Similarity-based interference in sentence comprehension in aphasia: A computational evaluation of two models of cue-based retrieval

Sentence comprehension requires the listener to link incoming words with short-term memory representations in order to build linguistic dependencies. The cue-based retrieval theory of sentence processing predicts that the retrieval of these memory representations is affected by similarity-based interference. We present the first large-scale computational evaluation of interference effects in two models of sentence processing – the activation-based model, and a modification of the direct-access model – in individuals with aphasia (IWA) and control participants in German. The parameters of the models are linked to prominent theories of processing deficits in aphasia, and the models are tested against two linguistic constructions in German: Pronoun resolution and relative clauses. The data come from a visual-world eye-tracking experiment combined with a sentence-picture matching task. The results show that both control participants and IWA are susceptible to retrieval interference, and that a combination of theoretical explanations (intermittent deficiencies, slow syntax, and resource reduction) can explain IWA’s deficits in sentence processing. Model comparisons reveal that both models have a similar predictive performance in pronoun resolution, but the activation-based model outperforms the direct-access model in relative clauses.

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A computational evaluation of two models of retrieval processes in sentence processing in aphasia

10.31234/osf.io/r7dn5 ◽

2020 ◽

Author(s):

Paula Lissón ◽

Dorothea Pregla ◽

Bruno Nicenboim ◽

Dario Paape ◽

Mick L. van het Nederend ◽

...

Keyword(s):

Language Processing ◽

Sentence Processing ◽

Sentence Comprehension ◽

Model Comparison ◽

Predictive Performance ◽

Direct Access ◽

Computational Evaluation ◽

Retrieval Processes ◽

Using Data ◽

Access Model

Can sentence comprehension impairments in aphasia be explained by difficulties arising from dependency completion processes in parsing? Two distinct models of dependencycompletion difficulty are investigated, the Lewis and Vasishth (2005) activation-based model, and the direct-access model (McElree, 2000). These models’ predictive performance is compared using data from individuals with aphasia (IWAs) and control participants. The data are from a self-paced listening task involving subject and object relative clauses. The relative predictive performance of the models is evaluated using k-fold cross validation. For both IWAs and controls, the activation model furnishes a somewhat better quantitativefit to the data than the direct-access model. Model comparison using Bayes factors shows that, assuming an activation-based model, intermittent deficiencies may be the best explanation for the cause of impairments in IWAs. This is the first computational evaluation of different models of dependency completion using data from impaired andunimpaired individuals. This evaluation develops a systematic approach that can be used to quantitatively compare the predictions of competing models of language processing.

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Modeling Sentence Comprehension Deficits in Aphasia: A Computational Evaluation of the Direct-Access Model of Retrieval

10.31234/osf.io/nfg7u ◽

2021 ◽

Author(s):

Paula Lissón ◽

Dorothea Pregla ◽

Dario Paape ◽

Frank Burchert ◽

Nicole Stadie ◽

...

Keyword(s):

Sentence Comprehension ◽

Direct Access ◽

Similar Performance ◽

Computational Evaluation ◽

Retrieval Mechanism ◽

Access Model

Several researchers have argued that sentence comprehension is mediated via a content addressable retrieval mechanism that allows fast and direct access to memory items. Initially failed retrievals can result in backtracking, which leads to correct retrieval. We present an augmented version of the direct access model that allows backtracking to fail. Based on self-paced listening data from individuals with aphasia, we compare the augmented model to the base model without backtracking failures. The augmented model shows quantitatively similar performance to the base model, but only the augmented model can account for slow incorrect responses. We argue that the modified direct-access model is theoretically better suited to fit data from impaired populations.

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Modeling Sentence Comprehension Deficits in Aphasia: A Computational Evaluation of the Direct-access Model of Retrieval

10.18653/v1/2021.cmcl-1.22 ◽

2021 ◽

Author(s):

Paula Lissón ◽

Dorothea Pregla ◽

Dario Paape ◽

Frank Burchert ◽

Nicole Stadie ◽

...

Keyword(s):

Sentence Comprehension ◽

Direct Access ◽

Computational Evaluation ◽

Access Model

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The neurobiology of agrammatic sentence comprehension: a lesion study

10.1101/192245 ◽

2017 ◽

Author(s):

Corianne Rogalsky ◽

Arianna N. LaCroix ◽

Kuan-Hua Chen ◽

Steven W. Anderson ◽

Hanna Damasio ◽

...

Keyword(s):

Temporal Lobe ◽

Sentence Processing ◽

Word Order ◽

Sentence Comprehension ◽

Functional Neuroimaging ◽

Matching Task ◽

Broca’S Area ◽

Broca's Area ◽

Cognitive Demands ◽

Lesion Symptom Mapping

AbstractBroca’s area has long been implicated in sentence comprehension. Damage to this region is thought to be the central source of “agrammatic comprehension” in which performance is substantially worse (and near chance) on sentences with noncanonical word orders compared to canonical word order sentences (in English). This claim is supported by functional neuroimaging studies demonstrating greater activation in Broca’s area for noncanonical versus canonical sentences. However, functional neuroimaging studies also have frequently implicated the anterior temporal lobe (ATL) in sentence processing more broadly, and recent lesion-symptom mapping studies have implicated the ATL and mid temporal regions in agrammatic comprehension. The present study investigates these seemingly conflicting findings in 66 left hemisphere patients with chronic focal cerebral damage. Patients completed two sentence comprehension measures, sentence-picture matching and plausibility judgments. Patients with damage including Broca’s area (but excluding the temporal lobe; n=11) on average did not exhibit the expected agrammatic comprehension pattern, e.g. their performance was > 80% on noncanonical sentences in the sentence-picture matching task. Patients with ATL damage (n=18) also did not exhibit an agrammatic comprehension pattern. Across our entire patient sample, the lesions of patients with agrammatic comprehension patterns in either task had maximal overlap in posterior superior temporal and inferior parietal regions. Using voxel-based lesion symptom mapping (VLSM), we find that lower performances on canonical and noncanonical sentences in each task are both associated with damage to a large left superior temporal-inferior parietal network including portions of the ATL, but not Broca’s area. Notably however, response bias in plausibility judgments was significantly associated with damage to inferior frontal cortex, including gray and white matter in Broca’s area, suggesting that the contribution of Broca’s area to sentence comprehension may be related to task-related cognitive demands.

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Age differences in the effect of animacy on Mandarin sentence processing

PeerJ ◽

10.7717/peerj.6437 ◽

2019 ◽

Vol 7 ◽

pp. e6437 ◽

Cited By ~ 2

Author(s):

Xinmiao Liu ◽

Wenbin Wang ◽

Haiyan Wang

Keyword(s):

Older Adults ◽

Sentence Processing ◽

Relative Clauses ◽

Sentence Comprehension ◽

Cognitive Resources ◽

Ageing Population ◽

Younger Adults ◽

Online Processing ◽

Significant Difference ◽

Object Relative

Animate nouns are preferred for grammatical subjects, whereas inanimate nouns are preferred for grammatical objects. Animacy provides important semantic cues for sentence comprehension. However, how individuals’ ability to use this animacy cue changes with advancing age is still not clear. The current study investigated whether older adults and younger adults were differentially sensitive to this semantic constraint in processing Mandarin relative clauses, using a self-paced reading paradigm. The sentences used in the study contained subject relative clauses or object relative clauses and had animate or inanimate subjects. The results indicate that the animacy manipulation affected the younger adults more than the older adults in online processing. Younger adults had longer reading times for all segments in subject relative clauses than in object relative clauses when the subjects were inanimate, whereas there was no significant difference in reading times between subject and object relative clauses when the subjects were animate. In the older group, animacy was not found to influence the processing difficulty of subject relative clauses and object relative clauses. Compared with younger adults, older adults were less sensitive to animacy constraints in relative clause processing. The findings indicate that the use of animacy cues became less efficient in the ageing population. The results can be explained by the capacity constrained comprehension theory, according to which older adults have greater difficulty in integrating semantic information with syntactic processing due to the lack of sufficient cognitive resources.

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The influences of proficiency levels and working memory capacities on sentence comprehension by Japanese learners of English

EUROSLA Yearbook ◽

10.1075/eurosla.15.06sud ◽

2015 ◽

Vol 15 ◽

pp. 143-163 ◽

Cited By ~ 1

Author(s):

Koji Suda

Keyword(s):

Working Memory ◽

Sentence Processing ◽

Relative Clause ◽

Relative Clauses ◽

Sentence Comprehension ◽

Structural Information ◽

Proficiency Levels ◽

Japanese Learners Of English ◽

Japanese Learners ◽

Object Relative

Examining influences of two participant factors, i.e., proficiency and working memory (WM), in second language (L2) sentence processing, we discuss how Japanese learners of English (JLEs) with distinct proficiency levels and WM capacities comprehend relative clauses in English. Reading times (RTs) were collected from intermediate and elementary levels of JLEs with different WM capacities using a self-paced reading task. The results revealed that: (1) JLEs had difficulty interpreting object relative clauses with animate antecedents; (2) JLEs at the elementary level processed the critical region in subject relative clauses with animate antecedents faster than that in object relative clauses with animate antecedents; (3) JLEs with the large WM capacity read embedded verbs faster than those with the small WM capacity; and (4) RTs of the verb region in the subject relative clause were shorter than those in the object relative clause. From these results, we propose that lower proficient L2 learners depend heavily on animacy information when they comprehend relative clauses though there appears evidence that JLEs also make use of structural information. Moreover, we suggest that WM has a positive role in the L2 comprehension process, similar to findings in previous L2 processing studies.

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Variability in sentence comprehension in aphasia in German

10.31234/osf.io/7hfpx ◽

2020 ◽

Author(s):

Dorothea Pregla ◽

Paula Lisson ◽

Shravan Vasishth ◽

Frank Burchert ◽

Nicole Stadie

Keyword(s):

Sentence Processing ◽

Large Scale ◽

Sentence Comprehension ◽

Control Group ◽

Data Set ◽

Control Structures ◽

Individual Level ◽

Competing Models ◽

Test Retest Reliability ◽

And Control

An important property of aphasia is the variability in the performance between and within individual patients. However, there have been only a few systematic large-scale studies in a range of syntactic constructions and tasks that make it possible to investigate variability and to evaluate the quantitative predictions of competing models of sentence comprehension in aphasia (Lissón et al., under review). This is the first comprehensive investigation of variability in sentence comprehension in German, testing 18 individuals with aphasia and a control group and involving (a) several construction (canonical / non-canonical declarative sentences, subject / object relative clauses, subject / object control structures, near / distant antecedents of pronouns), (b) three tasks (object manipulation, sentence-picture matching with / without self-paced listening), and (c) two test phases (to investigate test-retest reliability). This data-set provides a detailed investigation of individual-level variation in individuals with aphasia and control participants along several dimensions of sentence processing difficulty.

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Statistical properties of the speed-accuracy trade-off (SAT) paradigm in sentence processing

10.31234/osf.io/puqkv ◽

2021 ◽

Author(s):

Elizabeth Pankratz ◽

Himanshu Yadav ◽

Garrett Smith ◽

Shravan Vasishth

Keyword(s):

Sentence Processing ◽

Direct Access ◽

Limited Data ◽

Long Distance ◽

Test Parameter ◽

Trade Off ◽

Parameter Recovery ◽

Correct Representation ◽

Speed Accuracy ◽

Access Model

Studies of the speed-accuracy trade-off (SAT) have been influential in arguing for the direct-access model of retrieval in sentence processing. The direct-access model assumes that long-distance dependencies rely on a content-addressable search for the correct representation in memory. Here, we address two important weaknesses in the statistical methods standardly used for analysing SAT data. First, these methods are based on non-hierarchical modelling. We show how a hierarchical model can be fit to SAT data, and we test parameter recovery in this more conservative model. The parameters most relevant to the direct-access account cannot be accurately estimated, and we attribute this to the standard SAT model being overparameterised for the limited data available to fit it. Second, the power properties of SAT studies are unknown. We conduct a power analysis and show that inferences from null results to the null hypothesis, though commonplace in the SAT literature, may be unwarranted.

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The Neurobiology of Agrammatic Sentence Comprehension: A Lesion Study

Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience ◽

10.1162/jocn_a_01200 ◽

2018 ◽

Vol 30 (2) ◽

pp. 234-255 ◽

Cited By ~ 20

Author(s):

Corianne Rogalsky ◽

Arianna N. LaCroix ◽

Kuan-Hua Chen ◽

Steven W. Anderson ◽

Hanna Damasio ◽

...

Keyword(s):

Temporal Lobe ◽

Sentence Processing ◽

Word Order ◽

Sentence Comprehension ◽

Functional Neuroimaging ◽

Matching Task ◽

Broca’S Area ◽

Broca's Area ◽

Cognitive Demands ◽

Lesion Symptom Mapping

Broca's area has long been implicated in sentence comprehension. Damage to this region is thought to be the central source of “agrammatic comprehension” in which performance is substantially worse (and near chance) on sentences with noncanonical word orders compared with canonical word order sentences (in English). This claim is supported by functional neuroimaging studies demonstrating greater activation in Broca's area for noncanonical versus canonical sentences. However, functional neuroimaging studies also have frequently implicated the anterior temporal lobe (ATL) in sentence processing more broadly, and recent lesion–symptom mapping studies have implicated the ATL and mid temporal regions in agrammatic comprehension. This study investigates these seemingly conflicting findings in 66 left-hemisphere patients with chronic focal cerebral damage. Patients completed two sentence comprehension measures, sentence–picture matching and plausibility judgments. Patients with damage including Broca's area (but excluding the temporal lobe; n = 11) on average did not exhibit the expected agrammatic comprehension pattern—for example, their performance was >80% on noncanonical sentences in the sentence–picture matching task. Patients with ATL damage ( n = 18) also did not exhibit an agrammatic comprehension pattern. Across our entire patient sample, the lesions of patients with agrammatic comprehension patterns in either task had maximal overlap in posterior superior temporal and inferior parietal regions. Using voxel-based lesion–symptom mapping, we find that lower performances on canonical and noncanonical sentences in each task are both associated with damage to a large left superior temporal–inferior parietal network including portions of the ATL, but not Broca's area. Notably, however, response bias in plausibility judgments was significantly associated with damage to inferior frontal cortex, including gray and white matter in Broca's area, suggesting that the contribution of Broca's area to sentence comprehension may be related to task-related cognitive demands.

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Structural priming during sentence comprehension in Chinese–English bilinguals

Applied Psycholinguistics ◽

10.1017/s0142716416000382 ◽

2016 ◽

Vol 38 (3) ◽

pp. 657-678 ◽

Cited By ~ 1

Author(s):

YUFEN HSIEH

Keyword(s):

Sentence Processing ◽

Word Order ◽

Relative Clauses ◽

Sentence Comprehension ◽

Main Clause ◽

Structural Priming ◽

Translation Equivalent ◽

Reading Experiment ◽

Reading Chinese ◽

Processing Difficulty

ABSTRACTCross-linguistic priming in comprehension is understudied, and it remains unclear whether bilinguals have shared abstract syntactic representations during sentence comprehension. This article reports a self-paced reading experiment investigating the influence of Chinese passive relative clauses on the interpretation of English sentences that are temporarily ambiguous between an active main clause and a passive reduced relative (dispreferred) structure. The results showed that reading Chinese passive relative primes reduced processing difficulty in English targets at the dispreferred disambiguation. Chinese-to-English priming in comprehension occurred without lexical and word-order equivalence between primes and targets. In addition, translation-equivalent verbs did not boost cross-linguistic structural priming. The findings support an account under which bilingual sentence processing involves abstract, unordered syntactic representations that are integrated between languages.

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