Automatic Syntactic Processing in Agrammatic Aphasia: the Effects of Grammatical Violations

EasyChair Preprint 6527

Abstract

The findings of prior research on asyntactic comprehension vary depending on the experimental task and syntactic contrasts used in the study. When performance of persons with agrammatic aphasia is compared to neurotypical adults, as has been done in several studies, it does not tease apart a general effect of aphasia from syntactic deficits. The main goal of this research is to delineate the nature of asyntactic comprehension deficits in individuals with agrammatic production. The study recruited three groups: agrammatic production (N=9), severity-matched non-agrammatic aphasic individuals (N=7), and neurotypical adults (N=9). Participants engaged in two computer-based tasks (modeled after Faroqi-Shah et al., 2020): word monitoring, which is sensitive to online detection of syntactic violations, and auditory sentence judgment, which measured offline decisions about sentence well-formedness. The stimuli consisted of sentences with and without morphosyntactic (tense and word category) violations and semantic violations. Group analyses (Kruskal-Wallis test) showed impaired sentence judgment in agrammatic aphasia and no word monitoring deficit in aphasia. Single-subject statistics (Crawford & Garthwaite, 2002) showed deficits for both tasks in a subset of both agrammatic and non-agrammatic participants. Although off-line sentence judgment was impaired in agrammatic aphasia, on-line sentence processing was preserved in both agrammatic and non-agrammatic aphasia, consistent with Faroqi-Shah et al.(2020). The findings show that individuals with agrammatic production are preserved in automatic syntactic processing, as measured by the word monitoring task. Their breakdown in off-line sentence judgments could arise from challenges in post-syntactic analysis or working memory limitations. This finding is consistent with distinct neural resources for sentence production and syntactic analysis (Matchin & Hickok, 2020).

Keyphrases: Asyntactic comprehension, Word monitoring, agrammatism, aphasia, sentence processing

@booklet{EasyChair:6527,
  author    = {Minsun Kim and Yasmeen Faroqi-Shah},
  title     = {Automatic Syntactic Processing in Agrammatic Aphasia: the Effects of Grammatical Violations},
  howpublished = {EasyChair Preprint 6527},
  year      = {EasyChair, 2021}}