Tags:Agrammatism, Aphasia, Asyntactic comprehension, Sentence processing and Word monitoring
Abstract:
The findings of prior research on asyntactic comprehension vary depending on the experimental task and syntactic contrasts used in the study. The main goal of this research is to delineate the nature of asyntactic comprehension deficits in individuals with agrammatic production. The study recruited three groups: agrammatic production (N=9), severity-matched non-agrammatic aphasic individuals (N=7), and neurotypical adults (N=9). Participants engaged in two computer-based tasks (modeled after Faroqi-Shah et al., 2020): word monitoring, which is sensitive to online detection of syntactic violations, and auditory sentence judgment, which measured offline decisions about sentence well-formedness. The stimuli consisted of sentences with and without morphosyntactic (tense and word category) violations and semantic violations. The results of group analyses (Kruskal-Wallis test) showed impaired sentence judgment in agrammatic aphasia and no word monitoring deficit in aphasia. Single subject statistics (Crawford & Garthwaite, 2002) showed deficits for both tasks in a subset of both agrammatic and non-agrammatic participants. Group analyses showed differences for word category violations across both tasks. Single subject statistics showed deficits in a subset of both agrammatic and non-agrammatic participants. It should be noted that there were no significant differences between two aphasic groups for both tasks in Mann-Whitney U test. Although off-line sentence judgment and on-line sentence processing were impaired in agrammatic aphasia, the extent of the deficits did not differ from non-agrammatic group. Thus, the current study does not support an “amodal” syntactic deficit in individuals with agrammatic production. This finding is consistent with views that identify distinct neural resources for sentence planning for production and sentence interpretation during comprehension (Matchin & Hickok, 2020).
Automatic Syntactic Processing in Agrammatic Aphasia: the Effects of Grammatical Violations