Comprehension of reversible constructions in semantic aphasia

Abstract

Background: Impairments in spatial processing show themselves not only in gnosis and praxis, but also in the language domain. Such deficit is a characteristic feature of so-called semantic aphasia. The impaired comprehension of semantically reversible constructions in those patients can be explained by a disorder of the common spatial neuropsychological factor grounded in the temporal-parietal-occipital (TPO) regions of the brain. Aims: The aim of the present study was to experimentally test the possibility that individuals with semantic aphasia experience specific difficulties in extracting spatial relations from a linguistic form and rely instead on basic sensorimotor stereotypes to interpret reversible linguistic constructions. Methods & Procedures: Six individuals with semantic aphasia, 12 people with motor aphasia, 12 people with sensory aphasia, and 12 non-brain-damaged individuals performed a sentence-picture matching task; all participants were native speakers of Russian. Two types of reversible sentences were tested, each representing a direct and an inverted word order: prepositional (The boy is putting the bag in the box vs. The boy is putting in the box the bag) and instrumental (The grandmother is covering the scarf with the hat vs. The grandmother is covering with the hat the scarf). Irreversible sentences (The boy is putting the apple in the bag) served as control stimuli. Outcomes & Results: Each group of participants performed better on irreversible than on reversible sentences. Within reversible sentences, an interaction between word order and construction type was found in individuals with semantic aphasia only. They performed more accurately in prepositional constructions with direct word order and in instrumental constructions with inverted word order-both are related to sensorimotor stereotypes reflecting interaction with objects in the real world. Although no such clear dissociation was found in other aphasia types, correlation analysis revealed the same effect in some participants with motor and sensory aphasia. Conclusions: The findings confirm the importance of situational context for linguistic processing. First, if knowledge of the real world supports the unique interpretation of grammatical markers, it enhances processing in all tested cohorts of participants. Second, people with semantic aphasia consistently use sensorimotor stereotypes to compensate for their linguistic deficits. Since this was also found in some participants with other aphasia types, such a sensorimotor strategy might depend not on the damage to TPO areas as such, but on the intactness and overuse of left premotor regions suggested to be critical for motor and symbolic sequential processing.

Advancing Neurolinguistics in Russia: Experience and Implications of Building Experimental Research and Evidence-Based Practices

“…One such example is our eyetracking experiment that allowed to reinterpret filler reactivation at the trace position in wh-questions, due to the use of specific constructions existing in Russian, but not in English (Sekerina et al, 2019). In another study, free word order and case marking in Russian allowed us to comprehensively test the impact of isomorphism as a linear agreement between the order of sentence constituents and the temporal sequence of events on sentence processing (Dragoy et al, 2016b;Chrabaszcz et al, in press). Thus, overall, specific features of experimentally understudied languages enable to refine existing linguistic models and afford new generalizations about language processing.…”

“…Another important direction for assessment development has been intraoperative language mapping in tumor patients. Our team developed a linguistically grounded assessment protocol for intraoperative mapping with the aim of preserving language function in patients undergoing surgery for brain tumor or epileptogenic tissue resection (Dragoy et al, 2016b(Dragoy et al, , 2017. Collaboration with surgical centers across the country has helped to broadly distribute this knowledge, stimulate broader use of awake surgeries for language mapping and implement the protocol in clinical practice leading to improved language outcomes following surgery.…”

Slavic Psycholinguistics in the 21st Century

“…Acquired (aphasia) and developmental (specific language impairment, SLI) language impairments in Slavic languages also known as neurolinguistics have made substantial gains as well. A steady stream of articles on Russian aphasia from the Laboratory of Neurolinguistics at the Higher School of Economics (HSE) in Moscow (head: Olga Dragoy; Dragoy et al 2016;Laurinavichyute et al 2014) and on Russian-speaking SLI children from the research group at Yale University (Rakhlin et al 2013) deserve a special mention. There are also articles on aphasia and SLI for Bulgarian (Nikolova and Jarema 2004), Czech and Slovak (Marková and Cséfalvay 2010;Smolík and Vávrů 2014), Polish (Jodzio, Biechowska, and Leszniewska-Jodzio 2008), and Serbian (Vuković and Stojanovik 2011;Vuković, Vuković, and Miller 2016).…”

Toward a functional neuroanatomy of semantic aphasia: A history and ten new cases

“…However, the term 'semantic' is often applied to different clinical profiles and their underlying disorders. Luria (1947Luria ( /1970Luria ( , 1962Luria ( /1966Luria ( , 1973 referred to the term as the ultimate integrated meaning of a phrase or a sentence, while other clinical and experimental studies have shown that brain injury may cause a specific impairment in understanding grammatically-expressed relations between referents and events (Ardila, Concha, & Rosselli, 2000;Dragoy et al, 2016;Hier, Mogil, Rubin, & Komros, 1980). While able to understand the meaning of single components of a sentence, such patients experience difficulty in relating them to one another and synthesizing the overall meaning of the utterance, especially in semantically-reversible sentences (e.g., The boy is putting the bag into the box).…”