scholarly journals Why Can't Individuals with Nonfluent Aphasia Produce Sentences? Exploring the Role of Lexical Availability

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
◽  
Ella Creet
Keyword(s):  
Language Disorder ◽  
Target Sentence ◽  
Great Difficulty ◽  
Sentence Production ◽  
Sentence Structure ◽  
Structure Generation ◽  
Nonfluent Aphasia ◽  
Subject Noun ◽  
Production Accuracy

<p>Nonfluent aphasia is a language disorder characterised by sparse, fragmented speech. Individuals with this disorder often produce single words accurately (for example, they can name pictured objects), but have great difficulty producing sentences. An important research goal is to understand why sentences are so difficult for these individuals. To produce a sentence, a speaker must not only retrieve its lexical elements, but also integrate them into a grammatically well-formed sentence. Indeed, most research to date has focused on this grammatical integration process. However, recent studies suggest that the noun and/or verb content of the sentence can also be an important determinant of success (e.g., Raymer & Kohen, 2006; Speer & Wilshire, 2014). In this thesis, I explore the role of noun availability on sentence production accuracy using an identity priming paradigm. Participants are asked to describe a pictured event using a single sentence (e.g., “The fish is kissing the turtle”). In the critical condition, an auditory prime word is presented just prior to the picture, which is identical to one of the nouns in the target sentence (e.g., fish). The rationale is that the prime will enhance the availability of its counterpart when the person comes to produce the target sentence. Participants were four individuals with mild nonfluent aphasia, two individuals with fluent aphasia, and six older, healthy controls. Consistent with our hypotheses, the nonfluent participants as a group were more accurate at producing sentences when one of its nouns – either the subject or object - was primed in this way. Importantly, in the primed subject noun condition, these results held even when accuracy on the primed element itself was excluded, suggesting it had a broad effect on sentence production accuracy. The primed nouns had no effect on sentence production accuracy for the fluent individuals or the controls. We interpret these findings within models of sentence production that allow for considerable interplay between the processes of lexical content retrieval and sentence structure generation.</p>

scholarly journals Why Can't Individuals with Nonfluent Aphasia Produce Sentences? Exploring the Role of Lexical Availability

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
◽  
Ella Creet
Keyword(s):  
Language Disorder ◽  
Target Sentence ◽  
Great Difficulty ◽  
Sentence Production ◽  
Sentence Structure ◽  
Structure Generation ◽  
Nonfluent Aphasia ◽  
Subject Noun ◽  
Production Accuracy

<p>Nonfluent aphasia is a language disorder characterised by sparse, fragmented speech. Individuals with this disorder often produce single words accurately (for example, they can name pictured objects), but have great difficulty producing sentences. An important research goal is to understand why sentences are so difficult for these individuals. To produce a sentence, a speaker must not only retrieve its lexical elements, but also integrate them into a grammatically well-formed sentence. Indeed, most research to date has focused on this grammatical integration process. However, recent studies suggest that the noun and/or verb content of the sentence can also be an important determinant of success (e.g., Raymer & Kohen, 2006; Speer & Wilshire, 2014). In this thesis, I explore the role of noun availability on sentence production accuracy using an identity priming paradigm. Participants are asked to describe a pictured event using a single sentence (e.g., “The fish is kissing the turtle”). In the critical condition, an auditory prime word is presented just prior to the picture, which is identical to one of the nouns in the target sentence (e.g., fish). The rationale is that the prime will enhance the availability of its counterpart when the person comes to produce the target sentence. Participants were four individuals with mild nonfluent aphasia, two individuals with fluent aphasia, and six older, healthy controls. Consistent with our hypotheses, the nonfluent participants as a group were more accurate at producing sentences when one of its nouns – either the subject or object - was primed in this way. Importantly, in the primed subject noun condition, these results held even when accuracy on the primed element itself was excluded, suggesting it had a broad effect on sentence production accuracy. The primed nouns had no effect on sentence production accuracy for the fluent individuals or the controls. We interpret these findings within models of sentence production that allow for considerable interplay between the processes of lexical content retrieval and sentence structure generation.</p>

scholarly journals The effect of lexical content on sentence production in nonfluent aphasia

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
◽  
Paula Speer
Keyword(s):  
Great Difficulty ◽  
Sentence Production ◽  
Lexical Retrieval ◽  
Generation Process ◽  
Nonfluent Aphasia ◽  
Lexical Representations ◽  
Subject Noun ◽  
Fluent Aphasia ◽  
Lexical Content ◽  
The Relationship

<p>Individuals with nonfluent aphasia are able to produce many words in isolation, but have great difficulty producing sentences. Most research to date has compared accuracy across different types of sentence structures, focussing on grammatical aspects that may be compromised in nonfluent aphasia. However, based on the premise that lexical elements activate their associated grammatical frames as well as vice versa, lexical content may also be of vital importance. For example, rapid access to lexical elements – particularly ones appearing early in the sentence - may be crucial, especially if the sentence plan is weakly activated or rapidly decaying. The current study investigated the effect of different aspects of lexical content on nonfluent aphasic sentence production. Five participants with nonfluent aphasia, four participants with fluent aphasia and eight controls completed two picture description tasks eliciting subject-verb-object sentences (e.g., the dog is chasing the fox). Based on existing evidence suggesting that common words are accessed more rapidly than rarer ones, Experiment 1 manipulated the frequency of sentence nouns, thereby varying their speed of lexical retrieval by varying the frequency of sentence nouns. Nonfluent participants' accuracy was consistently higher for sentences commencing with a high frequency subject noun, even when errors on those nouns were themselves excluded. This was not the case for the fluent participants. Experiment 2 manipulated the semantic relationship between subject and object nouns. Previous research suggests that phrases containing related words may be challenging for individuals with nonfluent aphasia, possibly because lexical representations are inadequately tied to appropriate structural representations. The nonfluent participants produced sentences less accurately when they contained related lexical items, even when those items were in different noun phrases. The fluent participants exhibited the opposite trend. Finally, the relationship between the patterns observed in Experiment 1 and 2 and lesion location in the aphasic participants was explored by analysing magnetic resonance scans. We discuss the implications of our findings for theoretical accounts of sentence production more generally, and of nonfluent aphasia in particular. More precisely, we propose that individuals with nonfluent aphasia are disproportionately reliant on activated lexical representations to drive the sentence generation process, an idea we call the Content Drives Structure (COST) hypothesis.</p>

scholarly journals The effect of lexical content on sentence production in nonfluent aphasia

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
◽  
Paula Speer
Keyword(s):  
Great Difficulty ◽  
Sentence Production ◽  
Lexical Retrieval ◽  
Generation Process ◽  
Nonfluent Aphasia ◽  
Lexical Representations ◽  
Subject Noun ◽  
Fluent Aphasia ◽  
Lexical Content ◽  
The Relationship

<p>Individuals with nonfluent aphasia are able to produce many words in isolation, but have great difficulty producing sentences. Most research to date has compared accuracy across different types of sentence structures, focussing on grammatical aspects that may be compromised in nonfluent aphasia. However, based on the premise that lexical elements activate their associated grammatical frames as well as vice versa, lexical content may also be of vital importance. For example, rapid access to lexical elements – particularly ones appearing early in the sentence - may be crucial, especially if the sentence plan is weakly activated or rapidly decaying. The current study investigated the effect of different aspects of lexical content on nonfluent aphasic sentence production. Five participants with nonfluent aphasia, four participants with fluent aphasia and eight controls completed two picture description tasks eliciting subject-verb-object sentences (e.g., the dog is chasing the fox). Based on existing evidence suggesting that common words are accessed more rapidly than rarer ones, Experiment 1 manipulated the frequency of sentence nouns, thereby varying their speed of lexical retrieval by varying the frequency of sentence nouns. Nonfluent participants' accuracy was consistently higher for sentences commencing with a high frequency subject noun, even when errors on those nouns were themselves excluded. This was not the case for the fluent participants. Experiment 2 manipulated the semantic relationship between subject and object nouns. Previous research suggests that phrases containing related words may be challenging for individuals with nonfluent aphasia, possibly because lexical representations are inadequately tied to appropriate structural representations. The nonfluent participants produced sentences less accurately when they contained related lexical items, even when those items were in different noun phrases. The fluent participants exhibited the opposite trend. Finally, the relationship between the patterns observed in Experiment 1 and 2 and lesion location in the aphasic participants was explored by analysing magnetic resonance scans. We discuss the implications of our findings for theoretical accounts of sentence production more generally, and of nonfluent aphasia in particular. More precisely, we propose that individuals with nonfluent aphasia are disproportionately reliant on activated lexical representations to drive the sentence generation process, an idea we call the Content Drives Structure (COST) hypothesis.</p>

scholarly journals The role of explicit memory in syntactic persistence: Effects of lexical cueing and load on sentence memory and sentence production

PLoS ONE ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 15 (11) ◽  
pp. e0240909
Author(s):  
Chi Zhang ◽  
Sarah Bernolet ◽  
Robert J. Hartsuiker
Keyword(s):  
Cognitive Load ◽  
Explicit Memory ◽  
Sentence Production ◽  
Structural Priming ◽  
Sentence Structure ◽  
Memory Mechanism ◽  
Mathematical Problems ◽  
Load Effects ◽  
Syntactic Persistence

Speakers’ memory of sentence structure can persist and modulate the syntactic choices of subsequent utterances (i.e., structural priming). Much research on structural priming posited a multifactorial account by which an implicit learning process and a process related to explicit memory jointly contribute to the priming effect. Here, we tested two predictions from that account: (1) that lexical repetition facilitates the retrieval of sentence structures from memory; (2) that priming is partly driven by a short-term explicit memory mechanism with limited resources. In two pairs of structural priming and sentence structure memory experiments, we examined the effects of structural priming and its modulation by lexical repetition as a function of cognitive load in native Dutch speakers. Cognitive load was manipulated by interspersing the prime and target trials with easy or difficult mathematical problems. Lexical repetition boosted both structural priming (Experiments 1a–2a) and memory for sentence structure (Experiments 1b–2b) and did so with a comparable magnitude. In Experiment 1, there were no load effects, but in Experiment 2, with a stronger manipulation of load, both the priming and memory effects were reduced with a larger cognitive load. The findings support an explicit memory mechanism in structural priming that is cue-dependent and attention-demanding, consistent with a multifactorial account of structural priming.

Nonword Repetition Skills in Gulf Arabic–Speaking Children With Developmental Language Disorder

2020 ◽  
Vol 63 (11) ◽  
pp. 3700-3713
Author(s):  
Saleh Shaalan
Keyword(s):  
Phonological Processing ◽  
Language Disorder ◽  
Nonword Repetition ◽  
School Age Children ◽  
Typically Developing ◽  
Developmental Language Disorder ◽  
Gulf Arabic ◽  
Arabic Speaking ◽  
Phonological Complexity

Purpose This study examined the performance of Gulf Arabic–speaking children with developmental language disorder (DLD) on a Gulf Arabic nonword repetition (GA-NWR) test and compared it to their age- and language-matched groups. We also investigated the role of syllable length, wordlikeness, and phonological complexity in light of NWR theories. Method A new GA-NWR test was conducted with three groups of Gulf Arabic–speaking children: school-age children with DLD, language-matched controls (LCs), and age-matched controls (ACs). The test consisted of two- and three-syllable words that either had no clusters, medial clusters, final clusters, or medial + final clusters. Results The GA-NWR distinguished between the performance of children with DLD and the LC and AC groups. Results showed significant syllable length, wordlikeness, and phonological complexity effects. Differences between the DLD and typically developing groups were seen in two- and three-syllable nonwords; however, when compared on nonwords with no clusters, children with DLD were not significantly different from the LC group. Conclusions The GA-NWR test differentiated between children with DLD and their ACs and LCs. Findings, therefore, support its clinical utility in this variety of Arabic. Results showed that phonological processing factors, such as phonological complexity, may have stronger effects when compared to syllable length effects. Supplemental Material https://doi.org/10.23641/asha.12996812

Niuean

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Diane Massam
Keyword(s):  
Word Order ◽  
Argument Structure ◽  
Word Formation ◽  
Left Periphery ◽  
Sentence Structure ◽  
Noun Incorporation ◽  
The Pacific ◽  
Theta Role ◽  
Predicate Argument Structure

This book presents a detailed descriptive and theoretical examination of predicate-argument structure in Niuean, a Polynesian language within the Oceanic branch of the Austronesian family, spoken mainly on the Pacific island of Niue and in New Zealand. Niuean has VSO word order and an ergative case-marking system, both of which raise questions for a subject-predicate view of sentence structure. Working within a broadly Minimalist framework, this volume develops an analysis in which syntactic arguments are not merged locally to their thematic sources, but instead are merged high, above an inverted extended predicate which serves syntactically as the Niuean verb, later undergoing movement into the left periphery of the clause. The thematically lowest argument merges as an absolutive inner subject, with higher arguments merging as applicatives. The proposal relates Niuean word order and ergativity to its isolating morphology, by equating the absence of inflection with the absence of IP in Niuean, which impacts many aspects of its grammar. As well as developing a novel analysis of clause and argument structure, word order, ergative case, and theta role assignment, the volume argues for an expanded understanding of subjecthood. Throughout the volume, many other topics are also treated, such as noun incorporation, word formation, the parallel internal structure of predicates and arguments, null arguments, displacement typology, the role of determiners, and the structure of the left periphery.

The Role of Vehicle Characteristics in Drivers' Perception of Automobile Velocity

1978 ◽  
Vol 22 (1) ◽  
pp. 110-114
Author(s):  
Michael L. Matthews ◽  
Lawrence R. Cousins
Keyword(s):  
Auditory Information ◽  
Production Accuracy

Velocity production in the absence of speedometer information is investigated as a function of car size. In the first experiment three vehicles of different size were supplied by the experimenters; in experiment two a different sample of drivers used their own vehicles. In both experiments subjects performed under normal and auditory attenuated conditions. Results indicated greater production accuracy in small compared with large cars and a tendency for drivers of small cars to make greater use of auditory information.

Attention and Structural Choice in Sentence Production

2018 ◽  
pp. 526-546
Author(s):  
Andriy Myachykov ◽  
Mikhail Pokhoday ◽  
Russell Tomlin
Keyword(s):  
Experimental Evidence ◽  
Word Order ◽  
Syntactic Structure ◽  
Sentence Production ◽  
Regular Mapping ◽  
Structural Choice ◽  
Mapping Mechanism ◽  
Production Mechanisms

This chapter offers a review of experimental evidence about the role of the speaker’s attention in the choice of syntactic structure and the corresponding word order during sentence production. Here, we describe how the speaker’s syntactic choices reflect the regular mapping mechanism that reflects the features of the described event in the produced sentence. One of the most important event parameters that the speaker considers is the changing salience status of the event’s referents. This chapter summarizes current theoretical debate about the interplay between attention and sentence production mechanisms. Finally, it reviews the corresponding experimental evidence from languages with both restricted and flexible word orders.

Role of Inversion in Children's Question Development

1985 ◽  
Vol 28 (2) ◽  
pp. 225-232 ◽  
Author(s):  
Thomas Klee
Keyword(s):  
Noun Phrase ◽  
Empirical Support ◽  
Hearing Disorders ◽  
Question Types ◽  
Subject Noun ◽  
Utterance Length ◽  
Auxiliary Verb ◽  
Question Development

Current developmental descriptions of children's Wh-question production are contradictory. One account posits a stage in which the auxiliary verb and subject noun phrase are uninverted, whereas another view offers no empirical support for such a stage. The purpose of the present investigation was to test these divergent developmental descriptions by analyzing children's spontaneously produced questions. Six children at each of three linguistic stages, defined by mean utterance length in morphemes and ranging from 2.50 to 3.99, were selected for study. The children were between 25 and 47 months of age and evidenced no speech, language, or hearing disorders. Although the results replicated the proposed semantic ordering of question types, a stage characterized by uninverted forms was not supported.

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