Semantic effects in sentence recall: The contribution of immediate vs delayed recall in language assessment

Abstract

The reader will be able to: (i) define the difference between immediate and delayed sentence recall and different types of distractors, (ii) explain the utility of immediate and delayed recall sentence recall in language assessment, (iii) discuss suitability of delayed recall for the assessment of semantics.

Sentence Recall in Latent and Anomic Aphasia: An Exploratory Study of Semantics and Syntax

“…It could also be that the linguistic stimuli in this study may not have been sensitive enough to elicit a semantic plausibility effect. The latter explanation seems unlikely because similar sentences in terms of number of words and syntactic complexity have been used previously in the neurotypical and aphasia literature [31,32,37]. Our findings also differ from Newcombe and Marshall [34], the only other study of sentence recall in possibly latent aphasia that we are aware of.…”

“…Accuracy is the standard way of investigating sentence recall. While past research [32,38] showed that it is discriminatory in relatively more severe forms of mild aphasia, such as anomic, accuracy as a measure on its own may not distinguish between latent aphasia and neurotypical controls. This finding highlights the importance of temporal speech measures in revealing subtle language deficits not only as a result of stroke [16,27] but also other neurological conditions, non-progressive and progressive [83].…”

“…For example, birds eat worms, but worms do not eat birds. Although such linguistic contrasts have attracted attention in literature domains beyond aphasia [31][32][33], they remain largely unexplored in aphasia. Newcombe and Marshall [34] investigated sentence recall in people with focal, left hemisphere lesions, with and without aphasia.…”

“…Accordingly, plausible and implausible sentences resemble the two main conditions of inhibitory control measures. In the context of sentence recall, meaningful and familiar information, which is activated in plausible sentences, is thought to be more resistant to interference than less meaningful information when recalling implausible sentences [32]. This happens presumably because the novel conceptual event triggered by a plausible sentence is congruent with semantic representations in long-term memory (LTM).…”

Effects of semantic plausibility, syntactic complexity and n-gram frequency on children's sentence repetition

“…Evidence is available for both children and adults and for typologically different languages (English, Arabic, Czech; e.g., Miller & Isard, 1963;Polišenská et al, 2015;Valian et al, 2006;Wallan et al, 2011). For example, in a delayed recall task, Polišenská, Chiat, Comer and McKenzie (2014) demonstrated that plausibility improved recall in adults and six-year-old children, and that this effect increased with task difficulty. Plausible and implausible sentences encode different situations, with plausible sentences describing situations more likely to have occurred in the real world and therefore to have been experienced and encoded by the listener.…”