Aphasia is a complex disorder, frequent after stroke (with an incidence of 38%), with a detailed pathophysiological characterization. Effective approaches are crucial for devising an efficient rehabilitative strategy, in order to address the everyday life and professional disability. Several rehabilitative procedures are based on psycholinguistic, cognitive, psychosocial or pragmatic approaches, including amongst those with a neurobehavioral approach the Melodic Intonation Therapy (MIT). Van Eeckhout’s adaptation of MIT to French language (Melodic-Rhythmic Therapy: MRT) has implemented the training strategy by adding (...) a rhythmic structure reproducing French prosody. The purpose of this study was to adapt MRT rehabilitation procedures to Italian language and to verify its efficacy in a group of six chronic patients (five males) with severe non-fluent aphasia and without specific aphasic treatments during the previous 9 months. The patients were treated 4 days a week for 16 weeks, with sessions of 30–40 min. They were assessed 6 months after the end of the treatment (follow-up). The patients showed a significant improvement at the Aachener Aphasie Test (AAT) in different fields of spontaneous speech, with superimposable results at the follow-up. Albeit preliminary, these findings support the use of MRT in the rehabilitation after stroke. Specifically, MRT seems to benefit from its stronger structure than the available stimulation-facilitation procedures and allows a better quantification of the rehabilitation efficacy. (shrink)

This article examines Nietzsche’s evaluations of silence and laughter as Pyrrho’s two responses to the dilemma caused by doubts about truth in aphorism 213 of ‘The Wanderer and His Shadow’ (WS 213). Contrary to the common belief that speechlessness leads Pyrrho to tranquillity (ataraxia), in WS 213, it is a symptom of his intellectual impotence caused by logical impasse. Silence proves to be subject to the same traps as speeches. In his later period, Nietzsche deems Pyrrho’s impotent will to truth (...) and pursuit of tranquility nihilism. He contends that Pyrrho’s impotence triggers his ressentiment of dogmatists and labels Pyrrho as a Greek Buddhist in unpublished sections writtenin 1888. For Nietzsche, the only antidote to dogmatism and even nihilism is laughter, a way of overcoming Pyrrho’s obstinate will to truth embodied in the form of logical argumentation. Nietzsche seems to attribute the Democritean cheerfulness (euthumia) to Pyrrho, a manifestation of healthy skepticism and a dynamicconstellation of drives that embrace and overcome suffering. In Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Nietzsche claims that laughter is a sign of recovery from a spirit of excessive seriousness, which is embodied by the free-spirited Zarathustra, an antipode to Pyrrho ‘the fanatic of mistrust.’. (shrink)

This article examines Nietzsche’s evaluations of silence and laughter as Pyrrho’s two responses to the dilemma caused by doubts about truth in aphorism 213 of ‘The Wanderer and His Shadow’ (WS 213). Contrary to the common belief that speechlessness leads Pyrrho to tranquillity (ataraxia), in WS 213, it is a symptom of his intellectual impotence caused by logical impasse. Silence proves to be subject to the same traps as speeches. In his later period, Nietzsche deems Pyrrho’s impotent will to truth (...) and pursuit of tranquility nihilism. He contends that Pyrrho’s impotence triggers his ressentiment of dogmatists and labels Pyrrho as a Greek Buddhist in unpublished sections writtenin 1888. For Nietzsche, the only antidote to dogmatism and even nihilism is laughter, a way of overcoming Pyrrho’s obstinate will to truth embodied in the form of logical argumentation. Nietzsche seems to attribute the Democritean cheerfulness (euthumia) to Pyrrho, a manifestation of healthy skepticism and a dynamicconstellation of drives that embrace and overcome suffering. In Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Nietzsche claims that laughter is a sign of recovery from a spirit of excessive seriousness, which is embodied by the free-spirited Zarathustra, an antipode to Pyrrho ‘the fanatic of mistrust.’. (shrink)

Jerry Fodor's arguments for a language of thought are largely theoretical. Is there any empirical evidence that supports the existence of LOT? There is. Research on Global Aphasia supports the existence of LOT. In this paper, I discuss this evidence and why it supports Fodor's theory that there is a language of thought.

Can sentence comprehension impairments in aphasia be explained by difficulties arising from dependency completion processes in parsing? Two distinct models of dependency completion difficulty are investigated, the Lewis and Vasishth (2005) activation-based model and the direct-access model (DA; 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-based model furnishes a somewhat better quantitative fit to the data than the DA. Model comparisons using Bayes factors show that, assuming an activation-based model, intermittent deficiencies may be the best explanation for the cause of impairments in IWAs, although slowed syntax and lexical delayed access may also play a role. This is the first computational evaluation of different models of dependency completion using data from impaired and unimpaired individuals. This evaluation develops a systematic approach that can be used to quantitatively compare the predictions of competing models of language processing. (shrink)

An elaboration on some loose ends in Grodzinsky's analysis shows that data from the field of aphasia contribute to the formulation of theoretical linguistic principles, and provides extra arguments in favor of Grodzinsky's claim that linguistic theory is the best tool for the investigation of aphasia. This illustrates and emphasizes the importance of communication between researchers in the field of (Broca's) aphasia and of theoretical linguistics.

We present a computational evaluation of three hypotheses about sources of deficit in sentence comprehension in aphasia: slowed processing, intermittent deficiency, and resource reduction. The ACT-R based Lewis and Vasishth model is used to implement these three proposals. Slowed processing is implemented as slowed execution time of parse steps; intermittent deficiency as increased random noise in activation of elements in memory; and resource reduction as reduced spreading activation. As data, we considered subject vs. object relative sentences, presented in a (...) self-paced listening modality to 56 individuals with aphasia and 46 matched controls. The participants heard the sentences and carried out a picture verification task to decide on an interpretation of the sentence. These response accuracies are used to identify the best parameters that correspond to the three hypotheses mentioned above. We show that controls have more tightly clustered parameter values than IWA; specifically, compared to controls, among IWA there are more individuals with slow parsing times, high noise, and low spreading activation. We find that individual IWA show differential amounts of deficit along the three dimensions of slowed processing, intermittent deficiency, and resource reduction, overall, there is evidence for all three sources of deficit playing a role, and IWA have a more variable range of parameter values than controls. An important implication is that it may be meaningless to talk about sources of deficit with respect to an abstract verage IWA; the focus should be on the individual's differential degrees of deficit along different dimensions, and on understanding the causes of variability in deficit between participants. (shrink)

To be able to read a precise and elaborate self-observation by someone who suffered for an extended period of time from that language affliction that has been called aphasia for more than one hundred years is such an extremely unusual occurrence that one would think such a work would attract the attention of all those persons, whether specialists or enlightened amateurs, interested in questions of language and in its eventual pathological aspects.

_Linguistics and Aphasia_ is a major study of recent developments in applying psycholinguistics and pragmatics to the study of acquired language disorders and their remediation. Psycholinguistic analyses of aphasia interpret disorders in terms of damaged modules and processes within what was once a normal language system. These analyses have progressed to the point that they now routinely provide a model-based rationalefor planning patient therapy. Through a series of case studies, the authors show how the psycholinguistic analysis of aphasia (...) can be assessed for its effectiveness in clinical practice. Pragmatic approaches to the study of aphasia are of more recent origin. Ruth Lesser and Lesley Milroy evaluate their considerable significance to the study of aphasia and their relevance to practical issues of diagnosis and treatment. Controversial analysis, in particular, offers a fruitful and productive framework within which to assess the functional adequacy of the language used by aphasic speakers in everyday contexts. (shrink)

Aphasia is an acquired impairment of language functions resulting from a brain lesion. It is usually accompanied by deficits in non-linguistic cognitive processes. This study aimed to investigate in patients with aphasia the complex interrelationships between selected cognitive functions: auditory speech comprehension, working memory, and temporal information processing in the millisecond time range. Thirty right-handed subjects aged from 27 to 82 years suffering from post-stroke aphasia participated in the study. Verbal working memory and spatial working memory were (...) assessed with: a receptive verbal test and the Corsi Block-Tapping Test, respectively. Both these WM tests used the forward tasks and backward tasks. Auditory comprehension was assessed by receptive language tests, and TIP efficiency was assessed by auditory perception of temporal order in the millisecond time range. We observed better performance of forward WM tasks than backward ones, independently of the type of material used. Furthermore, the severity of auditory comprehension impairment correlated with the efficiency on both forward and backward VWM tasks and the backward SWM task. Further analysis revealed that TIP plays a crucial role only in the latter task. These results indicate the divergent pattern of interactions between WM and TIP depending on the type of WM tasks. Level of verbal competency appeared to play an important role in both VWM tasks, whereas TIP appeared to be important for SWM, but only on the backward task. (shrink)

Caplan & Waters's neuropsychological evidence for two types of verbal working memory rests entirely on a very restricted definition of “syntactic complexity,” one in terms of word order. This opens the possibility that the dissociation they observe relates to the differential use of word-order strategies rather than to the structure of verbal working memory.

People with aphasia use gestures not only to communicate relevant content but also to compensate for their verbal limitations. The Sketch Model (De Ruiter, 2000) assumes a flexible relationship between gesture and speech with the possibility of a compensatory use of the two modalities. In the successor of the Sketch Model, the AR‐Sketch Model (De Ruiter, 2017), the relationship between iconic gestures and speech is no longer assumed to be flexible and compensatory, but instead iconic gestures are assumed to (...) express information that is redundant to speech. In this study, we evaluated the contradictory predictions of the Sketch Model and the AR‐Sketch Model using data collected from people with aphasia as well as a group of people without language impairment. We only found compensatory use of gesture in the people with aphasia, whereas the people without language impairments made very little compensatory use of gestures. Hence, the people with aphasia gestured according to the prediction of the Sketch Model, whereas the people without language impairment did not. We conclude that aphasia fundamentally changes the relationship of gesture and speech. (shrink)

Investigating instances where lexical selection fails can lead to deeper insights into the cognitive machinery and architecture supporting successful word retrieval and speech production. In this paper, we used a multiplex lexical network approach that combines semantic and phonological similarities among words to model the structure of the mental lexicon. Network measures at different levels of analysis (degree, network distance, and closeness centrality) were used to investigate the influence of network structure on picture naming accuracy and errors by people with (...) Anomic, Broca's, Conduction, and Wernicke's aphasia. Our results reveal that word retrieval is influenced by the multiplex lexical network structure in at least two ways—(a) the accuracy of production and error type on incorrect productions were influenced by the degree and closeness centrality of the target word, and (b) error type also varied in terms of network distance between the target word and produced error word. Taken together, the analyses demonstrate that network science techniques, particularly the use of the multiplex lexical network to simultaneously represent semantic and phonological relationships among words, reveal how the structure of the mental lexicon influences language processes beyond traditionally examined psycholinguistic variables. We propose a framework for how the multiplex lexical network approach allows for understanding the influence of mental lexicon structure on word retrieval processes, with an eye toward a better understanding of the nature of clinical impairments, like aphasia. (shrink)

The role of nonverbal communication in patients with post-stroke language impairment (aphasia) is not yet fully understood. This study investigated how aphasic patients perceive and produce co-speech gestures during face-to-face interaction, and whether distinct brain lesions would predict the frequency of spontaneous co-speech gesturing. For this purpose, we recorded samples of conversations in patients with aphasia and healthy participants. Gesture perception was assessed by means of a head-mounted eye-tracking system, and the produced co-speech gestures were coded according to (...) a linguistic classification system. The main results are that meaning-laden gestures (e.g., iconic gestures representing object shapes) are more likely to attract visual attention than meaningless hand movements, and that patients with aphasia are more likely to fixate co-speech gestures overall than healthy participants. This implies that patients with aphasia may benefit from the multimodal information provided by co-speech gestures. On the level of co-speech gesture production, we found that patients with damage to the anterior part of the arcuate fasciculus showed a higher frequency of meaning-laden gestures. This area lies in close vicinity to the premotor cortex and is considered to be important for speech production. This may suggest that the use of meaning-laden gestures depends on the integrity of patients’ speech production abilities. (shrink)

People with post-stroke motor aphasia know what they would like to say but cannot express it through motor pathways due to disruption of cortical circuits. We present a theoretical background for our hypothesized connection between attention and aphasia rehabilitation and suggest why in this context, Brain-Computer Interfaces (BCI) use might be beneficial for patients diagnosed with aphasia. Not only could BCI technology provide a communication tool, it might support neuronal plasticity by activating language circuits and thereby boost (...) aphasia recovery. However, stroke may lead to heterogeneous symptoms that might hinder BCI use which is why the feasibility of this approach needed to be investigated first. In this pilot study, we included five participants diagnosed with post-stroke aphasia. Four participants were initially unable to use the visual P300 speller paradigm. By adjusting the paradigm to their needs, all participants could successfully learn to use the speller for communication with accuracies up to 100%. We describe necessary adjustments to the paradigm and present future steps to further investigate the here presented approach. (shrink)

Despite the ubiquity of inner speech in our mental lives, methods for objectively assessing inner speech capacities remain underdeveloped. The most common means of assessing inner speech is to present participants with tasks requiring them to silently judge whether two words rhyme. We developed a version of this task to assess the inner speech of a population of patients with aphasia and corresponding language production deficits. As expected, patients’ performance on the silent rhyming task was severely impaired relative to (...) controls. More surprisingly, however, patients’ performance on this task did not correlate with their performance on a variety of other standard tests of overt language abilities. In particular, patients who were generally unimpaired in their abilities to overtly name objects during confrontation naming tasks, and who could reliably judge when two words spoken to them rhymed, were still severely impaired (relative to controls) at completing the silent rhyme task. This seems to suggest that inner speech was more severely impaired in these patients than outer speech. However, these results should also cause us to critically reflect on the relation between inner speech and silent rhyme judgments more generally. (shrink)

Aphasia is a language disorder that occurs after a stroke and impairs listening, speaking, reading, writing, and calculation skills. Patients with post-stroke aphasia in Japan are increasing due to population aging and the advancement of medical treatment. Opportunities for adequate speech therapy in chronic stroke are limited due to time constraints. Recent studies have reported that intensive speech therapy for a short period of time or continuous speech therapy using high-tech equipment, including speech applications (apps, can improve (...) class='Hi'>aphasia even in the chronic stage. However, its underlying mechanism for improving language function and its effect on other cognitive functions remains unclear. In the present study, we investigated whether intensive speech therapy using a newly developed speech support app could improve aphasia and other cognitive functions in patients with chronic stroke. Furthermore, we examined whether it can alter the brain network related to language and other cortical areas. Thus, we conducted a prospective, single-comparison study to examine the effects of a new speech support app on language and cognitive functions and used resting state functional MRI (rs-fMRI) regions of interest (ROI) to ROI analysis to determine changes in the related brain network. Two patients with chronic stroke participated in this study. They used the independent speech therapy system to perform eight sets of 20 randomly presented words/time (taking approximately 20 min), for 8 consecutive weeks. Their language, higher cognitive functions including attention function, and rs-fMRI, were evaluated before and after the rehabilitation intervention using the speech support app. Both patients had improved pronunciation, daily conversational situations, and attention. The rs-fMRI analysis showed increased functional connectivity of brain regions associated with language and attention related areas. Our results show that intensive speech therapy using this speech support app can improve language and attention functions even in the chronic stage of stroke, and may be a useful tool for patients with aphasia. In the future, we will conduct longitudinal studies with larger numbers of patients, which we hope will continue the trends seen in the current study, and provide even stronger evidence for the usefulness of this new speech support app. (shrink)

n the philosophy of language, there are many ongoing controversies that stem from relying too heavily on an utterance-based framework. The traditional approach of rigidly partitioning the utterance’s meaning into what is grammatically determined from what is not may not fully capture the complexity of human language in real-world communicative contexts. To address this issue, we suggest shifting focus toward a broader analysis level encompassing conversations and discourses. From this broader perspective, it is possible to obtain a more integrated view (...) of how linguistic and extra-linguistic aspects dynamically interact and thus reconsider semantics/pragmatics dichotomy as complementary dimensions. Meaning is not confined to linguistic structures alone but emerges from the dynamic interplay of words, sociocultural knowledge, discursive situations, and psychological dispositions of speakers. Substantiating this perspective calls for embracing an interdisciplinary approach that synthesizes research from various domains, including linguistics, cognitive psychology, and philosophy of language. This paper focuses on a particularly compelling case study: aphasia. Speeches produced by individuals with aphasia represent complex scenarios where the balance between linguistic and extra-linguistic aspects is notably compromised, often to the former’s detriment. Aphasics’ productions represent a vivid example of how the interpretation of speeches can be far from involving fixed and static operations. Instead, it entails continuously reallocating cognitive resources toward the most readily available and accessible sources for the speakers. This case study ultimately demonstrates that the influence of semantic and pragmatic processes in shaping and conveying meanings displays remarkable adaptability, continuously adjusting to the ever changing demands placed upon speakers. -/- . (shrink)

Persons with aphasia suffer from a loss of communication ability as a consequence of a brain injury. A small strand of research indicates effec- tiveness of dialogic interventions for communication development for persons with aphasia, but a vast amount of research studies shows its effectiveness for other target groups. In this paper, we describe the main parts of the hitherto technological development of an application named Dialogica that is (i) aimed at facilitating increased communicative participation in dialogic settings (...) for persons with aphasia and other communication disorders, (ii) based on comput- er game technology as well as on theory in dialogic education and argumenta- tion theory, and (iii) designed for mobile devices with larger screens. (shrink)

Understanding between care providers and patients with stroke and aphasia: a phenomenological hermeneutic inquiryThe present study illuminates the understanding in communication between formal care providers and patients with stroke and aphasia. Five care providers and three such patients participated in the study. Video recordings were made during conversations about pictures (n = 15), and the care providers were also interviewed (n = 15) after the video‐recorded conversations. A phenomenological hermeneutic method of interpretation of the interview text was used. (...) The findings showed that a range of conditions for ‘understanding and being understood’ in the communication on the part of the care providers exists. These different conditions are:lackingboth knowledge and understanding;havingknowledge but not necessarily accompanied by understanding; andbeingin understanding. Within the condition ‘being in understanding’, the care providers create a feeling of at‐homeness in a relaxed atmosphere and thus have the opportunity to be in ‘understanding and being understood’ together with the patient. The condition ‘being in understanding’ appears in connection with the care providers’ creating of a ‘calm liturgy of caring’ by mediating humility and calm vitality affects to the patients, and further, when needed, being present on the level of mystery, i.e. caring communion. (shrink)

Studies show bilingualism entails an advantage in cognitive control tasks. There is evidence of a bilingual advantage in the context of aphasia, resulting in better cognitive outcomes and recovery in bilingual persons with aphasia compared to monolingual peers. This bilingual advantage also results in structural changes in the right hemisphere gray matter. Very few studies have examined the so-called bilingual advantage by reference to specific anomia therapy efficacy. This study aims to compare the effect of French-Phonological Component Analysis (...) (Fr-PCA) in monolinguals and bilingual persons with aphasia, both at the linguistic and cognitive control level, and to examine the structural impact of left hemisphere lesion location and right hemisphere structural data. Eight participants with chronic aphasia received Fr-PCA for a total of 15 h over 5 weeks. The results showed improved accuracy for treated words and generalization to untreated items and discourse in both groups, and improved Flanker task performance for some participants. Bilingual participants improved more than monolinguals for picture-naming tasks and narrative discourse. Damage to the left postcentral gyrus and the middle frontal gyrus was associated with less therapy-induced improvement. Additionally, left hemisphere damage to the inferior parietal gyrus and postcentral gyrus was associated with reduced cognitive control pre-therapy. Undamaged right hemisphere cortical thicknesses were significantly different between groups; the inferior frontal gyrus and the middle frontal gyrus were greater for the bilingual participants and correlated with cognitive control skills. These results suggest a bilingual advantage in anomia recovery following Fr-PCA, potentially resulting from enhanced cognitive control abilities that could be supported by right hemisphere neural reserve. (shrink)

If you were trained as a philosopher and were suddenly bereft of speech, writing and reading, how would you feel? Would you feel a sensation of death, or Nirvana, or unconscious or conscious loss of control? Would you feel scientifically objective, or full of Aristotelian wonder? Would you think you were having a supernatural experience?

Can sentence comprehension impairments in aphasia be explained by difficulties arising from dependency completion processes in parsing? Two distinct models of dependency completion difficulty are investigated, the Lewis and Vasishth (2005) activation‐based model and the direct‐access model (DA; 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‐based model furnishes a somewhat better quantitative fit to the data than the DA. Model comparisons using Bayes factors show that, assuming an activation‐based model, intermittent deficiencies may be the best explanation for the cause of impairments in IWAs, although slowed syntax and lexical delayed access may also play a role. This is the first computational evaluation of different models of dependency completion using data from impaired and unimpaired individuals. This evaluation develops a systematic approach that can be used to quantitatively compare the predictions of competing models of language processing. (shrink)

People with aphasia use gestures not only to communicate relevant content but also to compensate for their verbal limitations. The Sketch Model (De Ruiter, 2000) assumes a flexible relationship between gesture and speech with the possibility of a compensatory use of the two modalities. In the successor of the Sketch Model, the AR‐Sketch Model (De Ruiter, 2017), the relationship between iconic gestures and speech is no longer assumed to be flexible and compensatory, but instead iconic gestures are assumed to (...) express information that is redundant to speech. In this study, we evaluated the contradictory predictions of the Sketch Model and the AR‐Sketch Model using data collected from people with aphasia as well as a group of people without language impairment. We only found compensatory use of gesture in the people with aphasia, whereas the people without language impairments made very little compensatory use of gestures. Hence, the people with aphasia gestured according to the prediction of the Sketch Model, whereas the people without language impairment did not. We conclude that aphasia fundamentally changes the relationship of gesture and speech. (shrink)

This commentary focuses on the larger implications of Grodzinsky's hypothesis. Although Grodzinsky argues persuasively that the syntactic comprehension deficits in Broca's aphasia involve mainly an inability to comprehend sentences requiring a transformational movement of phrasal constituents, his larger claim for a distinct and dedicated “language organ” in the left hemisphere is much less tenable.

In recent years, language has been shown to play a number of important cognitive roles over and above the communication of thoughts. One hypothesis gaining support is that language facilitates thought about abstract categories, such as democracy or prediction. To test this proposal, a novel set of semantic memory task trials, designed for assessing abstract thought non-linguistically, were normed for levels of abstractness. The trials were rated as more or less abstract to the degree that answering them required the participant (...) to abstract away from both perceptual features and common setting associations corresponding to the target image. The normed materials were then used with a population of people with aphasia to assess the relationship of abstract thought to language. While the language-impaired group with aphasia showed lower overall accuracy and longer response times than controls in general, of special note is that their response times were significantly longer as a function of a trial’s degree of abstractness. Further, the aphasia group’s response times in reporting their degree of confidence (a separate, metacognitive measure) were negatively correlated with their language production abilities, with lower language scores predicting longer metacognitive response times. These results provide some support for the hypothesis that language is an important aid to abstract thought and to metacognition about abstract thought. (shrink)

We investigated spectral resting-state EEG in persons with chronic stroke-induced aphasia to determine its reliability, sensitivity, and relationship to functional behaviors. Resting-state EEG has not yet been characterized in this population and was selected given the demonstrated potential of resting-state investigations using other neuroimaging techniques to guide clinical decision-making. Controls and persons with chronic stroke-induced aphasia completed two EEG recording sessions, separated by approximately 1 month, as well as behavioral assessments of language, sensorimotor, and cognitive domains. Power in (...) the classic frequency bands was examined via spectral analysis of resting-state EEG data. Results suggest that power in the theta, alpha, and beta bands is reliable for use as a repeated measure. Significantly greater theta and lower beta power was observed in persons with aphasia than controls. Finally, in PWAs theta power negatively correlated with performance on a discourse informativeness measure, while alpha and beta power positively correlated with performance on the same measure. This indicates that spectral rsEEG slowing observed in PWAs in the chronic stage is pathological and suggests a possible avenue for directly altering brain activation to improve behavioral function. Taken together, these results suggest that spectral resting-state EEG holds promise for sensitive measurement of functioning and change in persons with chronic aphasia. Future studies investigating the utility of these measures as biomarkers of frank or latent aphasic deficits and treatment response in chronic stroke-induced aphasia are warranted. (shrink)

This article proposes an analysis of the gestural production of people suffering from fluent or non-fluent aphasia in comparison with the gestures performed by speakers not suffering from any language disorder. The interest of such a study is twofold: firstly, it allows a better understanding of what happens to gestures during the numerous speech dysfluencies caused by the speech impairment. Among other things, it sheds light on the links between speech and gestures in multimodal face-to-face interaction. Despite the profusion (...) of work on aphasia, very little is still known about the characteristics of the gestures performed spontaneously by aphasic people. The study presented here is based on video examples from the AphasiaBank corpus to illustrate the specific features of the speech and gestures of atypical speakers and gives a more detailed description of the gestural production of people with aphasia. This knowledge can inform post-stroke rehabilitation procedures that rely on some form of multimodal speech therapy in order to adapt to the various communication needs of the patients. (shrink)

Background: Neurotypical young adults show task-based modulation and stability of their eye movements across tasks. This study aimed to determine whether persons with aphasia (PWA) modulate their eye movements and show stability across tasks similarly to control participants. Methods: Forty-eight PWA and age-matched control participants completed four eye-tracking tasks: scene search, scene memorization, text-reading, and pseudo-reading. Results: Main effects of task emerged for mean fixation duration, saccade amplitude, and standard deviations of each, demonstrating task-based modulation of eye movements. Group (...) by task interactions indicated that PWA produced shorter fixations relative to controls. This effect was most pronounced for scene memorization and for individuals who recently suffered a stroke. PWA produced longer fixations, shorter saccades, and less variable eye movements in reading tasks compared to controls. Three-way interactions of group, aphasia subtype, and task also emerged. Text-reading and scene memorization were particularly effective at distinguishing aphasia subtype. Persons with anomic aphasia showed a reduction in reading saccade amplitudes relative to their respective control group and other PWA. Persons with conduction/Wernicke’s aphasia produced shorter scene memorization fixations relative to controls or PWA of other subtypes, suggesting a memorization specific effect. Positive correlations across most tasks emerged for fixation duration and did not significantly differ between controls and PWA. Conclusions: PWA generally produced shorter fixations and smaller saccades relative to controls particularly in scene memorization and text-reading respectively. The effect was most pronounced recently after a stroke. Selectively in reading tasks, PWA produced longer fixations and shorter saccades relative to controls, consistent with reading difficulty. PWA showed task-based modulation of eye movements, though the pattern of results was somewhat abnormal relative to controls. All subtypes of PWA also demonstrated task-based modulation of eye movements. However, persons with anomic aphasia showed reduced modulation of saccade amplitude and smaller reading saccades, possibly to improve reading comprehension. Controls and PWA generally produced stabile fixation durations across tasks and did not differ in their relationship across tasks. Overall, these results suggest there is potential to differentiate among PWA with varying subtypes and from controls using eye movement measures of task-based modulation, especially reading and scene memorization tasks. (shrink)

Three types of problems are raised in this commentary: On the linguistic side, we emphasize the importance of an appropriate definition of the different domains of linguistics. This is needed to define the domains (lexicon-syntax-semantics) to which transformational relations apply. We then question the concept of Broca's aphasia as a “functional” syndrome, associated with a specific lesion. Finally, we discuss evidence from functional brain imaging. The breadth and potential impact of such evidence has grown considerably in the last few (...) years, expanding our knowledge of the multiple contributions of the “Broca's region” to phonological, lexical-semantic, and syntactic processing. “Lumping” under diagnostic labels, such as Broca's aphasia, should be replaced by more detailed linguistic and neurological descriptions of the clinical cases. (shrink)

Individuals with agrammatic Broca's aphasia experience difficulty when processing reversible non-canonical sentences. Different accounts have been proposed to explain this phenomenon. The Trace Deletion account attributes this deficit to an impairment in syntactic representations, whereas others propose that the underlying structural representations are unimpaired, but sentence comprehension is affected by processing deficits, such as slow lexical activation, reduction in memory resources, slowed processing and/or intermittent deficiency, among others. We test the claims of two processing accounts, slowed processing and intermittent (...) deficiency, and two versions of the Trace Deletion Hypothesis, in a computational framework for sentence processing implemented in ACT-R. The assumption of slowed processing is operationalized as slow procedural memory, so that each processing action is performed slower than normal, and intermittent deficiency as extra noise in the procedural memory, so that the parsing steps are more noisy than normal. We operationalize the TDH as an absence of trace information in the parse tree. To test the predictions of the models implementing these theories, we use the data from a German sentence—picture matching study reported in Hanne, Sekerina, Vasishth, Burchert, and De Bleser. The data consist of offline and online measures. From among the models considered, the model assuming that both slowed processing and intermittent deficiency are present emerges as the best model of sentence processing difficulty in aphasia. The modeling of individual differences suggests that, if we assume that patients have both slowed processing and intermittent deficiency, they have them in differing degrees. (shrink)

Bloom's book underscores the importance of specifying the role of words and grammar in cognition. We propose that the cognitive power of language lies in the lexicon rather than grammar. We suggest ways in which studies involving children and patients with aphasia can provide insights into the basis of abstract cognition in the domain of number and mathematics.