Recovery of Sentence Production Processes Following Language Treatment in Aphasia: Evidence from Eyetracking

Jennifer E Mack, Michaela Nerantzini, Cynthia K Thompson, Jennifer E Mack, Michaela Nerantzini, Cynthia K Thompson

Abstract

Introduction: Sentence production impairments in aphasia often improve with treatment. However, little is known about how cognitive processes supporting sentence production, such as sentence planning, are impacted by treatment. Methods: The present study used eyetracking to examine changes in sentence production resulting from a 12-week language treatment program focused on passive sentences (Treatment of Underlying Forms (TUF); Thompson and Shapiro, 2005). In two pre-treatment and two post-treatment sessions, nine participants with mild-to-moderate agrammatic aphasia performed a structural priming task, which involved repeating primed sentences (actives or passives) and then, using the same verb, producing sentences describing pictured events. Two individuals with aphasia performed the eyetracking task on the same schedule without intervening language treatment. Ten unimpaired older adults also performed the task to identify normal performance patterns. Sentence production accuracy and speech onset latencies were examined, and eye movements to the pictured Agent and Theme characters were analyzed in the first 400 ms after picture onset, reflecting early sentence planning, and in the regions preceding the production of the sentence subject and post-verbal noun, reflecting lexical encoding. Results: Unimpaired controls performed with high accuracy. Their early eye movements (first 400 ms) indicated equal fixations to the Agent and Theme, consistent with structural sentence planning (i.e., initial construction of an abstract structural frame). Subsequent eye movements occurring prior to speech onset were consistent with encoding of the correct sentence subject (i.e., the Agent in actives, Theme in passives), with encoding of the post-verbal noun beginning at speech onset. In participants with aphasia, accuracy improved significantly with treatment, and post-treatment (but not pre-treatment) eye movements were qualitatively similar to those of unimpaired controls, indicating correct encoding of the Agent and Theme nouns for both active and passive sentences. Analysis of early eye movements also showed a treatment-induced increase in structural planning. No changes in sentence production accuracy or eye movements were found in the aphasic participants who did not receive treatment. Conclusion: These findings indicate that treatment improves sentence production and results in the emergence of normal-like cognitive processes associated with successful sentence production, including structural planning.

Keywords: agrammatism; aphasia; eyetracking; language treatment; online processing; sentence production.

Figures

Figure 1
Figure 1
Example stimulus for a passive sentence trial. The italic text outside the boxes indicates what participants did in each step of the trial.
Figure 2
Figure 2
Eye movement data: Unimpaired speakers, correct trials. The x axis indicates the time from picture onset in seconds; the y axis indicates the proportion of fixations to the Agent, out of all fixations to the Agent and Theme. Vertical lines indicate the mean onset time for each sentence region (active in black; passive in blue; labels, and onset times that are the same across structures, are in purple). The horizontal line indicates at-chance fixation patterns (i.e., an equal proportion of fixations to the Agent and Theme). Ons, picture onset; PreN1, beginning of PreN1 region (400 ms); N1, onset of subject noun; V, onset of verb; N2, onset of post-verbal noun; End, trial end.
Figure 3
Figure 3
Eye movement data: Treatment group, all trials. (A) Pre-treatment data, (B) Post-treatment data. The x axis indicates the time from picture onset in seconds; the y axis indicates the proportion of fixations to the Agent, out of all fixations to the Agent and Theme. “Active” and “Passive” data points refer to trials with active and passive primes, respectively. Vertical lines indicate the mean onset time for each sentence region (active in black; passive in blue; labels, and onset times that are the same across structures, are in purple). The horizontal line indicates at-chance fixation patterns (i.e., an equal proportion of fixations to the Agent and Theme). Ons, picture onset; PreN1, beginning of PreN1 region (400 ms); N1, onset of subject noun; V, onset of verb; N2, onset of post-verbal noun; End, trial end.
Figure 4
Figure 4
Eye movement data: Treatment group, correct trials. (A) Pre-treatment data, (B) Post-treatment data. The x axis indicates the time from picture onset in seconds; the y axis indicates the proportion of fixations to the Agent, out of all fixations to the Agent and Theme. Vertical lines indicate the mean onset time for each sentence region (active in black; passive in blue; labels, and onset times that are the same/similar across structures, are in purple). The horizontal line indicates at-chance fixation patterns (i.e., an equal proportion of fixations to the Agent and Theme). Ons, picture onset; PreN1, beginning of PreN1 region (400 ms); N1, onset of subject noun; V, onset of verb; N2, onset of post-verbal noun; End, trial end.
Figure 5
Figure 5
Eye movement data: Natural History group, all trials. (A) Study entry, (B) Study end. The x axis indicates the time from picture onset in seconds; the y axis indicates the proportion of fixations to the Agent, out of all fixations to the Agent and Theme. Vertical lines indicate the mean onset time for each sentence region (active in black; passive in blue; labels, and onset times that are the same/similar across structures, are in purple). The horizontal line indicates at-chance fixation patterns (i.e., an equal proportion of fixations to the Agent and Theme). Ons, picture onset; PreN1, beginning of PreN1 region (400 ms); N1, onset of subject noun; V, onset of verb; N2, onset of post-verbal noun; End, trial end.
Figure 6
Figure 6
Individual changes in passive sentence production accuracy and processing in the Treatment (Tx) group and Natural History (NH) group participants. Points to the right of the vertical line and above the horizontal line indicate improvements in performance. The diagonal line in the second figure indicates the significant correlation between eye movements and accuracy for picture description in the Treatment group.

References

    1. Bastiaanse R., Edwards S. (2004). Word order and finiteness in Dutch and English Broca's and Wernicke's aphasia. Brain Lang. 89, 91–107. 10.1016/S0093-934X(03)00306-7
    1. Bastiaanse R., Thompson C. K. (2012). Perspectives on Agrammatism. Sussex: Psychology Press.
    1. Bates D., Maechler M., Bolker B., Walker S. (2015). Fitting linear mixed-effects models using lme4. J. Stat. Softw. 67, 1–48. 10.18637/jss.v067.i01
    1. Benjamini Y., Hochberg Y. (1995). Controlling the false discovery rate: a practical and powerful approach to multiple testing. J. R. Statist. Soc. B 57, 289–300.
    1. Bird H., Franklin S. (1995). Cinderella revisited: a comparison of fluent and nonfluent aphasic speech. J. Neuroling. 9, 187–206. 10.1016/0911-6044(96)00006-1
    1. Bock K., Ferreira V. (2014). Syntactically speaking, in Oxford Handbook of Language Production, eds Goldrick M., Ferreira V., Miozzo M. (Oxford: Oxford University Press; ), 21–46.
    1. Bock K., Irwin D. E., Davidson D. J. J. (2004). Putting first things first, in The Integration of Language, Vision, and Action: Eye Movements and the Visual World, eds Ferreira F., Henderson M. (New York, NY: Psychology Press; ), 249–278.
    1. Bock K., Irwin D. E., Davidson D. J., Levelt W. J. M. (2003). Minding the clock. J. Mem. Lang. 48, 653–685. 10.1016/S0749-596X(03)00007-X
    1. Boersma P., Weenink D. (2016). Praat: Doing Phonetics by Computer. Version 6.0.16. Available online at:
    1. Burchert F., Meissner N., De Bleser R. (2008). Production of non-canonical sentences in agrammatic aphasia: limits in representation or rule application? Brain Lang. 104, 170–179. 10.1016/j.bandl.2007.06.004
    1. Caplan D., Hanna J. E. (1998). Sentence production by aphasic patients in a constrained task. Brain Lang. 63, 184–218. 10.1006/brln.1998.1930
    1. Cho S., Thompson C. K. (2010). What goes wrong during passive sentence production in agrammatic aphasia: an eyetracking study. Aphasiology 24, 1576–1592. 10.1080/02687031003714442
    1. Cho-Reyes S., Mack J. E., Thompson C. K. (2016). Grammatical encoding and learning in agrammatic aphasia: evidence from structural priming. J. Mem. Lang. 91, 202–218. 10.1016/j.jml.2016.02.004
    1. Cho-Reyes S., Thompson C. K. (2012). Verb and sentence production and comprehension in aphasia: Northwestern Assessment of Verbs and Sentences. Aphasiology 26, 1250–1277. 10.1080/02687038.2012.693584
    1. Davies M. (2008). The Corpus of Contemporary American English: 450 million words, 1990-2012. Available online at:
    1. Dickey M. W., Thompson C. K. (2004). The resolution and recovery of filler-gap dependencies in aphasia: avidence from on-line anomaly detection. Brain Lang. 88, 108–127. 10.1016/S0093-934X(03)00283-9
    1. Dickey M. W., Yoo H. (2010). Predicting outcomes for linguistically specific sentence treatment protocols. Aphasiology 24, 787–801. 10.1080/02687030903515354
    1. Druks J. (2017). Contemporary and Emergent Theories of Agrammatism. New York, NY: Routledge.
    1. Faroqi-Shah Y., Thompson C. K. (2003). Effect of lexical cues on the production of active and passive sentences in Broca's and Wernicke's aphasia. Brain Lang. 85, 409–426. 10.1016/S0093-934X(02)00586-2
    1. Faroqi-Shah Y., Thompson C. K. (2012). Approaches to treatment of agrammatism, in Perspectives on Agrammatism, eds Bastiaanse R., Thompson C. K. (Sussex: Psychology Press; ), 158–191.
    1. Ferreira F., Swets B. (2002). How incremental is language production? Evidence from the production of utterances requiring the computation of arithmetic sums. J. Mem. Lang. 46, 57–84. 10.1006/jmla.2001.2797
    1. Friedmann N., Grodzinsky Y. (1997). Tense and agreement in agrammatic production: pruning the syntactic tree. Brain Lang. 56, 397–425. 10.1006/brln.1997.1795
    1. Gleitman L. R., January D., Nappa R., Trueswell J. C. (2007). On the give and take between event apprehension and utterance formulation. J. Mem. Lang. 57, 544–569. 10.1016/j.jml.2007.01.007
    1. Griffin Z. M., Bock K. (2000). What the eyes say about speaking. Psychol. Sci. 11, 274–279. 10.1111/1467-9280.00255
    1. Griffin Z. M., Spieler D. H. (2006). Observing the what and when of language production for different age groups by monitoring speakers' eye movements. Brain Lang. 99, 272–288. 10.1016/j.bandl.2005.08.003
    1. Hartsuiker R. J., Kolk H. H. (1998). Syntactic facilitation in agrammatic sentence production. Brain Lang. 62, 221–254. 10.1006/brln.1997.1905
    1. Hwang H., Kaiser E. (2014). The role of the verb in grammatical function assignment in English and Korean. J. Exp. Psychol. Learn. Mem. Cogn. 40, 1363–1376. 10.1037/a0036797
    1. Jacobs B. J., Thompson C. K. (2000). Cross-modal generalization effects of training noncanonical sentence comprehension and production in agrammatic aphasia. J. Speech Lang. Hear. Res. 43, 5–20. 10.1044/jslhr.4301.05
    1. Kay J., Lesser R., Coltheart M. (1992). Psycholinguistic Assessments of Language Processing in Aphasia (PALPA). East Sussex: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates Ltd.
    1. Kennison S. M., Trofe J. L. (2003). Comprehending pronouns: a role for word-specific gender stereotype information. J. Psycholinguist. Res. 32, 355–378. 10.1023/A:1023599719948
    1. Kertesz A. (2006). Western Aphasia Battery-Revised (WAB-R). San Antonio, TX: Pearson.
    1. Kolk H. (1995). A time-based approach to agrammatic production. Brain Lang., 50, 282–303. 10.1006/brln.1995.1049
    1. Konopka A. E., Meyer A. S. (2014). Priming sentence planning. Cogn. Psychol. 73, 1–40. 10.1016/j.cogpsych.2014.04.001
    1. Kuchinsky S. E., Bock K. (2010). From seeing to saying: Perceiving, planning, producing, in Paper Presented at the 23rd Meeting of the CUNY Human Sentence Processing Conference (New York, NY: ).
    1. Kuznetsova A., Brockhoff P. B., Christensen P. H. B. (2015). lmerTest: Tests in Linear Mixed Effects Models. Available online at:
    1. Lee J., Thompson C. K. (2011a). Real-time production of arguments and adjuncts in normal and agrammatic speakers. Lang. Cogn. Process. 26, 985–1021. 10.1080/01690965.2010.496237
    1. Lee J., Thompson C. K. (2011b). Real-time production of unergative and unaccusative sentences in normal and agrammatic speakers: an eyetracking study. Aphasiology 25, 813–825. 10.1080/02687038.2010.542563
    1. Lee J., Yoshida M., Thompson C. K. (2015). Grammatical planning units during real-time sentence production in agrammatic aphasia and healthy speakers. J. Speech Lang. Hear. Res. 58, 1182–1194. 10.1044/2015_JSLHR-L-14-0250
    1. Mack J. E., Thompson C. K. (in press). Recovery of online sentence processing in aphasia: eye movement changes resulting from Treatment of Underlying Forms. J. Speech Lang. Hear. Res.
    1. Mack J. E., Wei A. Z., Gutierrez S., Thompson C. K. (2016). Tracking sentence comprehension: test-retest reliability in people with aphasia and unimpaired adults. J. Neurolinguist. 40, 98–111. 10.1016/j.jneuroling.2016.06.001
    1. Marin J. W., Schwartz M. F. (1998). Facilitating sentence planning in nonfluent aphasia. Brain Lang. 65, 174–177.
    1. Rochon E., Saffran E. M., Berndt R. S., Schwartz M. F. (2000). Quantitative analysis of aphasic sentence production: further development and new data. Brain Lang. 72, 193–218. 10.1006/brln.1999.2285
    1. Saffran E. M., Berndt R. S., Schwartz M. F. (1989). The quantitative analysis of agrammatic production: procedure and data. Brain Lang. 37, 440–479. 10.1016/0093-934X(89)90030-8
    1. Saffran E. M., Martin N. (1997). Effects of structural priming on sentence production in aphasics. Lang. Cogn. Process. 12, 877–882. 10.1080/016909697386772
    1. Schwartz M. F., Saffran E. M., Fink R. B., Myers J. L., Martin N. (1994). Mapping therapy: a treatment programme for agrammatism. Aphasiology 8, 19–54. 10.1080/02687039408248639
    1. Thompson C. K. (2011). Northwestern Assessment of Verbs and Sentences (NAVS). Evanston, IL: Northwestern University.
    1. Thompson C. K., Cho S., Hsu C. J., Wieneke C., Rademaker A., Weitner B. B., et al. . (2012). Dissociations between fluency and agrammatism in primary progressive aphasia. Aphasiology 26, 20–43. 10.1080/02687038.2011.584691
    1. Thompson C. K., den Ouden D. B., Bonakdarpour B., Garibaldi K., Parrish T. B. (2010). Neural plasticity and treatment-induced recovery of sentence processing in agrammatism. Neuropsychologia 48, 3211–3227. 10.1016/j.neuropsychologia.2010.06.036
    1. Thompson C. K., Lee M. (2009). Psych verb production and comprehension in agrammatic Broca's aphasia. J. Neurolinguistics 22, 354–369. 10.1016/j.jneuroling.2008.11.003
    1. Thompson C. K., Meltzer-Asscher A., Cho S., Lee J., Wieneke C., Weintraub S., et al. . (2013a). Syntactic and morphosyntactic processing in stroke-induced and primary progressive aphasia. Behav. Neurol. 26, 35–54. 10.1155/2013/749412
    1. Thompson C. K., Riley E. A., den Ouden D. B., Meltzer-Asscher A., Lukic S. (2013b). Training verb argument structure production in agrammatic aphasia: behavioral and neural recovery patterns. Cortex 49, 2358–2376. 10.1016/j.cortex.2013.02.003
    1. Thompson C. K., Shapiro L. (2005). Treating agrammatic aphasia within a linguistic framework: treatment of Underlying Forms. Aphasiology 19, 1021–1036. 10.1080/02687030544000227
    1. Thompson C. K., Shapiro L. P., Ballard K. J., Jacobs B. J., Schneider S. S., Tait M. E. (1997). Training and generalized production of wh- and NP-movement structures in agrammatic aphasia. J. Speech Lang. Hear. Res. 40, 228–244. 10.1044/jslhr.4002.228
    1. Thompson C. K., Shapiro L. P., Kiran S., Sobecks J. (2003). The role of syntactic complexity in treatment of sentence deficits in agrammatic aphasia: the complexity account of treatment efficacy (CATE). J. Speech Lang. Hear. Res. 46, 591–607. 10.1044/1092-4388(2003/047)
    1. Thompson C. K., Shapiro L. P., Li L., Schendel L. (1995). Analysis of verbs and verb-argument structure: a method for quantification of aphasic language production. Clin. Aphasiol. 23, 121–140.
    1. Thompson C. K., Weintraub S. (2014). Northwestern Naming Battery (NNB). Evanston, IL: Northwestern University.
    1. Van de Velde M., Meyer A. S., Konopka A. E. (2014). Message formulation and structural assembly: describing "easy" and "hard" events with preferred and dispreferred syntactic structures. J. Mem. Lang. 71, 124–144. 10.1016/j.jml.2013.11.001
    1. Verreyt N., Bogaerts L., Cop U., Bernolet S., De Letter M., Hemelsoet D., et al. (2013). Syntactic priming in bilingual patients with parallel and differential aphasia. Aphasiology 27, 867–887. 10.1080/02687038.2013.791918
    1. Wagner V., Jescheniak J. D., Schriefers H. (2010). On the flexibility of grammatical advance planning during sentence production: effects of cognitive load on multiple lexical access. J. Exp. Psychol. Learn. Mem. Cogn. 36, 423–440. 10.1037/a0018619
    1. Wierenga C. E., Maher L. M., Moore A. B., White K. D., McGregor K., Soltysik D. A., et al. . (2006). Neural substrates of syntactic mapping treatment: an fMRI study of two cases. J. Int. Neuropsychol. Soc. 12, 132–146. 10.1017/S135561770606019X

Source: PubMed

Sponsors en medewerkers

Medische omstandigheden

Geneesmiddelinterventies

3
Abonneren