Mira Goral

Relationships among Facial, Prosodic, and Lexical Channels of Emotional Perceptual Processing

This study was designed to address the issue of whether there is a general processor for the perception of emotion or whether there are separate processors. We examined the relationships among three channels of emotional communication in 100 healthy right-handed adult males and females. The channels were facial, prosodic/intonational, and lexical/verbal; both identification and discrimination tasks of emotional perception were utilised. Statistical analyses controlled for nonemotional perceptual factors and subject characteristics (i.e. demographic and general cognitive). For identification, multiple significant correlations were found among the channels. For discrimination, fewer correlations were significant. Overall, these results provide support for the notion of a general processor for emotional perceptual identification in normal adult subjects.

Bilateral brain regions associated with naming in older adults

To determine structural brain correlates of naming abilities in older adults, we tested 24 individuals aged 56-79 on two confrontation-naming tests (the Boston Naming Test (BNT) and the Action Naming Test (ANT)), then collected from these individuals structural Magnetic-Resonance Imaging (MRI) and Diffusion Tensor Imaging (DTI) data. Overall, several regions showed that greater gray and white matter volume/integrity measures were associated with better task performance. Left peri-Sylvian language regions and their right-hemisphere counterparts, plus left mid-frontal gyrus correlated with accuracy and/or negatively with response time (RT) on the naming tests. Fractional anisotropy maps derived from DTI showed robust positive correlations with ANT accuracy bilaterally in the temporal lobe and in right middle frontal lobe, as well as negative correlations with BNT RT, bilaterally, in the white matter within middle and inferior temporal lobes. We conclude that those older adults with relatively better naming skills can rely on right-hemisphere peri-Sylvian and mid-frontal regions and pathways, in conjunction with left-hemisphere peri-Sylvian and mid-frontal regions, to achieve their success.

Training verb production in communicative context: Evidence from a person with chronic non‐fluent aphasia

Background: The use of constraint‐induced treatment in aphasia therapy has yielded promising but mixed results. Aims: We conducted a treatment study with an individual with chronic non‐fluent aphasia. The goal of the treatment was to improve verb production in sentence and narrative contexts. Methods & Procedures: We administered a modified constraint‐induced aphasia treatment in a single‐participant design. Treatment emphasised the production of verbs within informative exchanges. Verb production in narratives was assessed before and after the treatment. Outcomes & Results: Results demonstrated a significant increase in the number of verbs produced during narrative generation following treatment. Moreover, a positive change was perceived by naïve listeners who rated the social‐communicative impact of the participants narratives. Conclusions: The increase in verb production seen in the post‐treatment measures is attributed to a combination of the constraints imposed on sentence production during the treatment sessions, the informative nature of the treatment exchanges, and the relative intensity of the treatment schedule.

Nonparallel recovery in bilingual aphasia: Effects of language choice, language proficiency, and treatment

We describe a 57-year-old Russian-Hebrew bilingual aphasic patient who received speech-language therapy in his second language (Hebrew) in the first three-and-a-half months post onset and then in his first language (Russian) for an additional month and a half. He was first diagnosed with Expressive-Receptive aphasia in both languages. After four weeks of treatment in the second language, his language skills improved and he was subsequently diagnosed with Predominantly Receptive aphasia in both languages. Three-and-a-half months post onset, he was diagnosed differently in the two languages: Predominantly Receptive aphasia in Hebrew and Amnestic aphasia in Russian. Following additional six weeks of therapy, this time in his first language (Russian), the patient was diagnosed as Amnestic in both his languages. We present the course of his improvement as seen in four successive evaluation periods in both the treated and nontreated languages, in all language modalities. We address various factors that may have contributed to the nonparallel recovery of the two languages and discuss the relative contribution of spontaneous recovery, therapeutic transfer, language proficiency, language use, and structural relations between the two languages.

Cross-language treatment generalisation: A case of trilingual aphasia

BACKGROUND: Recent investigations of language gains following treatment in bilingual individuals with chronic aphasia appear to confirm early reports that not only the treated language but also the non-treated language(s) benefit from treatment. The evidence, however, is still suggestive, and the variables that may mitigate generalisation across languages warrant further investigation. AIMS: We set out to examine cross-language generalisation of language treatment in a trilingual speaker with mild chronic aphasia. METHODS #ENTITYSTARTX00026; PROCEDURES: Language treatment was administered in English, the participants second language (L2). The first treatment block focused on morphosyntactic skills and the second on language production rate. Measurements were collected in the treated language (English, L2) as well as the two non-treated languages: Hebrew (the participants first language, L1) and French (the participants third language, L3). OUTCOMES #ENTITYSTARTX00026; RESULTS: The participant showed improvement in his production of selected morphosyntactic elements, such as pronoun gender agreement, in the treated language (L2) as well as in the non-treated French (L3) following the treatment block that focused on morphosyntactic skills. Speech rate also improved in English (L2) and French (L3) following that treatment block. No changes were observed in Hebrew, the participants L1. CONCLUSIONS: Selective cross-language generalisation of treatment benefit was found for morphosyntactic abilities from the participants second language to his third language.

Effects of Health Status on Word Finding in Aging

OBJECTIVES: To evaluate effects of health status on word‐finding difficulty in aging, adjusting for the known contributors of education, sex, and ethnicity.

The Contribution of Set Switching and Working Memory to Sentence Processing in Older Adults

This study evaluates the involvement of switching skills and working-memory capacity in auditory sentence processing in older adults. The authors examined 241 healthy participants, aged 55 to 88 years, who completed four neuropsychological tasks and two sentence-processing tasks. In addition to age and the expected contribution of working memory, switching ability, as measured by the number of perseverative errors on the Wisconsin Card Sorting Test, emerged as a strong predictor of performance on both sentence-processing tasks. Individuals with both low working-memory spans and more perseverative errors achieved the lowest accuracy scores. These findings are consistent with compensatory accounts of successful performance in older age.

Semantic verbal fluency in two contrasting languages

This cross‐linguistic study investigated Semantic Verbal Fluency (SVF) performance in 30 American English‐speaking and 30 Finnish‐speaking healthy elderly adults with different cultural and linguistic backgrounds. Despite the different backgrounds of the participant groups, remarkable similarities were found between the groups in the overall SVF performance in two semantic categories (animals and clothes), in the proportions of words produced within the first half (30 seconds) of the SVF tasks, and in the variety of words produced for the categories. These similarities emerged despite the difference in the mean length of words produced in the two languages (with Finnish words being significantly longer than English words). The few differences found between the groups concerned the types and frequencies of the 10 most common words generated for the categories. It was concluded that culture and language differences do not contribute significantly to variability in SVF performance in healthy elderly people.

Language and Dementia: Neuropsychological Aspects.

This article reviews recent evidence for the relationship between extralinguistic cognitive and language abilities in dementia. A survey of data from investigations of three dementia syndromes (Alzheimers disease, semantic dementia and progressive nonfluent aphasia) reveals that, more often than not, deterioration of conceptual organization appears associated with lexical impairments, whereas impairments in executive function are associated with sentence- and discourse-level deficits. These connections between extralinguistic functions and language ability also emerge from the literature on cognitive reserve and bilingualism that investigates factors that delay the onset and possibly the progression of neuropsychological manifestation of dementia.

Lexical Attrition in Younger and Older Bilingual Adults.

Healthy monolingual older adults experience changes in their lexical abilities. Bilingual individuals immersed in an environment in which their second language is dominant experience lexical changes, or attrition, in their first language. Changes in lexical skills in the first language of older individuals who are bilinguals, therefore, can be attributed to the typical processes accompanying older age, the typical processes accompanying first‐language attrition in bilingual contexts, or both. The challenge, then, in understanding how lexical skills change in bilingual older individuals, lies in dissociating these processes. This paper addresses the difficulty of teasing apart the effects of ageing and attrition in older bilinguals and proposes some solutions. It presents preliminary results from a study of lexical processing in bilingual younger and older individuals. Processing differences were found for the older bilingual participants in their first language (L1), but not in their second language (L2). It is concluded that the lexical behaviour found for older bilinguals in this study can be attributed to L1 attrition and not to processes of ageing. These findings are discussed in the context of previous reports concerning changes in lexical skills associated with typical ageing and those associated with bilingual L1 attrition.