Lise Menn

Contrasting cases of Italian agrammatic aphasia without comprehension disorder

Two patients with agrammatic speech and unimpaired comprehension are presented and contrasted. Case 1 had an infarction involving precentral gyrus, subjacent white matter, and posterior and superior aspects of the insula, largely sparing Brocas area. His speech was slow and dysarthric, consisting of short disconnected phrases with some omission of lexical verbs. Case 2 had an unusual transient aphasia of acute onset without hemiplegia; speech rate, articulation, and sentence length and complexity appeared normal. Both patients tended to omit function words and finite verb inflections, but Case 2 did so much more than did Case 1. Neither patient showed impairment in any other area of language performance. Tentatively, Case 2 is described as being more morphologically impaired but less syntactically impaired than Case 1, while neither has damage to a central language processor.

1 – Is Agrammatism a Unitary Phenomenon?*

Publisher Summary This chapter provides an overview of the concept of Agrammatism. In the year 1918, Deleuze was the first to provide a description of Agrammatisim, wherein it was described as a remarkable feature in the speech by certain aphasic patients. This phenomenon has recently come under the supervision of both linguists and neuropsychologists owing to the significance of it as a channel linking the linguistic construct to the brain mechanisms of language. However, the description has changed from the prior one during the modern Era, which characterizes solely as in terms of changes in the linguistic structure of speech output.

Comprehending conventional and novel metaphors: An ERP study

The neural mechanisms underlying the processing of conventional and novel conceptual metaphorical sentences were examined with event-related potentials (ERPs). Conventional metaphors were created based on the Contemporary Theory of Metaphor and were operationally defined as familiar and readily interpretable. Novel metaphors were unfamiliar and harder to interpret. Using a sensicality judgment task, we compared ERPs elicited by the same target word when it was used to end anomalous, novel metaphorical, conventional metaphorical and literal sentences. Amplitudes of the N400 ERP component (320-440 ms) were more negative for anomalous sentences, novel metaphors, and conventional metaphors compared with literal sentences. Within a later window (440-560 ms), ERPs associated with conventional metaphors converged to the same level as literal sentences while the novel metaphors stayed anomalous throughout. The reported results were compatible with models assuming an initial stage for metaphor mappings from one concept to another and that these mappings are cognitively taxing.

Lexical Retrieval: The Tip-of-the-Tongue Phenomenon.

An experiment is reported in which university undergraduates were given word definitions and asked to say aloud all responses that came to mind in the course of their attempts to retrieve the target words. Results showed that phonologically similar responses and word-fragments are good predictors of target word knowledge and the likelihood of eventual success in retrieval. Responses which were semantically related to the target word were less predictive of eventual success. Results are discussed in terms of their implications for interpreting tip-of-the-tongue analyses as a “window” on the process of word retrieval.

Non-fluent Aphasia in a Multilingual World

“Non-fluent Aphasia in a Multilingual World” is an up-to-date introduction to the language of patients with non-fluent aphasia. Recent research in languages other than English has challenged our old descriptions of aphasia syndromes: while their patterns can be recognized across languages, the structure of each language has a profound effect on the symptoms of aphasic speech. However, the basic linguistic concepts needed to understand these effects in languages other than English have rarely been part of the training of the clinician. “Non-fluent Aphasia in a Multilingual World” introduces these concepts plainly and concretely, in the context of dozens of examples from the narratives and conversations of patients speaking most of the major languages of Europe, North America and Asia. Linguistic and clinical terms are carefully defined and kept as theory neutral as possible. “Non-Fluent Aphasia in a Multilingual World” is especially useful for speech-language pathologists whose patients are immigrants and guestworkers, and for the clinician who must deal creatively with the challenges of providing aphasia diagnosis and therapy in a multicultural, multidialectical setting.

Primary Progressive Aphasia in a Bilingual Woman

Multilingual aphasias are common because most people in the world know more than one language, but little is known of these syndromes except in patients who have had a stroke. We present a 76-year-old right-handed woman, fluent in English and Chinese, who developed anomia at age 70 and then progressed to aphasia. Functional neuroimaging disclosed mild left temporoparietal hypometabolism. Neurolinguistic testing was performed in both English and Chinese, representing a unique contribution to the literature. Results revealed conduction-like aphasia that was comparable in the two languages, although English was slightly better preserved. Primary progressive aphasia has disrupted 2 languages in a similar manner, suggesting their close neuroanatomic relationship in this case.

What "mice trap" tells us about the mental lexicon.

Level ordering has proven inadequate as a morphological theory, leaving unexplained the experimental results taken to support it as a component of innate grammar-young childrens acceptance of irregular plurals in English compounds. The present study demonstrates that these results can be explained by slower access to the grammatically preferred singulars of irregular nouns when compounds are created on-line from plural stimuli. Experiments on English noun-noun compound production and on production of either singular or plural forms from the same or opposite form confirmed that more irregular than regular plurals were used in compounds, and showed that producing irregular singulars from plurals was slower than producing regular singulars. Plural responses were also slower when cue and required response number differed.

Connectionist Modeling and the Microstructure of Phonological Development: A Progress Report

Children learning to pronounce the sounds of their languages exhibit individual differences and a varying but often high degree of regularity in their rendering of adult words. The mappings from adult to child words show great phonetic context dependency and considerable stability over time, but often much lexical irregularity and other ‘unruly behavior’. Standard child phonology models, derived from adult-based phonological theory, ignore such unruly phenomena as non-rule-governed template matching, crosstalk between rules, and fuzzy boundaries of rule domains. Connectionist learning models are in principle well adapted to simulating these properties; a model in progress, GEYKO, is sketched. Children have access to several feedback loops in learning to pronounce, both internal (auditory, motor, proprioceptive) and external (parental social and material reinforcement). GEYKO’s speech gesture planning module is intended to learn production with the aid of such feedback, and its auditory planning module will learn perceptual categorization of spectral data by unsupervised learning methods.

LANGUAGE ACQUISITION, APHASIA, AND PHONOTACTIC UNIVERSALS

In this paper I will consider the nature of phonotactic markedness in the light of work in early first language phonotaxis. Then we will turn to work in progress on a particular family of aphasic word production errors, to recent studies of second language acquisition, and to instrumental phonetic work on perceptual aspects of phonotaxis. I think that all four of these areas of study, as well as slip of the tongue data, are fitting together to make a coherent explanatory approach to phonotactic universals, this paper is intended as a brief introduction to the nature of that approach.

Analysing speech problems in a longitudinal case study of logopenic variant PPA

Background: Primary progressive aphasia (PPA) is a neurodegenerative form of dementia in which gradually worsening language impairments are the prominent feature in the initial stages. PPA is commonly differentiated into three variants: nonfluent agrammatic (PPA-NVF), semantic (PPA-SV), and logopenic (PPA-LV). Aims: This article provides a longitudinal description of changes in picture description produced by a woman with PPA-LV, introduces a reliable new measure that captures those changes, and relates the measured changes to raters’ perceptions of changes in discourse quality. Method & Procedures: Seven oral descriptions of the Boston Diagnostic Aphasia Examination (BDAE) Cookie Theft picture were digitally recorded over the course of 27 months and later transcribed. Transcriptions were analysed using a new adaptation of the Linguistic Communication Measure (LCM) and the Linguistic Communication Measure-Revised Cantonese (LCM-RC) designed to be sensitive to the features of PPA-LV. We have named this third form the LCM, the Linguistic Communication Measure–-Speech Sounds (LCM-SS). Audio recordings of the seven picture descriptions plus three produced by typical speakers of similar age were rated for goodness by 15 raters. Outcomes & Results: Goodness ratings of the participants’ speech samples decreased steadily over the 27 months. Although our previous measures of discourse quality (LCM, LCMC-RC) appeared to work well for capturing many of the speakers with vascular aphasia, they failed to capture the nature of this participant’s decline: Her lexical access slowed over time, but did not become more error-prone, and morphosyntactic components did not worsen, with errors remaining low to almost absent. However, speech sound errors and repetitions increased steadily over the 27 months. The new measure, LCM-SS, succeeded in capturing this pattern of decline: Several of the LCM-SS measures were highly correlated to ratings of goodness, and two of the LCM-SS indices (sound errors and grammatical errors) accounted for 98% of the variance in the goodness ratings. Conclusions: Over the course of 27 months, the most significant change in this participant’s Cookie Theft descriptions was the steady increase in sound errors, in the context of decreased efficiency in lexical retrieval and relatively stable grammatical form. This pattern was also highly related to listeners’ perceptions of the quality of discourse. Neither of the previous versions of the LCM captured this debilitating increase in sound errors, but adding the index of sound errors to those previous versions resulted in an analysis method that was sensitive to the linguistic features exhibited by this participant with PPA-LV.