Purpose: This study investigated conflict adaptation in aphasia, specifically whether upregulating cognitive control improves sentence comprehension. Method: Four individuals with mild aphasia completed four eye tracking sessions with interleaved auditory Stroop and sentence-to-picture matching trials (critical and filler sentences). Auditory…

Wernicke's aphasia (WA) is the classical neurological model of comprehension impairment and, as a result, the posterior temporal lobe is assumed to be critical to semantic cognition. This conclusion is potentially confused by (a) the existence of patient groups with semantic impairment following damage to other brain regions (semantic dementia and…

Focal brain lesions are assumed to produce language deficits by two basic mechanisms: local cortical dysfunction at the lesion site, and remote cortical dysfunction due to disruption of the transfer and integration of information between connected brain regions. However, functional imaging studies investigating language outcome after aphasic…

Broca's area has been considered, for over a century, as the brain centre responsible for speech production. Modern neuroimaging and neuropsychological evidence have suggested a wider functional role is played by this area. In addition to the evidence that it is involved in syntactical analysis, mathematical calculation and music processing, it…

Repetition is a central phenomenon of behavior, and researchers have made extensive use of it to illuminate psychological functioning. In the language sciences, a ubiquitous form of such repetition is "structural priming," a tendency to repeat or better process a current sentence because of its structural similarity to a previously experienced…

We report on three experiments that provide a real-time processing perspective on the poor comprehension of Broca's aphasic patients for non-canonically structured sentences. In the first experiment we presented sentences (via a Cross Modal Lexical Priming (CMLP) paradigm) to Broca's patients at a normal rate of speech. Unlike the pattern found…

Cognitive neuropsychological studies of bilingual patients with aphasia have contributed to our understanding of how the brain processes different languages. The question we asked is whether differences in script have any impact on language processing in bilingual aphasic patients who speak languages with different writing systems: Chinese and…

Sentence comprehension and grammaticality judgment were studied in 10 healthy subjects and 10 agrammatic aphasic stroke patients. The latter were able to make grammaticality and comprehension judgments, but less accurately. Results indicated that such judgments are made using different processes and/or operate on different aspects of language…

Considering Jakobson's theory that speech disorders involve defects in paradigmatic or in syntagmatic operations, and that these two categories result in different defects, this question was examined: does the syntagmatic group suffer from defects not only in contextual generation of active speech but also in comprehension of grammatical…

This article examines the process of language comprehension by relating the question to aphasia. The premise is that the study of aphasia should lead to a better understanding of the processes involved in comprehension. (Text is in French.) (AM)

Investigated the source of agrammatic aphasic patients' difficulty comprehending semantically reversible sentences. Found approximately equal distributions of three distinct patterns. Results conflict with explanations of comprehension failure which state that a single pattern of performance on sentence structures characterizes comprehension of…

Three objectives of research reported here were to describe the neural organization underlying language usage and language loss, to study activities occurring in both cerebral hemispheres, and to study neural changes related to changes in syntactic complexity of stimuli. A dichoptic procedure was chosen. A subject faced a viewing screen on which…