Language Abilities of Russian Primary-School-Aged Children with Autism Spectrum Disorder: Evidence from Comprehensive Assessment

Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders - The purpose of the present research was to comprehensively assess the language abilities of Russian primary-school-aged children with Autism Spectrum...     

The contribution of working memory to language comprehension: differential effect of aphasia type

Background: Experimental studies of short-term memory and working memory (WM) in aphasia fail to discriminate cognitive impairments of different aphasia types—non-fluent, Broca-type aphasia and fluent, Wernicke-type aphasia. However, based on the varying fundamental features of these two aphasia syndromes, the potentially different underlying mechanisms of impairment and scant preliminary evidence of varying cognitive deficits, a differential relationship between cognitive function and language processing in these two groups can be predicted.

Aims: The current study investigates the hypothesis concerning the differential impact of cognitive impairments in individuals with fluent versus non-fluent aphasia types.

Methods & Procedures: Participants with fluent (n = 19) and non-fluent (n = 16) aphasia and participants without brain damage (n = 36) were presented with an eye-tracking WM task. Additionally, individuals with aphasia completed two language comprehension tasks.

Outcomes & Results: Results revealed significant decrease in WM capacity in individuals with aphasia compared with participants without brain damage. The two aphasia groups performed similarly on the WM and language tasks. Furthermore, for participants with non-fluent aphasia, it was revealed that WM makes a significant contribution to language comprehension, while for fluent individuals this relationship was not significant.

Conclusions: Overall, the present data support the claim that there are cognitive deficits in aphasia and that these cognitive deficits tend to exacerbate the language impairments of persons with non-fluent aphasia types. The results are discussed in the context of varying mechanisms of impairment in different types of aphasia. The present findings have important implications both for the assessment and the treatment of individuals with aphasia and for understanding the nature of aphasia.     

The effects of instrumentality and name relation on action naming in Russian speakers with aphasia

Background: A verb’s instrumentality and name relation to an associated instrument noun are among the factors influencing verb retrieval in speakers with aphasia. Previous data on the effects of these factors are equivocal, possibly due to language- and task-specific factors.

Aims: The present study aimed to investigate the nature of the instrumentality and verb-noun name relation effects by retesting them in a large sample of Russian-speaking individuals with fluent and non-fluent aphasia.

Methods & Procedures: Forty Russian-speaking individuals with aphasia (twenty with fluent and twenty with non-fluent aphasia) and twenty controls performed an action naming task. Overall accuracy scores and qualitative error types were analysed.

Outcomes & Results: A positive effect of instrumentality was found in both groups of individuals with aphasia. A negative effect of verb-noun name relation was found in non-fluent aphasia and was larger for verbs with a smaller overlap with the instrument noun. In both aphasia groups, semantically related errors were more numerous for non-instrumental than instrumental verbs, whereas phonological errors were more numerous for name-related than non-name-related instrumental verbs.

Conclusions: The positive effect of instrumentality on verb retrieval may be attributed to a facilitatory effect of richer conceptual representations of instrumental verbs. The negative effect of name relation on verb retrieval may be explained by interference of the phonological form of the instrument noun. These factors influence verb retrieval in aphasia and should be taken into account when developing testing/treatment materials and stimuli for experimental studies.     

Comprehension of reversible constructions in semantic aphasia

Background: Impairments in spatial processing show themselves not only in gnosis and praxis, but also in the language domain. Such deficit is a characteristic feature of so-called semantic aphasia. The impaired comprehension of semantically reversible constructions in those patients can be explained by a disorder of the common spatial neuropsychological factor grounded in the temporal-parietal-occipital (TPO) regions of the brain.

Aims: The aim of the present study was to experimentally test the possibility that individuals with semantic aphasia experience specific difficulties in extracting spatial relations from a linguistic form and rely instead on basic sensorimotor stereotypes to interpret reversible linguistic constructions.

Methods & Procedures: Six individuals with semantic aphasia, 12 people with motor aphasia, 12 people with sensory aphasia, and 12 non-brain-damaged individuals performed a sentence–picture matching task; all participants were native speakers of Russian. Two types of reversible sentences were tested, each representing a direct and an inverted word order: prepositional (The boy is putting the bag in the box vs. The boy is putting in the box the bag) and instrumental (The grandmother is covering the scarf with the hat vs. The grandmother is covering with the hat the scarf). Irreversible sentences (The boy is putting the apple in the bag) served as control stimuli.

Outcomes & Results: Each group of participants performed better on irreversible than on reversible sentences. Within reversible sentences, an interaction between word order and construction type was found in individuals with semantic aphasia only. They performed more accurately in prepositional constructions with direct word order and in instrumental constructions with inverted word order—both are related to sensorimotor stereotypes reflecting interaction with objects in the real world. Although no such clear dissociation was found in other aphasia types, correlation analysis revealed the same effect in some participants with motor and sensory aphasia.

Conclusions: The findings confirm the importance of situational context for linguistic processing. First, if knowledge of the real world supports the unique interpretation of grammatical markers, it enhances processing in all tested cohorts of participants. Second, people with semantic aphasia consistently use sensorimotor stereotypes to compensate for their linguistic deficits. Since this was also found in some participants with other aphasia types, such a sensorimotor strategy might depend not on the damage to TPO areas as such, but on the intactness and overuse of left premotor regions suggested to be critical for motor and symbolic sequential processing.     

Processing polarity: ERP evidence for differences between positive and negative polarity

The goal of the present study was to investigate event-related potential (ERP) responses to Dutch negative and positive polarity adverbs of degree presented in licensed and unlicensed contexts with negative and affirmative particles directly preceding the polarity item. To control for effects of the processing of negation as such, neutral adverbs were also presented in negative and affirmative contexts. The results did not show any significant effect of negation for the non-polar adverbs, allowing context effects for polarity items to be interpreted as being due to the appropriateness of the context. Negative polarity violations elicited an N400 response that might reflect the lack of semantic congruity of the negative polarity item in an affirmative context. In contrast, processing positive polarity items in context of negation resulted in a positive effect resembling the P600, which may be considered as a marker of a different sort of integration difficulty caused by violation of licensing conditions and/or a search for a licensor in the wider discourse context. The study presented here is the first to show an unambiguous dissociation between responses to negative and positive polarity violations. This dissociation argues for different mechanisms underlying the processing of these two types of polarity; we propose that positive polarity items are sensitive to wider discourse context, while negative polarity items are more sensitive to local lexical context.     

Verb production and word order in Russian agrammatic speakers

Background: Verb production has been shown to be impaired in individuals with agrammatic Broca's aphasia. Several theories have linked this deficit to problems with the implementation of grammatical information that the verb contains. In particular, the number and type of arguments associated with a verb were suggested as causes of production difficulties in agrammatic speakers. The influence of these two factors on agrammatic production has been investigated in English and Dutch (Bastiaanse & Van Zonneveld, 2005 Bastiaanse, R. and van Zonneveld, R. 2005. Sentence production with verbs of alternating transitivity in agrammatic Broca's aphasia.. Journal of Neurolinguistics, 18: 57–66. [Crossref], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar]; Thompson, 2003 Thompson, C. K. 2003. Unaccusative verb production in agrammatic aphasia: The argument structure complexity hypothesis.. Journal of Neurolinguistics, 16: 151–167. [Crossref], [PubMed], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar]).

Aims: The present study focuses on exploring these factors in a structurally different language. Russian, with its rich morphology and relatively free word order, is of interest because it enables not only testing of earlier advanced hypotheses on agrammatic production, but also specification of them at some essential points.

Methods & Procedures: A sentence production priming paradigm was used that was based on the method developed by Thompson, Lange, Schneider, and Shapiro (1997 Thompson, C. K., Lange, K. L., Schneider, S. L. and Shapiro, L. P. 1997. Agrammatic and non‐brain‐damaged subjects' verb and verb argument structure production.. Aphasiology, 11: 473–490. [Taylor & Francis Online], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar]) which allows a particular verb and sentence construction to be elicited. Six conditions included sentences with different numbers of arguments (one or two), different types of thematic role mapping (direct or indirect), and different word order (basic or scrambled). The test contained 60 items, 10 items per condition. In all, 16 individuals with agrammatic aphasia and 16 non‐brain‐damaged individuals participated in the study.

Outcomes & Results: Cross‐linguistic significance of the earlier advanced hypotheses was demonstrated: the increased number of verb arguments and syntactic operations concerning constituent movement cause production problems for Russian agrammatic speakers. Moreover, the data show that agrammatic speech difficulties are related to the number of arguments explicitly mentioned in a sentence, to the number of operations applied to the syntactic structure of a produced sentence, and to changing the base‐generated position of a constituent (not to the order of the constituents per se).

Conclusions: The study provides further evidence that verb production is selectively impaired in agrammatic aphasia. This deficit is related to the implementation of the grammatical information that a verb contains and the syntactic operations applied to basic structures.