Effects of lexical processing deficits on agrammatic sentence comprehension: An eyetracking study

Individuals with Broca’s aphasia show lexical processing deficits, such as deficits in lexical access or lexical integration. Although studies have implicated lexical processing as areas of impairment in Broca’s aphasia, few studies have looked at the effects of these deficits on sentence comprehension. We conducted a series of eyetracking experiments to test whether Broca’s aphasic individuals are impaired in lexical access or lexical integration and whether such deficits affect sentence comprehension. Results showed that while lexical access and lexical integration are both impaired in Broca’s aphasia, only the deficit in lexical integration affects sentence comprehension

Sentactics®: A Virtual Treatment of Underlying Forms

This study tested the effects of Sentactics®, a computer-automated version of Treatment of Underlying Forms (TUF). Results showed that treatment effects derived from Sentactics® replicated those of clinician-delivered TUF, improving agrammatic patients’ ability to comprehend and produce complex sentences and resulting in generalization to untrained linguistically related forms, of lesser complexity. Additionally, no differences were found in a comparison of the relative effectiveness of computer-delivered Sentactics® and clinician-delivered TUF. These results provide further support for the efficacy of the TUF protocol and demonstrate the viability of computerized therapies in the field of aphasia treatment

The on-line comprehension of wh- movement structures in agrammatic Broca’s aphasia: Evidence from eyetracking

Dickey & Thompson (2004) present evidence that individuals with agrammatic Broca’s aphasia retain significant on-line gap-filling capacity, which improves in response to linguistically-motivated treatment (TUF; Thompson 2001). This paper presents data from an eyetracking study following up this result. Twelve agrammatic aphasic individuals’ and eight control participants’ eyes were tracked while they listened to stories ending with comprehension probes involving wh- movement (wh- object questions, object clefts). Aphasic participants’ responses to probes demonstrated impaired comprehension of wh- movement structures. However, their eye-movements indicated intact automatic processing of the movement sentences, even for wh- questions which they failed to comprehend