Cognitive effort during a short-term memory (STM) task in individuals with aphasia
Publication date: Available online 5 January 2018Source: Journal of NeurolinguisticsAuthor(s): Esther S. Kim, Salima Suleman, Tammy HopperAbstractPeople with aphasia (PWA) have been shown to demonstrate limited short-term memory (STM) span capacity, but little is known about the degree of cognitive effort PWA expend when completing STM tasks. For decades, researchers have used task-evoked pupillary responses (TEPRs) to infer cognitive effort; pupil size increases as the difficulty of a task increases. The purpose of this study was to examine TEPRs while PWA and healthy control participants completed a STM picture span task...
Source: Journal of Neurolinguistics - July 5, 2018 Category: Speech-Language Pathology Source Type: research
Lexical overlap increases syntactic priming in aphasia independently of short-term memory abilities: Evidence against the explicit memory account of the lexical boost
Publication date: Available online 1 February 2018Source: Journal of NeurolinguisticsAuthor(s): Hao Yan, Randi C. Martin, L. Robert SlevcAbstractSpeakers show syntactic priming – that is, a tendency to repeat syntactic constructions they have recently comprehended or produced – and this tendency is even stronger when adjacent utterances share the same main verb, termed the lexical boost. Some have suggested that abstract syntactic priming (i.e., with no lexical overlap) derives from implicit learning, whereas the lexical boost derives from explicit short-term memory (STM) for the prime (e.g., Chang, Dell, & Bock, 2006)...
Source: Journal of Neurolinguistics - July 5, 2018 Category: Speech-Language Pathology Source Type: research
Transfer effects on spoken sentence comprehension and functional communication after working memory training in stroke aphasia
Publication date: Available online 10 February 2018Source: Journal of NeurolinguisticsAuthor(s): Lilla Zakariás, Christos Salis, Isabell WartenburgerAbstractRecent treatment protocols have been successful in improving working memory (WM) in individuals with aphasia. However, the evidence to date is small and the extent to which improvements in trained tasks of WM transfer to untrained memory tasks, spoken sentence comprehension, and functional communication is yet poorly understood. To address these issues, we conducted a multiple baseline study with three German-speaking individuals with chronic post-stroke aphasia. Part...
Source: Journal of Neurolinguistics - July 5, 2018 Category: Speech-Language Pathology Source Type: research
Influence of working memory on stimulus generalization in anomia treatment: A pilot study
Publication date: Available online 15 February 2018Source: Journal of NeurolinguisticsAuthor(s): Stacy M. Harnish, Deena Schwen Blackett, Alexandra Zezinka, Jennifer P. Lundine, Xueliang PanAbstractNeuropsychological testing of distinct cognitive domains holds promise as a prognostic indicator of aphasia therapy success; however, it is unclear the degree to which cognitive assessments may also predict generalization abilities. The present study aimed to assess the relationship between working memory skills and stimulus generalization from a visual picture-naming treatment to an auditory definition-naming task. Seven indivi...
Source: Journal of Neurolinguistics - July 5, 2018 Category: Speech-Language Pathology Source Type: research
Another look at the role of vowel letters in word reading in L2 English among native Korean readers
This study investigated the role of vowels in L2 English word reading among native Korean readers. Seventy six Korean- and English-speaking adults read words in a naming test. Stimuli included four conditions: lowercase, uppercase, letter strings with no vowels (e.g., cmmn for common), and letter strings with randomly missing letters (e.g., corct for correct). Overall, the vowel deletion manipulation gave rise to higher accuracy and faster reading than the random omission condition for the two groups. When the baseline was controlled, the group and condition variables jointly affected accuracy, but the condition and L1 scr...
Source: Journal of Neurolinguistics - July 5, 2018 Category: Speech-Language Pathology Source Type: research
Assessment of linguistic and verbal short-term memory components of language abilities in aphasia
Publication date: Available online 21 February 2018Source: Journal of NeurolinguisticsAuthor(s): Nadine Martin, Irene Minkina, Francine P. Kohen, Michelene Kalinyak-FliszarAbstractSome current models of aphasia emphasize a role of short-term memory in the processing of language and propose that the language impairment in aphasia involves impairment to cognitive processes that activate and maintain representations of words over the time-period needed to support single word and multiple word tasks, including verbal span tasks. This paper reports normative data from 39 people with aphasia and 16 age-matched neurotypical contr...
Source: Journal of Neurolinguistics - July 5, 2018 Category: Speech-Language Pathology Source Type: research
Working memory in aphasia: Peeling the onion
Publication date: Available online 7 March 2018Source: Journal of NeurolinguisticsAuthor(s): Stephanie C. Christensen, Heather Harris Wright, Ileana RatiuAbstractCompared to neurologically healthy adults, persons with aphasia (PWA) demonstrate impaired performance on working memory (WM) tasks. These deficits in WM are thought to underlie language processing problems in PWA. However, most studies use WM tasks that are verbal in nature, making it difficult to determine if these deficits are due to domain-general attentional processes related to WM or domain-specific verbal abilities. The purpose of the current study was to e...
Source: Journal of Neurolinguistics - July 5, 2018 Category: Speech-Language Pathology Source Type: research
Deconstructing and reconstructing cross-language transfer in bilingual reading development: An interactive framework
Publication date: Available online 8 March 2018Source: Journal of NeurolinguisticsAuthor(s): Sheila Cira Chung, Xi Chen, Esther GevaAbstractThe concept of cross-language transfer is central in bilingual reading development. This is because researchers and educators search for the conditions that allow learning that takes place in one language to enhance learning in the other language (Perkins & Salomon, 1992). In the past, the research focus was primarily on cross-language transfer in spoken language. However, since the 90s, cross-language transfer has been studied in relation to literacy aspects, such as word reading, spe...
Source: Journal of Neurolinguistics - July 5, 2018 Category: Speech-Language Pathology Source Type: research
Chinese-English bilinguals transfer L1 lexical reading procedures and holistic orthographic coding to L2 English
This study examines second language (L2) reading by individuals with a Chinese or Korean native literacy (L1) background. It tests a hypothesis about the L1-L2 transfer of word reading procedures, which predicts that Chinese-English (CE) bilinguals transfer a bias towards lexical reading procedures and holistic orthographic coding to L2 English reading, whereas Korean-English (KE) bilinguals transfer a bias towards sublexical reading procedures and analytic orthographic coding. To test this hypothesis, we gave a word naming task to CE and KE groups matched on English language experience and use. The stimuli were English wo...
Source: Journal of Neurolinguistics - July 5, 2018 Category: Speech-Language Pathology Source Type: research
Radical repetition effects in beginning learners of Chinese as a foreign language reading
Publication date: Available online 23 March 2018Source: Journal of NeurolinguisticsAuthor(s): Atsuko Takashima, Ludo VerhoevenAbstractThe aim of the present study was to examine whether repetition of radicals during training of Chinese characters leads to better word acquisition performance in beginning learners of Chinese as a foreign language. Thirty Dutch university students were trained on 36 Chinese one-character words for their pronunciations and meanings. They were also exposed to the specifics of the radicals, that is, for phonetic radicals, the associated pronunciation was explained, and for semantic radicals the ...
Source: Journal of Neurolinguistics - July 5, 2018 Category: Speech-Language Pathology Source Type: research
Effects of working memory demands on sentence production in aphasia
Publication date: Available online 31 March 2018Source: Journal of NeurolinguisticsAuthor(s): Jee Eun Sung, Bora Eom, Soo Eun LeeAbstractThe purpose of the study was to investigate the effects of task demands on sentence production and their relation to working memory (WM) capacity in people with aphasia using a verb-final language. The current study manipulated the WM loads on the sentence production tasks by varying the following three factors: task type (syntactic priming vs. sentence completion), sentence type (active vs. passive), and canonicity (canonical vs. noncanonical word order). Task type and word order canonic...
Source: Journal of Neurolinguistics - July 5, 2018 Category: Speech-Language Pathology Source Type: research
Sentence processing in aphasia: An examination of material-specific and general cognitive factors
Publication date: Available online 4 April 2018Source: Journal of NeurolinguisticsAuthor(s): Laura L. MurrayAbstractThe purpose of this study was to characterize further the nature of sentence processing deficits in acquired aphasia. Adults with aphasia and age- and education-matched adults with no brain damage completed a battery of formal cognitive-linguistic tests and an experimental sentence judgment task, which was performed alone and during focused attention and divided attention or dual-task conditions. The specific aims were to determine whether (a) increased extra-linguistic cognitive demands (i.e., focused and di...
Source: Journal of Neurolinguistics - July 5, 2018 Category: Speech-Language Pathology Source Type: research
On the association between memory capacity and sentence comprehension: Insights from a systematic review and meta-analysis of the aphasia literature
Publication date: Available online 4 April 2018Source: Journal of NeurolinguisticsAuthor(s): Maria Varkanitsa, David CaplanAbstractThe role of short-term memory (STM) and working memory (WM) in sentence comprehension has been controversial; many neuropsychological studies and studies with neurologically intact individuals have revealed co-occurrence of STM/WM and sentence comprehension while other studies have found no relation between the two. The aim of this article is to revisit the association between memory capacity and sentence comprehension by systematically reviewing all relevant studies in the aphasia literature p...
Source: Journal of Neurolinguistics - July 5, 2018 Category: Speech-Language Pathology Source Type: research
Reading comprehension in L1 and L2: An integrative approach
Publication date: Available online 7 April 2018Source: Journal of NeurolinguisticsAuthor(s): Ping Li, Roy B. ClarianaAbstractLike other areas of research in reading and language, the study of reading comprehension has traditionally focused on readers of native or first language, and relatively little attention has been directed to the study of second language reading comprehension. Even fewer studies have examined the neurocognitive bases of second language reading comprehension. In this article we take these research gaps as a starting point for providing an integrative analysis of reading comprehension in first and secon...
Source: Journal of Neurolinguistics - July 5, 2018 Category: Speech-Language Pathology Source Type: research
Beyond the simple view of early first and second language reading: The impact of lexical quality
Publication date: Available online 14 April 2018Source: Journal of NeurolinguisticsAuthor(s): Ludo Verhoeven, Marinus Voeten, Anne VermeerAbstractAccording to the simple view of reading (SVR), reading comprehension is the product of word decoding and listening comprehension. Against this background, we examined the additional role of early lexical quality in the prediction of reading comprehension, either directly or indirectly via word decoding or listening comprehension. Following a longitudinal design, 566 children learning to read Dutch as L1 and 463 children learning to read Dutch as L2 in the Netherlands were tested ...
Source: Journal of Neurolinguistics - July 5, 2018 Category: Speech-Language Pathology Source Type: research
