Article
Psychology, Multidisciplinary
Christina Manouilidou, Michaela Nerantzini, Brianne M. Chiappetta, M. Marsel Mesulam, Cynthia K. Thompson
Summary: This study examined the processing of derivational morphology in individuals with language disorders, finding that agrammatic patients had difficulties in detecting syntactic violations, while syntactic deficits could impact word level processing. The results supported the existence of various stages in accessing complex pseudowords, emphasizing the contribution of syntactic/grammatical knowledge to word processing.
FRONTIERS IN PSYCHOLOGY
(2021)
Article
Clinical Neurology
Neguine Rezaii, James Michaelov, Sylvia Josephy-Hernandez, Boyu Ren, Daisy Hochberg, Megan Quimby, Bradford C. Dickerson
Summary: Nonfluent aphasia is characterized by simplified sentence structures and word-level abnormalities. The prevailing belief is that a core deficit in syntax processing causes these abnormalities. However, an alternative view based on information theory suggests that the word-level features of nonfluency are actually a compensatory process called lexical condensation.
ANNALS OF NEUROLOGY
(2023)
Review
Audiology & Speech-Language Pathology
Saryu Sharma, Hana Kim, Havan Harris, Amanda Haberstroh, Heather Harris Wright, Kathrin Rothermich
Summary: This scoping review identified the use of eye tracking paradigms and measures in investigating auditory and reading comprehension deficits in persons with aphasia. The studies summarized provide evidence that these methods are beneficial for studying language comprehension in PWA. Challenges of using eye tracking in this context are also discussed.
JOURNAL OF SPEECH LANGUAGE AND HEARING RESEARCH
(2021)
Article
Behavioral Sciences
Keisuke Morihara, Shoko Ota, Kazuo Kakinuma, Nobuko Kawakami, Yuichi Higashiyama, Shigenori Kanno, Fumiaki Tanaka, Kyoko Suzuki
Summary: This study aimed to investigate the association between Buccofacial apraxia (BFA) and agrammatism in nonfluent/agrammatic variant primary progressive aphasia (nfvPPA) and compare the atrophic regions in PPA patients with and without BFA. Language examination and BFA evaluations were conducted on 74 PPA patients, revealing BFA in 20 nfvPPA patients and 3 unclassified PPA patients. The group with BFA showed worse spontaneous speech and writing, and a higher ratio of agrammatic errors, but no difference in the severity of prosodic and phonetic components of AOS compared to the group without BFA. Voxel-based morphometry (VBM) analysis revealed that the severity of BFA correlated with atrophy in specific regions of the frontal gyrus. BFA has a distinct anatomical basis from AOS in nfvPPA patients and is characterized by more anterior degeneration.
Article
Neurosciences
William Matchin, Alexandra Basilakos, Dirk-Bart Den Ouden, Brielle C. Stark, Gregory Hickok, Julius Fridriksson
Summary: This study utilized lesion-symptom mapping in three groups of patients with left hemisphere brain damage to investigate region-specific effects on linguistic mechanisms. The results revealed multiple measure by region interaction effects, supporting differentiation between regions in the language network for high-level linguistic processing.
Article
Education & Educational Research
Vera Yunxiao Xia, Lydia White, Natalia Brambatti Guzzo
Summary: This study investigates the effects of featural Relativized Minimality on the processing of relative clauses in Mandarin speakers' L2 English. The results show that object relatives (ORCs) are processed slower than subject relatives (SRCs), supporting the presence of an intervention effect. However, faster reading times were found in ORCs when the intervenor and head noun matched in number.
SECOND LANGUAGE RESEARCH
(2022)
Review
Audiology & Speech-Language Pathology
Sarah-Eve Poirier, Marion Fossard, Laura Monetta
Summary: This study aims to analyze the efficacy of 11 different treatments proposed for sentence production deficits in individuals with aphasia. The majority of treatments showed gains on trained items and generalization to untreated items, but other efficacy measures were not always reported or improved.
Article
Linguistics
Matthew Walenski, Thomas Sostarics, M. Marsel Mesulam, Cynthia K. Thompson
Summary: This study investigated adjective production in patients with different types of aphasia and healthy controls. The findings showed that agrammatic aphasia patients produced significantly fewer attributive adjectives compared to the control group, while other patient groups were similar to the control group. Furthermore, there was a significant correlation between the rate of producing attributive adjectives and impaired production of complex syntactic structure sentences in agrammatic aphasia patients. Analysis of the lexical characteristics of the produced adjectives revealed consistent patterns with the language profile of each group.
JOURNAL OF NEUROLINGUISTICS
(2024)
Article
Audiology & Speech-Language Pathology
William S. Evans, Robert Cavanaugh, Yina Quique, Emily Boss, Jeffrey J. Starns, William D. Hula
Summary: The study developed and tested a novel treatment framework called BEARS for aphasia patients, aiming to balance effort, accuracy, and response speed to improve treatment outcomes. Results showed improvement in naming accuracy and efficiency, as well as enhanced system calibration, with practice efficiency during treatment positively correlated with treatment outcomes.
JOURNAL OF SPEECH LANGUAGE AND HEARING RESEARCH
(2021)
Article
Audiology & Speech-Language Pathology
Giulia Gilardone, Mauro Vigano, Giulio Costantini, Alessia Monti, Massimo Corbo, Carlo Cecchetto, Costanza Papagno
Summary: By studying the sentence comprehension ability of individuals with aphasia and the role of phonological short-term memory (pSTM), it was found that there is a significant interaction between sentence type and pSTM. Participants with lower pSTM scores showed reduced comprehension of center-embedded object relatives and long coordinated sentences. There was also a significant interaction between sentence type and agrammatism, with a lower performance for passives in the agrammatic group.
INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF LANGUAGE & COMMUNICATION DISORDERS
(2023)
Article
Neurosciences
Matthew Walenski, Jennifer E. Mack, M. Marsel Mesulam, Cynthia K. Thompson
Summary: PPA-G is characterized by agrammatic language production and impaired comprehension of noncanonical syntactic structures. The deficits in thematic integration and delayed thematic prediction are consistent with impaired comprehension in agrammatic PPA.
FRONTIERS IN HUMAN NEUROSCIENCE
(2021)
Article
Audiology & Speech-Language Pathology
Samaneh Sazegar Nejad, Fariba Yadegari, Robab Teymouri
Summary: This study aimed to introduce a verb treatment protocol based on Persian syntax for individuals with aphasia, focusing on improving verb production skills. The results showed significant improvements in verb percent production and sentence level skills, suggesting the potential benefits of PVSP for Persian-speaking agrammatic non-fluent patients.
Article
Audiology & Speech-Language Pathology
Farzaneh Dashti, Mozhgan Asadi, Fariba Yadegari
Summary: This study investigated the effect of morphosemantic treatment on verb inflection in Persian-speaking agrammatic participants. The results showed significant improvement in both trained and untrained verb tenses, suggesting that the therapy had a lasting effect.
Article
Audiology & Speech-Language Pathology
Evelina Fedorenko, Rachel Ryskin, Edward Gibson
Summary: This article revisits the economy of effort hypothesis in the context of increasing emphasis on rational and efficient behavior in cognitive science. The authors argue that individuals with non-fluent aphasia tend to simplify their expressions to cope with the increased cost of linguistic output, resulting in agrammatic output. They suggest that while this hypothesis may not explain all cases of agrammatism, it provides a plausible explanation for a subset of expressive aphasia cases.
Article
Audiology & Speech-Language Pathology
Tatiana Karpouzian-Rogers, Rob Hurley, Mustafa Seckin, Stacey Moeller, Nathan Gill, Hui Zhang, Christina Coventry, Matthew Nelson, Sandra Weintraub, Emily Rogalski, M. Marsel Mesulam
Summary: This study found that fixation patterns in individuals with PPA reflect varying levels of word knowledge.
BRAIN AND LANGUAGE
(2022)
Article
Audiology & Speech-Language Pathology
Mohd Azmarul A. Aziz, Mursyida Hassan, Rogayah A. Razak, Maria Garraffa
Editorial Material
Audiology & Speech-Language Pathology
Maria Garraffa, Valantis Fyndanis
Article
Neurosciences
Federico Brusa, Lukas Kretzschmar, Francesca Giulia Magnani, Graham Turner, Maria Garraffa, Anna Sedda
Summary: Body representation refers to the mental representation of motor, sensory, emotional, and semantic information about the physical body, which plays a crucial role in everyday life. While implicit parameters were able to differentiate tango dancers from controls, there were no clear differences identified between sign language users and other groups.
EXPERIMENTAL BRAIN RESEARCH
(2021)
Article
Psychology, Multidisciplinary
Norsofiah Abu Bakar, Giuditta Smith, Rogayah A. Razak, Maria Garraffa
Summary: This study investigates the comprehension and production of Wh- questions in Malay-speaking children with a developmental language disorder. The results show that these children have an asymmetry in the comprehension of Wh- questions, particularly for which NP questions. In terms of production, they prefer using questions with in situ Wh- elements.
FRONTIERS IN PSYCHOLOGY
(2022)
Review
Psychology, Multidisciplinary
Franziska Koder, Curtis Sharma, Sarah Cameron, Maria Garraffa
Summary: This systematic review finds that bilingualism does not have consistent positive or negative effects on attention deficits in adults or children with ADHD. The current research suggests that individuals with ADHD and their families need not worry about learning additional languages negatively impacting their functioning or cognitive performance.
FRONTIERS IN PSYCHOLOGY
(2022)
Book Review
Education, Special
Maria Garraffa
CHILD LANGUAGE TEACHING & THERAPY
(2023)
Article
Audiology & Speech-Language Pathology
Giuditta Smith, Charlotte Kershaw, Valentina Brunetto, Maria Garraffa
Summary: Agrammatic aphasia is associated with impairments in functional words and complex sentences. Speech errors in people with aphasia (PWA) are selectively manifested in omissions of functional words, particularly in tense inflection on verbs. Investigations of the inflectional domain in PWA are rare in languages like English where tense and agreement are difficult to disentangle. This study introduces a novel approach using copula omission of the verb to be to disentangle inflectional errors in English.
Editorial Material
Psychology, Multidisciplinary
Maria Garraffa, Maria Teresa Guasti, Theodoros Marinis, Gary Morgan
FRONTIERS IN PSYCHOLOGY
(2023)
Article
Linguistics
Valentina Brunetto, Charlotte Kershaw, Maria Garraffa
Summary: This paper presents evidence that shows a convergence between child language acquisition and Broca's aphasia in terms of copula omission. The study finds that people with Broca's aphasia tend to omit copulas only in aspectual predicates, which is similar to the findings in child English reported by Becker (2002). The grammatical property of aspectual predicates is a stronger predictor of copula omission compared to other non-grammatical factors such as predicate length or utterance length. The authors argue that grammatical accounts based on the cartographic location and 'treepruning'/'growing trees' of Tense provide a better explanation for the similarities in omission patterns in these two populations.
GLOSSA-A JOURNAL OF GENERAL LINGUISTICS
(2023)
Article
Multidisciplinary Sciences
Chiara Visentin, Matteo Pellegatti, Maria Garraffa, Alberto Di Domenico, Nicola Prodi
Summary: This study examines the role of individual characteristics in primary school children's listening comprehension tasks. The results show that the presence of a two-talker masker impairs children's accuracy, effort, and motivation. Reading comprehension supports task accuracy, inhibitory control moderates the effect of listening condition on listening effort measures, and noise sensitivity also affects perceived listening effort. Understanding the relationship between individual characteristics and classroom sound environment is important for designing spaces that promote students' well-being and support their learning performance.
SCIENTIFIC REPORTS
(2023)
Article
Linguistics
Giuditta Smith, Roberta Spelorzi, Antonella Sorace, Maria Garraffa
Summary: This study investigates the behavior of clitic production and nonword repetition in mature language systems in bilingual settings, providing benchmark data on heritage Italian. The findings suggest that clitic pronouns are vulnerable, while nonword repetition is a potential marker for evaluating language competence in heritage speakers of Italian.
Article
Linguistics
Euan Dickson, Laura Manderson, Mateo Obregon, Maria Garraffa
Summary: This study validates a reading assessment for Scottish Gaelic speakers and compares the reading abilities of Gaelic/English bilingual children and monolingual English children, finding no significant differences in reading performance between the two groups, with bilingual children showing superior performance in some linguistic tasks.
Article
Psychology, Developmental
Maria Garraffa, Francesca Smart, Mateo Obregon
Summary: The study found that classroom-based syntactic training on passive sentences significantly improved children's abilities to produce passive sentences, indicating the benefits of rich language exposure in language learning and demonstrating the quick dynamic adaptation of children's implicit learning mechanisms to language exposure activities.
LANGUAGE LEARNING AND DEVELOPMENT
(2021)
Article
Psychology, Multidisciplinary
Maria Garraffa, Mateo Obregon, Bernadette O'Rourke, Antonella Sorace
FRONTIERS IN PSYCHOLOGY
(2020)
Article
Psychology, Multidisciplinary
Mohd Azmarul A. Aziz, Rogayah A. Razak, Maria Garraffa
BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES
(2020)
Article
Linguistics
Matthew Walenski, Thomas Sostarics, M. Marsel Mesulam, Cynthia K. Thompson
Summary: This study investigated adjective production in patients with different types of aphasia and healthy controls. The findings showed that agrammatic aphasia patients produced significantly fewer attributive adjectives compared to the control group, while other patient groups were similar to the control group. Furthermore, there was a significant correlation between the rate of producing attributive adjectives and impaired production of complex syntactic structure sentences in agrammatic aphasia patients. Analysis of the lexical characteristics of the produced adjectives revealed consistent patterns with the language profile of each group.
JOURNAL OF NEUROLINGUISTICS
(2024)
Article
Linguistics
Xi Chen, Diana Sidtis
Summary: This study investigates the ability of Mandarin-speaking individuals with PD to convey contrastive stress in production and perceive these contrasts in listening. Results show that individuals with PD have difficulty in producing contrastive stress, but their ability to perceive these contrasts is relatively preserved.
JOURNAL OF NEUROLINGUISTICS
(2024)
Article
Linguistics
Dagmar Divjak, Hui Sun, Petar Milin
Summary: This study explores the feasibility of using Heart Rate Variability (HRV) as an indicator to assess implicit language knowledge, and finds that cardiovascular response can reflect the degree of grammatical errors. The results reveal the intricate relationship between physiology and cognition, and provide new possibilities for assessing language knowledge in natural and authentic settings.
JOURNAL OF NEUROLINGUISTICS
(2024)
Article
Linguistics
Xiangyang Zhang, Wenqi Cai, Min Dang, Rui Zhang, Xiaojuan Wang, Jianfeng Yang
Summary: This study investigates the brain mechanisms of sub-lexical semantic processing and its interaction with lexical-semantic processing in visual word reading. The results reveal the neural bases involved in these processes and provide insights for understanding semantic processing in reading.
JOURNAL OF NEUROLINGUISTICS
(2024)
Article
Linguistics
Tala Noufi, Maor Zeev-Wolf
Summary: This study aimed to test the effect of left-hand muscle contractions on metaphor comprehension in adolescents, and compare the processing of conventional and novel metaphors between adolescents and adults. The results showed that left-hand muscle contractions enhanced metaphor comprehension, but over-activation of the right hemisphere decreased the ability to process unrelated expressions. Additionally, adolescents were more accurate in processing novel metaphors, possibly due to their reliance on coarse semantic coding.
JOURNAL OF NEUROLINGUISTICS
(2024)
Review
Linguistics
Yasin Kargar, Milad Jalilian
Summary: This article provides a systematic review of how the brain processes language and the functions of white matter tracts related to language. It offers valuable guidance for neuroclinicians and neurosurgeons in diagnosing language impairments and planning treatments.
JOURNAL OF NEUROLINGUISTICS
(2024)
Article
Linguistics
Mohamad El Haj, Dimitrios Kapogiannis, Claire Boutoleau-Bretonniere
Summary: This study assessed linguistic processing in patients with behavioral variant frontotemporal dementia (bvFTD) using pupillometry. The results showed that patients with bvFTD had smaller pupil size during verbal fluency tasks and counting compared to control participants. However, larger pupil size was observed during verbal fluency tasks compared to counting in both groups. Moreover, patients with bvFTD performed poorer in verbal fluency tasks compared to control participants.
JOURNAL OF NEUROLINGUISTICS
(2024)
Article
Linguistics
Vanessa Harwood, Adrian Garcia-Sierra, Raphael Dias, Emily Jelfs, Alisa Baron
Summary: This study investigates the phonological sensitivity to native and nonnative speech syllables and its relationship with English word reading abilities in 6-8 year-old monolingual English-speaking children. The results suggest that speech perception of native contrasts recorded in left temporal electrode sites is linked to English word reading abilities.
JOURNAL OF NEUROLINGUISTICS
(2024)
