Lexical and Prosodic Effects on Syntactic Ambiguity Resolution in Aphasia

DeDe, Gayle

doi:10.1007/s10936-011-9191-1

Cited by 18 publications

(36 citation statements)

References 56 publications

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“…The Lexical Bias Hypothesis was motivated by studies of normal sentence comprehension, which have convincingly demonstrated that non-disordered individuals use multiple sources of information, including probabilistic cues, to construct a mental representation of a sentence during syntactic parsing (e.g., see MacDonald, Pearlmutter, & Seidenberg, 1994; Pickering & van Gompel, 2006 for reviews). Probabilistic cues refer to statistical regularities within a language, such as the frequency with which specific structures and lexical items occur in a language and the contexts in which particular words appear (e.g., DeDe, 2010; Garnsey et al, 1997; MacDonald et al, 1994; Pickering & Van Gompel, 2006; Trueswell & Tanenhaus, 1994). Thus, the Lexical Bias Hypothesis predicts that people with aphasia would have more difficulty understanding sentences in which the probabilistic cues do not bias the listener or reader to the correct interpretation of the sentence.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…), though it can also occur in a transitive sentence frame (e.g., The parents danced the tango .). The fact that verb transitivity bias influences how college age adults process syntactically ambiguous sentences is well documented (e.g., DeDe, 2010; Staub, 2011). Relatively few studies have examined how verb argument structure in general, or transitivity biases in particular, influence sentence comprehension in people with aphasia.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…DeDe (2011) investigated whether lexical and prosodic cues influence how people with aphasia process syntactically ambiguous sentences in a self-paced listening study. The lexical cues were verb transitivity bias and plausibility; plausibility referred to whether or not the noun following the verb was a likely object for that verb.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Verb transitivity bias affects on-line sentence reading in people with aphasia

DeDe

2013

Aphasiology

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Background Studies of sentence comprehension in non-disordered populations have convincingly demonstrated that probabilistic cues influence on-line syntactic processing. One well-studied cue is verb argument structure bias, which refers to the probability that a verb will occur in a particular syntactic frame. According to the Lexical Bias Hypothesis, people with aphasia have difficulty understanding sentences in which the verb’s argument structure bias conflicts with the sentence structure (e.g., a transitively biased verb in an intransitive sentence). This hypothesis may provide an account of why people with aphasia have difficulty understanding both simple and complex sentences. Aims The purpose of this study was to test the Lexical Bias Hypothesis using an on-line measure of written sentence comprehension, self-paced reading. Methods & Procedures The participants were ten people with aphasia and ten non-brain-damaged controls. The stimuli were syntactically simple transitive and intransitive sentences that contained transitively- or intransitively-biased verbs. For example, the transitively-biased verb “called” appeared in sentences such as “The agent called (the writer) from overseas to make an offer.” The intransitively-biased verb “danced” appeared in sentences such as “The couple danced (the tango) every Friday night last summer.” Outcomes & Results Both groups’ reading times for critical segments were longer when the verb’s transitivity bias did not match the sentence structure, particularly in intransitive sentences. Conclusions The results were generally consistent with the Lexical Bias Hypothesis, and demonstrated that lexical biases affect on-line processing of syntactically simple sentences in people with aphasia and controls.

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Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Verb transitivity bias affects on-line sentence reading in people with aphasia

DeDe

2013

Aphasiology

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“…However, a small number of studies have investigated how other probabilistic cues contribute to sentence comprehension impairments in aphasia (DeDe, 2012(DeDe, , 2013bGahl, 2002;Russo, Peach, & Shapiro, 1998). Gahl (2002) proposed the lexical bias hypothesis, which claims that people with aphasia rely on probabilistic knowledge about verb bias to a greater extent than individuals without brain damage.…”

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confidence: 99%

Online Sentence Reading in People With Aphasia: Evidence From Eye Tracking

Knilans

DeDe

2015

Am J Speech Lang Pathol

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Purpose: There is a lot of evidence that people with aphasia have more difficulty understanding structurally complex sentences (e.g., object clefts) than simpler sentences (subject clefts). However, subject clefts also occur more frequently in English than object clefts. Thus, it is possible that both structural complexity and frequency affect how people with aphasia understand these structures. Method: Nine people with aphasia and 8 age-matched controls participated in the study. The stimuli consisted of 24 object cleft and 24 subject cleft sentences. The task was eye tracking during reading, which permits a more fine-grained analysis of reading performance than measures such as self-paced reading.Results: As expected, controls had longer reading times for critical regions in object cleft sentences compared with subject cleft sentences. People with aphasia showed the predicted effects of structural frequency. Effects of structural complexity in people with aphasia did not emerge on their first pass through the sentence but were observed when they were rereading critical regions of complex sentences. Conclusions: People with aphasia are sensitive to both structural complexity and structural frequency when reading. However, people with aphasia may use different reading strategies than controls when confronted with relatively infrequent and complex sentence structures. P eople with aphasia often have difficulty understanding complex sentences, especially sentences that do not follow the canonical, or typical, word order for their language (e.g., Dick et al., 2001). In English, sentences typically follow subject-verb-object word order. Sentences with noncanonical word order are both more syntactically complex and less common than sentences with canonical word order (e.g., Roland, Dick, & Elman, 2007). Studies of sentence comprehension impairments in people with aphasia have focused on the contributions of structural complexity (e.g., Caplan, Waters, DeDe, Michaud, & Reddy, 2007;Dick et al., 2001;Grodzinsky, 2000;Thompson & Choy, 2009). However, research from adults without brain damage suggests that the relative frequency of syntactic structures also influences processing difficulty (e.g., Levy, 2008;Staub, 2010). Thus, it is possible that people with aphasia have trouble understanding sentences with noncanonical word order at least in part because such sentences occur relatively infrequently compared with sentences with canonical word order. The purpose of the present study was to determine whether sentence comprehension impairments in people with aphasia reflect sensitivity to the frequency of the structure as well as structural complexity.A lot of evidence regarding effects of structural complexity comes from studies investigating how people with aphasia process sentences with object and subject relative clauses, such as the object and subject clefts in examples 1 and 2: Sentences 1 and 2 both convey the idea "the boy hugged the girl," but object clefts such as in sentence 1 are more difficult to process than su...

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“…In NBD English individuals, these extra processing costs are not problematic. However, it has repeatedly been reported that individuals with aphasia are slower to fully integrate grammatical, lexical-semantic, discourse, and prosodic information (see, e.g., DeDe, 2012). The extra processing costs required by the integration process may disrupt the parsing process of English sentences with direct and indirect speech in individuals with aphasia.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%