American Journal of Speech-Language Pathology, 2012
Purpose To investigate the time-course of processing of lexical items in auditorily presented can... more Purpose To investigate the time-course of processing of lexical items in auditorily presented canonical (subject–verb–object) constructions in young, neurologically unimpaired control participants and participants with left-hemisphere damage and agrammatic aphasia. Method A cross modal picture priming (CMPP) paradigm was used to test 114 control participants and 8 participants with agrammatic aphasia for priming of a lexical item (direct object noun) immediately after it is initially encountered in the ongoing auditory stream and at 3 additional time points at 400-ms intervals. Results The control participants demonstrated immediate activation of the lexical item, followed by a rapid loss (decay). The participants with aphasia demonstrated delayed activation of the lexical item. Conclusion This evidence supports the hypothesis of a delay in lexical activation in people with agrammatic aphasia. The delay in lexical activation feeds syntactic processing too slowly, contributing to com...
We describe an effort to map lesion to behavior by studying the comprehension of complex VP-Ellip... more We describe an effort to map lesion to behavior by studying the comprehension of complex VP-Ellipsis constructions (e.g., The policeman defended the child, and the dedicated fireman did___ too…) in participants with Broca‟s aphasia. We quantified the lesions of our individual participants using cytoarchitectonic probability maps of the human brain. We found that our Broca participants evinced delayed priming of the object in the ellipsis clause, while off-line comprehension was largely spared. Structure-function analyses revealed that lesions in both temporal and frontal areas participated in the behavioral outcomes, though each region seems to have played a distinct role.
This study investigated the comprehension of various types of Wh-questions in unimpaired adults a... more This study investigated the comprehension of various types of Wh-questions in unimpaired adults and those with Broca’s aphasia. Using an eye tracking-while listening method, we examined four specific hypotheses. Our initial results for our healthy controls revealed offline support for a Word Order Hypothesis – object-extracted Who and Which-NP questions took longer to resolve than subject-extracted versions. Our results using eye gaze data, however, revealed support for a Retrieval Hypothesis – Which-NP questions that contain more specific information yielded fewer looks to the correct referent than their Who-question counterparts. These patterns set the stage for our ongoing aphasia study.
Autism is characterized by language and communication deficits. We investigated grammatical and l... more Autism is characterized by language and communication deficits. We investigated grammatical and lexical processes in high-functioning autism by contrasting the production of regular and irregular past-tense forms. Boys with autism and typically-developing control boys did not differ in accuracy or error rates. However, boys with autism were significantly faster than controls at producing rule-governed past-tenses (slip-slipped, plim-plimmed, bring-bringed), though not lexically-dependent past-tenses (bring-brought, squeeze-squeezed, splim-splam). This pattern mirrors previous findings from Tourette syndrome attributed to abnormalities of frontal/basal-ganglia circuits that underlie grammar. We suggest a similar abnormality underlying language in autism. Importantly, even when children with autism show apparently normal language (e.g., in accuracy or with diagnostic instruments), processes and/or brain structures subserving language may be atypical in the disorder.
American Journal of Speech-Language Pathology, 2012
Purpose To investigate the time-course of processing of lexical items in auditorily presented can... more Purpose To investigate the time-course of processing of lexical items in auditorily presented canonical (subject–verb–object) constructions in young, neurologically unimpaired control participants and participants with left-hemisphere damage and agrammatic aphasia. Method A cross modal picture priming (CMPP) paradigm was used to test 114 control participants and 8 participants with agrammatic aphasia for priming of a lexical item (direct object noun) immediately after it is initially encountered in the ongoing auditory stream and at 3 additional time points at 400-ms intervals. Results The control participants demonstrated immediate activation of the lexical item, followed by a rapid loss (decay). The participants with aphasia demonstrated delayed activation of the lexical item. Conclusion This evidence supports the hypothesis of a delay in lexical activation in people with agrammatic aphasia. The delay in lexical activation feeds syntactic processing too slowly, contributing to com...
We describe an effort to map lesion to behavior by studying the comprehension of complex VP-Ellip... more We describe an effort to map lesion to behavior by studying the comprehension of complex VP-Ellipsis constructions (e.g., The policeman defended the child, and the dedicated fireman did___ too…) in participants with Broca‟s aphasia. We quantified the lesions of our individual participants using cytoarchitectonic probability maps of the human brain. We found that our Broca participants evinced delayed priming of the object in the ellipsis clause, while off-line comprehension was largely spared. Structure-function analyses revealed that lesions in both temporal and frontal areas participated in the behavioral outcomes, though each region seems to have played a distinct role.
This study investigated the comprehension of various types of Wh-questions in unimpaired adults a... more This study investigated the comprehension of various types of Wh-questions in unimpaired adults and those with Broca’s aphasia. Using an eye tracking-while listening method, we examined four specific hypotheses. Our initial results for our healthy controls revealed offline support for a Word Order Hypothesis – object-extracted Who and Which-NP questions took longer to resolve than subject-extracted versions. Our results using eye gaze data, however, revealed support for a Retrieval Hypothesis – Which-NP questions that contain more specific information yielded fewer looks to the correct referent than their Who-question counterparts. These patterns set the stage for our ongoing aphasia study.
Autism is characterized by language and communication deficits. We investigated grammatical and l... more Autism is characterized by language and communication deficits. We investigated grammatical and lexical processes in high-functioning autism by contrasting the production of regular and irregular past-tense forms. Boys with autism and typically-developing control boys did not differ in accuracy or error rates. However, boys with autism were significantly faster than controls at producing rule-governed past-tenses (slip-slipped, plim-plimmed, bring-bringed), though not lexically-dependent past-tenses (bring-brought, squeeze-squeezed, splim-splam). This pattern mirrors previous findings from Tourette syndrome attributed to abnormalities of frontal/basal-ganglia circuits that underlie grammar. We suggest a similar abnormality underlying language in autism. Importantly, even when children with autism show apparently normal language (e.g., in accuracy or with diagnostic instruments), processes and/or brain structures subserving language may be atypical in the disorder.
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Papers by M. Walenski