Ride the Storm: Navigating Through Unstable Periods / Katerina Rudko (Belka G...
Dissertation Proposal Talk V1
1. Behavioral and Neural Indices
of Lexical Access During
Idiom Comprehension
Kathleen P. Brumm
March 22, 2010
1
2. The audience liked the wrestler that the
parish priest condemned for foul language
2
3. Outline
• Comprehension deficits in aphasia: Converging Evidence
• Goal of the project
– Parsimonious account of comprehension deficits
• Specific Aims
– Psycholinguistic (moment-by-moment) processes
– Neurolinguistic (neural architecture)
– Hypotheses
• Preliminary Studies
• Proposed Studies and Pilot Data
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4. Goal : Examine root cause(s) of
comprehension deficits in aphasia
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5. Comprehension in Aphasia
•Aphasia is acquired langauge
disorder, subsequent to stroke
•Sub-types of aphasia: classified by
symptoms and neural lesions
•Broca’s and Wernicke’s: most
commonly studied
Broca’s Aphasia
Wernicke’s Aphasia:
•Left Inferior Frontal Lobe •Left Posterior Superior Temporal Lobe
(BA44/45) (BA 22)
•Expressive language deficit •Receptive Language Deficit
•Receptive language deficit?
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6. Comprehension in Aphasia
• Comprehension deficits in Broca’s aphasia across
variety of tasks (e.g. Dickey et al., 2006; Grodzinsky, 1995; Love & Oster, 2002; Zurif et al.,
1993)
– Specifically, processing and comprehension deficits for complex
sentences (from Love et al., 2008)
The audience liked the wrestleri that the parish priest condemned(t)i for foul language
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7. Comprehension in Aphasia
• Individuals with Broca’s aphasia show
comprehension deficits for these non-canonical
sentences
– Both off-line (conscious interpretation; e.g. picture-sentence
matching)
– On-line (real-time, prior to conscious reflection) measures (e.g.
Grodzinsky, 2000; Love & Oster, 2002)
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8. Off-Line Methodologies
• Assess outcome of comprehension process
Simple: The woman dries the child with blonde hair
Complex: The child that the woman dries has blonde hair
Adapted from Love & Oster, 2002
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10. On-Line Methodology:
Cross-modal priming
“The audience liked the
wrestler that the parish
priest condemned* for
foul language”
Swinney et al., 1979
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11. On-Line Methodology:
Cross-modal priming
“The audience liked the
wrestler that the parish
priest condemned* for
foul language”
climber
Swinney et al., 1979
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14. Cross-modal priming
“The audience liked the
wrestler that the parish
priest condemned* for
foul language”
fighter
Swinney et al., 1979
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15. Cross-modal priming
“The audience liked the
wrestler that the parish
priest condemned* for
foul language”
fighter
climber
Swinney et al., 1979
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16. Cross-modal priming
“The audience liked the
wrestler that the parish
priest condemned* for
foul language”
fighter
climber
Speeded RT to related
(“fighter”) relative to non-
related (“climber”)
=
priming
Swinney et al., 1979
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17. Comprehension in Aphasia
The audience liked the wrestler1 that the2 parish priest
condemned 3 for foul language
4
• Unimpaired: Lexical access for an object at its offset
(“wrestler”), and at offset of verb (“condemned”)
• Broca’s aphasia: Lexical access not noted at offset of object
or at offset of verb
– Lexical access: 300ms after offset of object (“the”) and
500ms after offset of verb (“foul”)
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18. Comprehension in Aphasia
• Complex sentences are not only comprehension deficit
in Broca’s aphasia
• Another type of comprehension deficit:
Idioms
The burglar spilled the beans about the money at his
mother’s house
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19. Comprehension in Aphasia
• Idiom: Multi-word phrase
• Meaning cannot usually be derived by
understanding literal meanings of component
words (Cacciari & Tabossi, 1988)
[spill] + [the] + [beans]
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22. Comprehension in Aphasia
String-to-word matching
(Cacciari et al., 2006; Papagno & Caporali, 2007)
To come to the hands
fight
finger
departure
cinema
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23. Comprehension in Aphasia
String-to-word matching
(Cacciari et al., 2006; Papagno & Caporali, 2007)
To come to the hands
fight
finger
departure
cinema
Oral Idiom Definition
(Papagno et al., 2004)
What does it mean to
String-to-picture matching “come to the hands?”
(Papagno et al., 2004; 2006; Papagno & Genoni, 2004;
Papagno & Caporali, 2007)
To come to the hands
(To fight)
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24. Comprehension in Aphasia
Is there a parsimonious explanation for
comprehension deficits in Broca’s aphasia?
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25. Comprehension in Aphasia
Goal : Examine root cause(s) of
comprehension deficits in aphasia
Disordered Lexical Access?
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Read sentence out loud.
This is an example of a complex sentence—so called because the word order is different from the canonical SVO order in English. This is an example of a sentence in which the object (wrestler) precedes the subject (priest) and the verb (condemned).
When you heard this sentence, perhaps you had a moment of difficulty understanding it, but most likely, you were able to extract the meaning—that the priest condemned the wrestler. You probably exerted little conscious effort to do this. In fact, typical, healthy listeners are able to understand these types of sentences with little overt difficulty. It’s only when someone has a language disorder that they may have trouble understanding complex sentences like this one. In fact, evidence from individuals with language disorders (adults and children?) indicates that comprehension of complex sentences is a highly orchestrated task, with cognitive processes that occur outside the conscious awareness of the listener, and that language disorders can disrupt this process.
The current proposal aims to examine the underlying cognitive and neural mechanisms that are disrupted in language disorder when auditory comprehension is impaired for certain elements of language, such as complex sentences like this example.
Mutli-methodological approach can point toward processing that is going on cognitively and neurally
Complex: English default SVO order is not sentence order—in this example, we see an Object-Subject-Verb Order. LOTS of evidence that sentences that deviate from “canonical” word order are more difficult to process and understand than those which follow a “canonical” (SVO in English) word order. There are many theories as to why these types of sentences are difficult for individuals with aphasia to understand....(next slide)
Off-line measures are taken after event of interest; tap into conscious “top-down” abilities and real-world knowledge: many different types of cognitive processing goes into conscious off-line comprehension; important in their own right
On-line can look at isolable stages of the comprehension process, before a listener has a chance to reflect and inject conscious processing
Will talk more about specific on-line methodology in a moment
Individuals with Broca’s aphasia are at chance performance on selecting appropriate picture for complex sentences, reliably correct for simpler sentences
In a CMLP paradigm, Participant hears auditory sentence via headphones, while seated in front of computer screen. At point of interest during the uninterrupted auditory sentence, visual “probe” word appears in center of the screen. This visual probe is semantically related to some critical word in the auditory sentence. Participant makes binary lexical decision response (yes/no for word) as fast as they can. Critical point: test during the uninterrupted sentence, and the sentence continues on after the test point.
In a CMLP paradigm, Participant hears auditory sentence via headphones, while seated in front of computer screen. At point of interest during the uninterrupted auditory sentence, visual “probe” word appears in center of the screen. This visual probe is semantically related to some critical word in the auditory sentence. Participant makes binary lexical decision response (yes/no for word) as fast as they can. Critical point: test during the uninterrupted sentence, and the sentence continues on after the test point.
CMLP based on automatic semantic priming (Meyer et al., 1975)--facilitated response to a word, due to prior semantic processing of a related word. In CMLP, the visual probe word is related to a word of interest in the auditory sentence, or in a control condition, probe word is unrelated to sentence material. We can compare lexical decision RTs between related and control trials--research has demonstrated that relatively speeded RTs to related vs. control words indicates priming, and priming in these studies acts as a marker of semantic processing of sentence material. CMLP is thus used to investigate unconscious, automatic lexical processing of material in the auditory sentence. The task is flexible enough so that probe words can be presented at various points in the auditory sentence, and we can investigate unconscious lexical processing during auditory sentence comprehension. Important to note, research indicates that participants are consciously unaware of any relationship between visual probe word and auditory sentence content.
CMLP based on automatic semantic priming (Meyer et al., 1975)--facilitated response to a word, due to prior semantic processing of a related word. In CMLP, the visual probe word is related to a word of interest in the auditory sentence, or in a control condition, probe word is unrelated to sentence material. We can compare lexical decision RTs between related and control trials--research has demonstrated that relatively speeded RTs to related vs. control words indicates priming, and priming in these studies acts as a marker of semantic processing of sentence material. CMLP is thus used to investigate unconscious, automatic lexical processing of material in the auditory sentence. The task is flexible enough so that probe words can be presented at various points in the auditory sentence, and we can investigate unconscious lexical processing during auditory sentence comprehension. Important to note, research indicates that participants are consciously unaware of any relationship between visual probe word and auditory sentence content.
CMLP based on automatic semantic priming (Meyer et al., 1975)--facilitated response to a word, due to prior semantic processing of a related word. In CMLP, the visual probe word is related to a word of interest in the auditory sentence, or in a control condition, probe word is unrelated to sentence material. We can compare lexical decision RTs between related and control trials--research has demonstrated that relatively speeded RTs to related vs. control words indicates priming, and priming in these studies acts as a marker of semantic processing of sentence material. CMLP is thus used to investigate unconscious, automatic lexical processing of material in the auditory sentence. The task is flexible enough so that probe words can be presented at various points in the auditory sentence, and we can investigate unconscious lexical processing during auditory sentence comprehension. Important to note, research indicates that participants are consciously unaware of any relationship between visual probe word and auditory sentence content.
CMLP based on automatic semantic priming (Meyer et al., 1975)--facilitated response to a word, due to prior semantic processing of a related word. In CMLP, the visual probe word is related to a word of interest in the auditory sentence, or in a control condition, probe word is unrelated to sentence material. We can compare lexical decision RTs between related and control trials--research has demonstrated that relatively speeded RTs to related vs. control words indicates priming, and priming in these studies acts as a marker of semantic processing of sentence material. CMLP is thus used to investigate unconscious, automatic lexical processing of material in the auditory sentence. The task is flexible enough so that probe words can be presented at various points in the auditory sentence, and we can investigate unconscious lexical processing during auditory sentence comprehension. Important to note, research indicates that participants are consciously unaware of any relationship between visual probe word and auditory sentence content.
Suggests that lexical access is delayed in Broca’s aphasia, due to this delay, the appropriate lexical items cannot be fed into syntactic system on right time scale, and comprehension breaks down. Note, this pattern of results implies INTACT syntax building in Broca’s aphasia, since we see re-activation of the object after the verb—same pattern as in unimpaired listeners, just on a later time scale
This result fits well with earlier data (Swinney et al., 1989 & Prather 1997) that suggest slowed lexical access mechanisms in Broca’s aphasia, both during sentence comprehension and during single word processing
HOWEVER, still good amount of debate about causes of sentence comprehension deficits in Broca’s aphasia
As mentioned earlier, complex sentence comprehension isn’t ONLY evidence of comprehension impairment in aphasia
AND if lexical access is slowed in aphasia, we should see the effects of this during comprehension of other language items.
Can look to other types of comprehension impairments for evidence that addresses core linguistic processing mechanisms that may be disturbed—this proposal looks specifically at idioms to examine lexical processing in aphasia.
Idioms are these unique entities--each word that contributes to an idiom has its own literal meaning, but the phrase as a whole can also have a literal and/or figurative (non-literal) meaning
Idiom comprehension deficits have been demonstrated in the literature many times for off-line tasks, consistent deficit in off-line performance
Studies with heterogeneous populations, but frontal lobe involvement implicates worse performance
To date, no on-line studies looking at lexical access for idiom comprehension in aphasia
Idiom comprehension deficits have been demonstrated in the literature many times for off-line tasks, consistent deficit in off-line performance
Studies with heterogeneous populations, but frontal lobe involvement implicates worse performance
To date, no on-line studies looking at lexical access for idiom comprehension in aphasia
Idiom comprehension deficits have been demonstrated in the literature many times for off-line tasks, consistent deficit in off-line performance
Studies with heterogeneous populations, but frontal lobe involvement implicates worse performance
To date, no on-line studies looking at lexical access for idiom comprehension in aphasia
Idiom comprehension deficits have been demonstrated in the literature many times for off-line tasks, consistent deficit in off-line performance
Studies with heterogeneous populations, but frontal lobe involvement implicates worse performance
To date, no on-line studies looking at lexical access for idiom comprehension in aphasia
