Electrophysiology of Prosodic and Lexical-Semantic Processing During Sentence Comprehension in Aphasia

Publication date: Available online 20 October 2017 Source:Neuropsychologia Author(s): Shannon M. Sheppard, Tracy Love, Katherine J. Midgley, Phillip J. Holcomb, Lewis P. Shapiro Event-related potentials (ERPs) were used to examine how individuals with aphasia and a group of age-matched controls use prosody and thematic fit information in sentences containing temporary syntactic ambiguities. Two groups of individuals with aphasia were investigated; those demonstrating relatively good sentence comprehension whose primary language difficulty is anomia (Individuals with Anomic Aphasia (IWAA)), and those who demonstrate impaired sentence comprehension whose primary diagnosis is Broca's aphasia (Individuals with Broca's Aphasia (IWBA). The stimuli had early closure syntactic structure and contained a temporary early closure (correct) / late closure (incorrect) syntactic ambiguity. The prosody was manipulated to either be congruent or incongruent, and the temporarily ambiguous NP was also manipulated to either be a plausible or an implausible continuation for the subordinate verb (e.g., "While the band played the song/the beer pleased all the customers."). It was hypothesized that an implausible NP in sentences with incongruent prosody may provide the parser with a plausibility cue that could be used to predict syntactic structure. The individuals with aphasia were broken into a group of High Comprehenders and a group of Low Comprehenders depending on the severity of their se...

Source: Neuropsychologia - October 20, 2017 Category: Neurology Source Type: research