Background and Aims:Previous studies have shown that age of acquisition affects language production in persons with aphasia (PWA), specifically, earlier-acquired words are better preserved compared to later-learned ones (for review, see Brysbaert & Ellis, 2016). Also, it has been argued that naming objects with lower name agreement requires inhibition of alternative names (Alario et al., 2004), and therefore puts higher demands on cognitive control. Bose and Schafer (2017) showed that although both PWA and healthy controls performed better at naming words with high naming agreement, the difference between the naming conditions was significantly greater for PWA. This could be due to reduced ability to inhibit irrelevant information in PWA. The current study aims to investigate whether cognitive control mediates the effects of psycholinguistic variables on object naming accuracy in aphasia. Methods and Procedures: Participants (N = 31, 32% female) were right-handed, native Russian speakers with preserved visual and hearing abilities diagnosed with mild to moderate post-stroke aphasia. They were aged 40-70 (mean = 59.5, SD = 8.6). The participants were tested on a picture-naming task including 247 items and 2 subtests from the Russian Birmingham Cognitive Screen, namely Auditory attention, and Rule Finding tasks. Outcomes and Results: To define whether cognitive control mediates the effect of psycholinguistic variables on naming response accuracy, multiple linear regression was used. Significant main effects of log-transformed word frequency, AoA, and cognitive control were found, as well as a significant interaction between logtransformed word frequency and cognitive control. Conclusions: Our findings suggest that cognitive control mediated the effect of word frequency in naming in aphasia. PWA with weaker cognitive control name pictures depicting less-frequent words less accurately than more frequent words. This points to the fact that PWA have difficulty in lexical access when producing language. The implications of the study are that the focus of aphasia rehabilitation should be on very frequent structures and words as these are usually more preserved in PWA with weaker cognitive control.
Mixing languages within a sentence or a conversation is a common practice among many speakers of multiple languages. Language mixing found in multilingual speakers with aphasia has been suggested to reflect deficits associated with the brain lesion. In this paper we examine language mixing behaviour in multilingual people with aphasia to test the hypothesis that the use of language mixing reflects a communicative strategy. We analysed connected language production elicited from 11 individuals with aphasia. Words produced were coded as mixed or not. Frequencies of mixing were tabulated for each individual in each of her or his languages in each of two elicitation tasks (Picture sequence description, Narrative production). We tested the predictions that there would be more word mixing: for participants with greater aphasia severity; while speaking in a language of lower post-stroke proficiency; during a task that requires more restricted word retrieval; for people with non-fluent aphasia, while attempting to produce function words (compared to content words); and that there would be little use of a language not known to the interlocutors. The results supported three of the five predictions. We interpret our data to suggest that multilingual speakers with aphasia mix words in connected language production primarily to bypass instances of word-retrieval difficulties, and typically avoid pragmatically inappropriate language mixing.
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