper adds to existing knowledge This study investigates the relationship between speech production and narrative production. The results reveal an indirect relationship between speech production and narrative coherence in children with DLD and poor intelligibility. These children are hampered in telling coherent stories because their speech production problems result in poor word structures, partly used to form cohesive sentences. Using sentences with sufficient cohesion is a necessary condition for realising a coherent story. Speech analysis of spontaneous language results in a varied set of daily used words in sentences and might thus best reflect a child's capacity in speech production. What are the potential or actual clinical implications of this work? The results of this research suggest the importance of assessing narrative skills in children with DLD and poor intelligibility because these children experience both problems at the level of narrative cohesion as on narrative coherence.

This study investigates the cognitive and neural mechanisms underlying syntactic and semantic processing in Yoruba-English bilinguals, emphasizing how bilingual proficiency modulates these processes. Drawing on two complementary approaches—an electrophysiological examination of sentence comprehension and a behavioral analysis of sentence production—the research explores the interplay between language experience, real-time processing, and cross-linguistic influence. EEG data collected during sentence comprehension tasks reveal proficiency-related differences in event-related potentials (ERPs), particularly the N400 and P600 components. Meanwhile, behavioral data from sentence production tasks highlight variation in syntactic restructuring and cross-linguistic transfer based on bilingual proficiency. The findings contribute to our understanding of the dynamic and multi-layered nature of bilingual language processing, with implications for theories of second language acquisition, cognitive control, and neural plasticity.

The neurobiology of sentence production: A narrative review and meta-analysis.