Mapping therapy for sentence production impairments in nonfluent aphasia

This study investigated a new treatment in which sentence production abilities were trained in a small group of individuals and nonfluent aphasia. It was based upon a mapping therapy approach which holds that sentence production and comprehension impairments are due to difficulties in mapping between the meaning form (thematic roles) and the syntactic form of sentences. We trained production of both canonical and noncanonical reversible sentences.Three patients received treatment and two served as control participants. Patients who received treatment demonstrated acquisition of all trained sentence structures. They also demonstrated across-task generalisation of treated and some untreated sentence structures on two tasks of constrained sentence production, and showed some improvements on a narrative task. One control participant improved on some of these measures and the other did not. There was no noted improvement in sentence comprehension abilities following treatment. Results are discussed with reference to the heterogeneity of underlying impairments in sentence production impairments in nonfluent patients, and the possible mechanisms by which improvement in sentence production might have been achieved in treatment.

The timing of island effects in nonnative sentence processing

Using the eye-movement monitoring technique in two reading comprehension experiments, we investigated the timing of constraints on wh-dependencies (so-called ‘island’ constraints) in native and nonnative sentence processing. Our results show that both native and nonnative speakers of English are sensitive to extraction islands during processing, suggesting that memory storage limitations affect native and nonnative comprehenders in essentially the same way. Furthermore, our results show that the timing of island effects in native compared to nonnative sentence comprehension is affected differently by the type of cue (semantic fit versus filled gaps) signalling whether dependency formation is possible at a potential gap site. Whereas English native speakers showed immediate sensitivity to filled gaps but not to lack of semantic fit, proficient German-speaking learners of L2 English showed the opposite sensitivity pattern. This indicates that initial wh-dependency formation in nonnative processing is based on semantic feature-matching rather than being structurally mediated as in native comprehension.

Variable binding and coreference in sentence comprehension: evidence from eye movements

The hypothesis that pronouns can be resolved via either the syntax or the discourse representation has played an important role in linguistic accounts of pronoun interpretation (e.g. Grodzinsky & Reinhart, 1993). We report the results of an eye-movement monitoring study investigating the relative timing of syntactically-mediated variable binding and discourse-based coreference assignment during pronoun resolution. We examined whether ambiguous pronouns are preferentially resolved via either the variable binding or coreference route, and in particular tested the hypothesis that variable binding should always be computed before coreference assignment. Participants’ eye movements were monitored while they read sentences containing a pronoun and two potential antecedents, a c-commanding quantified noun phrase and a non c-commanding proper name. Gender congruence between the pronoun and either of the two potential antecedents was manipulated as an experimental diagnostic for dependency formation. In two experiments, we found that participants’ reading times were reliably longer when the linearly closest antecedent mismatched in gender with the pronoun. These findings fail to support the hypothesis that variable binding is computed before coreference assignment, and instead suggest that antecedent recency plays an important role in affecting the extent to which a variable binding antecedent is considered. We discuss these results in relation to models of memory retrieval during sentence comprehension, and interpret the antecedent recency preference as an example of forgetting over time.

Using eye movements to investigate word frequency effects in children’s sentence reading

While eye movements have been used widely to investigate how skilled adult readers process written language, relatively little research has used this methodology with children. This is unfortunate as, as we discuss here, eye-movement studies have significant potential to inform our understanding of children’s reading development. We consider some of the empirical and theoretical issues that arise when using this methodology with children, illustrating our points with data from an experiment examining word frequency effects in 8-year-old children’s sentence reading. Children showed significantly longer gaze durations to low than high-frequency words, demonstrating that linguistic characteristics of text drive children’s eye movements as they read. We discuss these findings within the broader context of how eye-movement studies can inform our understanding of children’s reading, and can assist with the development of appropriately targeted interventions to support children as they learn to read.

Two-Item Sentence Comprehension by a Dog (Canis familiaris)

Syntax use by non-human animals remains a controversial issue. We present here evidence that a dog may respond to verbal requests composed of two independent terms, one referring to an object and the other to an action to be performed relative to the object. A female mongrel dog, Sofia, was initially trained to respond to action (point and fetch) and object (ball, key, stick, bottle and bear) terms which were then presented as simultaneous, combinatorial requests (e. g. ball fetch, stick point). Sofia successfully responded to object-action requests presented as single sentences, and was able to flexibly generalize her performance across different contexts. These results provide empirical evidence that dogs are able to extract the information contained in complex messages and to integrate it in directed performance, an ability which is shared with other linguistically trained animals and may represent a forerunner of syntactic functioning.

Mini-Mental State Examination sentence writing among community-dwelling elderly adults in Brazil: text fluency and grammar complexity

Background: In normal aging, the decrease in the syntactic complexity of written production is usually associated with cognitive deficits. This study was aimed to analyze the quality of older adults' textual production indicated by verbal fluency (number of words) and grammatical complexity (number of ideas) in relation to gender, age, schooling, and cognitive status. Methods: From a probabilistic sample of community-dwelling people aged 65 years and above (n = 900), 577 were selected on basis of their responses to the Mini-Mental State Examination (MMSE) sentence writing, which were submitted to content analysis; 323 were excluded as they left the item blank or performed illegible or not meaningful responses. Education adjusted cut-off scores for the MMSE were used to classify the participants as cognitively impaired or unimpaired. Total and subdomain MMSE scores were computed. Results: 40.56% of participants whose answers to the MMSE sentence were excluded from the analyses had cognitive impairment compared to 13.86% among those whose answers were included. The excluded participants were older and less educated. Women and those older than 80 years had the lowest scores in the MMSE. There was no statistically significant relationship between gender, age, schooling, and textual performance. There was a modest but significant correlation between number of words written and the scores in the Language subdomain. Conclusions: Results suggest the strong influence of schooling and age over MMSE sentence performance. Failing to write a sentence may suggest cognitive impairment, yet, instructions for the MMSE sentence, i.e. to produce a simple sentence, may limit its clinical interpretation.

Language and Embodiment: sensory-motor and linguistic-social experience. Evidence on sentence comprehension

In this work I address the study of language comprehension in an “embodied” framework. Firstly I show behavioral evidence supporting the idea that language modulates the motor system in a specific way, both at a proximal level (sensibility to the effectors) and at the distal level (sensibility to the goal of the action in which the single motor acts are inserted). I will present two studies in which the method is basically the same: we manipulated the linguistic stimuli (the kind of sentence: hand action vs. foot action vs. mouth action) and the effector by which participants had to respond (hand vs. foot vs. mouth; dominant hand vs. non-dominant hand). Response times analyses showed a specific modulation depending on the kind of sentence: participants were facilitated in the task execution (sentence sensibility judgment) when the effector they had to use to respond was the same to which the sentences referred. Namely, during language comprehension a pre-activation of the motor system seems to take place. This activation is analogous (even if less intense) to the one detectable when we practically execute the action described by the sentence. Beyond this effector specific modulation, we also found an effect of the goal suggested by the sentence. That is, the hand effector was pre-activated not only by hand-action-related sentences, but also by sentences describing mouth actions, consistently with the fact that to execute an action on an object with the mouth we firstly have to bring it to the mouth with the hand. After reviewing the evidence on simulation specificity directly referring to the body (for instance, the kind of the effector activated by the language), I focus on the specific properties of the object to which the words refer, particularly on the weight. In this case the hypothesis to test was if both lifting movement perception and lifting movement execution are modulated by language comprehension. We used behavioral and kinematics methods, and we manipulated the linguistic stimuli (the kind of sentence: the lifting of heavy objects vs. the lifting of light objects). To study the movement perception we measured the correlations between the weight of the objects lifted by an actor (heavy objects vs. light objects) and the esteems provided by the participants. To study the movement execution we measured kinematics parameters variance (velocity, acceleration, time to the first peak of velocity) during the actual lifting of objects (heavy objects vs. light objects). Both kinds of measures revealed that language had a specific effect on the motor system, both at a perceptive and at a motoric level. Finally, I address the issue of the abstract words. Different studies in the “embodied” framework tried to explain the meaning of abstract words The limit of these works is that they account only for subsets of phenomena, so results are difficult to generalize. We tried to circumvent this problem by contrasting transitive verbs (abstract and concrete) and nouns (abstract and concrete) in different combinations. The behavioral study was conducted both with German and Italian participants, as the two languages are syntactically different. We found that response times were faster for both the compatible pairs (concrete verb + concrete noun; abstract verb + abstract noun) than for the mixed ones. Interestingly, for the mixed combinations analyses showed a modulation due to the specific language (German vs. Italian): when the concrete word precedes the abstract one responses were faster, regardless of the word grammatical class. Results are discussed in the framework of current views on abstract words. They highlight the important role of developmental and social aspects of language use, and confirm theories assigning a crucial role to both sensorimotor and linguistic experience for abstract words.