Idiom comprehension in aphasic patients

Idiom comprehension was assessed in 10 aphasic patients with semantic deficits by means of a string-to-picture matching task. Patients were also submitted to an oral explanation of the same idioms, and to a word comprehension task. The stimuli of this last task were the words following the verb in the idioms. Idiom comprehension was severely impaired, with a bias toward the literal interpretation. Very few errors were produced with words, making impossible to establish a correlation between comprehension of idioms and of individual words. The difficulties in idiom comprehension seemed to be due to the fact that patients rely on a literal-first strategy, accessing a figurative interpretation only when the linguistic analysis fails to yield acceptable results.     

Comprehension of Idioms in Turkish Aphasic Participants

Brain damaged participants offer an opportunity to evaluate the cognitive and linguistic processes and make assumptions about how the brain works. Cognitive linguists have been investigating the underlying mechanisms of idiom comprehension to unravel the ongoing debate on hemispheric specialization in figurative language comprehension. The aim of this study is to evaluate and compare the comprehension of idiomatic expressions in left brain damaged (LBD) aphasic, right brain damaged (RBD) and healthy control participants. Idiom comprehension in eleven LBD aphasic participants, ten RBD participants and eleven healthy control participants were assessed with three tasks: String to Picture Matching Task, Literal Sentence Comprehension Task and Oral Idiom Definition Task. The results of the tasks showed that in overall idiom comprehension category, the left brain-damaged aphasic participants interpret idioms more literally compared to right brain-damaged participants. What is more, there is a significant difference in opaque idiom comprehension implying that left brain-damaged aphasic participants perform worse compared to right brain-damaged participants. On the other hand, there is no statistically significant difference in scores of transparent idiom comprehension between the left brain-damaged aphasic and right brain-damaged participants. This result also contribute to the idea that while figurative processing system is damaged in LBD aphasics, the literal comprehension mechanism is spared to some extent. The results of this study support the view that idiom comprehension sites are mainly left lateralized. Furthermore, the results of this study are in consistence with the Giora’s Graded Salience Hypothesis.     

The multidetermined nature of idiom processing

Models of idiom comprehension differ in their predictions concerning compositionality: Some claim that idiomatic meaning is the result of compositional analysis initiated at the earliest stages of comprehension, whereas others claim that compositional analysis occurs only at late stages, subsequent to direct retrieval--especially for idioms that are highly familiar. We evaluated these alternatives in four experiments by using a variety of online and offline comprehension measures. In Experiment 1, we analyzed the normative characteristics of 219 idioms with respect to these predictions. Dimensions of interest included several measures of decomposability, familiarity, and word frequency of the idioms' verbs and nouns. In Experiments 2 through 4, we determined how these dimensions relate to several online measures of idiom comprehension. High familiarity was associated with good comprehension across all experiments; however, facilitative effects of decomposability were found only for tasks that required an overt semantic judgment. Word frequency, but not semantic decomposability of the idiom-initial verb, was associated with comprehension for some measures. These data support a model of idiom comprehension, according to which figurative meaning arises from the time-dependent availability of multiple linguistic constraints, and in which decomposability plays a limited role in the earliest stages of idiom comprehension. Normative data for 210 of the idiomatic phrases may be downloaded from the Psychonomic Society Web archive at www.psychonomic.org/archive/.     

Conceptual metaphors are not automatically accessed during idiom comprehension

Do conceptual analogies motivate idiom use and comprehension in discourse? For example, a story in which a person is described asfuming would be analogically consistent with an idiom such asblew her top, but inconsistent with an idiom such asbite his head off. Earlier work by Nayak and Gibbs(1990) had suggested that people use such analogical information during idiom comprehension. We replicated their findings inan idiom choice task, suggesting that people can indeed make use of such knowledge. However, when reading times were used to assess idiom comprehensibility, no effects of analogical consistency were found. We conclude that conceptual analogies play little, if any, role in idiom comprehension unless people have the time (and motivation) to make considered judgments.     

Dissociations and associations of performance in syntactic comprehension in aphasia and their implications for the nature of aphasic deficits

Sixty-one pwa were tested on syntactic comprehension in three tasks: sentence-picture matching, sentence-picture matching with auditory moving window presentation, and object manipulation. There were significant correlations of performances on sentences across tasks. First factors on which all sentence types loaded in unrotated factor analyses accounted for most of the variance in each task. Dissociations in performance between sentence types that differed minimally in their syntactic structures were not consistent across tasks. These results replicate previous results with smaller samples and provide important validation of basic aspects of aphasic performance in this area of language processing. They point to the role of a reduction in processing resources and of the interaction of task demands and parsing and interpretive abilities in the genesis of patient performance.     

The Sum and Substance of It: The Appreciation of Mass and Count Quantifiers in Parkinson′s Disease

We performed three experiments in order to determine whether patients with Parkinson′s disease (PD) have a sentence comprehension impairment. In the first experiment, we found that nondemented PD patients were impaired at matching a short sentence containing a mass or count quantifier (e.g., "Point to the jar with many") with one of four pictures. Patients erred by pointing to the incorrect mass or count type of substance, but pointed correctly to the large or small amount of a substance in the picture. In the second experiment, we asked the same PD patients to judge short sentences containing mass or count nouns modified by mass or count adjectives (e.g., *"The glass contains many milk"). PD patients were significantly impaired at detecting errors in the agreement between a noun and a quantifying adjective and errors in the appropriate use of the plural associated with a noun. A sentence completion task was performed in order to determine whether patients impaired on both sentence-picture matching and sentence judgment tasks are also compromised in their expression of quantifiers. Some patients impaired on both tasks also had difficulty expressing quantifiers, and it is these patients who may have difficulty performing grammatical computations. Other patients were selectively impaired in their sentence-picture matching or their sentence judgments, suggesting a performance deficit concerned with a particular task. We conclude that sentence comprehension impairments in PD are multifactorial in nature.     

Feature analysis and the token test

In a picture-matching task pictures of objects had to be arranged into pairs by aphasic and nonaphasic patients and normal controls. Aphasic patients were also given the Token Test. Correlation between the rank order of error scores in both tests was highly significant in aphasic patients. The pictures were also given to a normal group for free matching. Overlapping of normal performance on free matching and aphasic performance on bound matching occurred. We hypothesized that aphasic impairment was due to a difficulty in calling up associations, difficulty in feature analysis, and in moving from one concept to another. These findings are discussed in the light of abilities needed for Token Test performance. The results indicate that the traditionally presumed fundamental difference between verbal and nonverbal cognitive tasks is rather unsatisfactory.     

Children's understanding of ambiguous idioms and conversational perspective-taking

The aim of this study was to test the hypothesis that conversational perspective-taking is a determinant of unfamiliar ambiguous idiom comprehension. We investigated two types of ambiguous idiom, decomposable and nondecomposable expressions, which differ in the degree to which the literal meanings of the individual words contribute to the overall idiomatic meaning. We designed an experiment to assess the relationship between the acquisition of figurative comprehension and conversational perspective-taking. Our sample of children aged 5-7 years performed three conversational perspective-taking tasks (language acts, shared/unshared information, and conversational maxims). They then listened to decomposable and nondecomposable idiomatic expressions presented in context before performing a multiple-choice task (figurative, literal, and contextual responses). Results indicated that decomposable idiom comprehension was predicted by conversational perspective-taking scores and language skills, whereas nondecomposable idiom comprehension was predicted solely by language skills. We discuss our findings with respect to verbal and pragmatic skills.     

Automatic and volitional semantic processing in aphasia.

The present study investigated the status of semantic information in aphasia by comparing the performances of aphasic and nonaphasic subjects on two tasks: an automatic semantic facilitation task and a volitional task of relatedness judgment. Both the aphasic and nonaphasic groups evidenced a semantic facilitation effect, in an on-line task of semantic processing. However, those aphasics with severe comprehension and naming disturbances (termed low comprehension aphasics) demonstrated considerable difficulty in judging the relatedness between a pictured object and members of that object's semantic field, the severity of the impairment being greater for those pictures that the low comprehension aphasics were unable to name. The pattern of results can best be explained by supposing the structural integrity of the store of semantic information in aphasia, and in particular in low comprehension aphasia: information that is retrieved and manipulated in judgment-mediated tasks with considerable difficulty.     

Patterns of comprehension and production of nouns and verbs in agrammatism: implications for lexical organization

This study examined the relationship between verb retrieval and verb-argument-structure properties in seven agrammatic aphasic patients using tasks requiring access to the verb's lexicon for both comprehension- and productionlike processes. Results showed intact comprehension of both nouns and verbs and noun naming, but impaired naming of verbs. Subjects also demonstrated near-normal performance on a grammaticality judgment task involving verb-argument-structure violations but were impaired in categorizing verbs by type (based on number of obligatory arguments). In both naming and categorization conditions, a hierarchy of verb difficulty emerged. Subjects were more accurate in naming/categorizing one-place verbs than two-place verbs and more accurate in naming/categorizing two-place verbs than three-place verbs. The pattern of selective impairment in lexical access/retrieval supports the hypothesis that one dimension of normal lexical organization is by form class. The results also suggest that no necessary relationship exists between production difficulties and comprehension of nouns/verbs in agrammatism. Further, the performance pattern noted supports the claim that verb-argument-structure properties, an important component of the verb lexicon, influence verb production at the single-word and at the sentence level. Subjects' performance on different tasks suggests that the locus of breakdown in the verb-retrieval processes for productionlike tasks may be in accessing information at the lemma level of representation as per Bock's model (1995) of sentence production.     

Speech sound errors in patients with conduction and Broca's aphasia

Speech sound errors exhibited by three conduction and three Broca's aphasic patients on naming and word-repetition tasks were subjected to phonemic and subphonemic analyses. In the conduction aphasic patients, errors occurred equally often on consonants and vowels in both the naming and word-repetition tasks, while in the Broca's aphasic patients errors occurred selectively on consonants. Transposition errors occurred almost as often as substitution errors in the conduction aphasic patients, while substitution errors constituted the majority of errors in the Broca's aphasic patients. The Broca's aphasic patients, as compared to the conduction aphasic patients, exhibited a markedly higher number of substitution errors occurring between phonemes separated by a single subphonemic feature on the naming task. On the basis of these findings, it was hypothesized that the differences in the error patterns of the two types of aphasia reflected differences in the underlying mechanisms of the impairment in each type.     

Patterns of spontaneous recovery in aphasic groups: A study of adult stroke patients

The recovery of 31 aphasic stroke patients in the first three months postonset was investigated. Improvements on eight comprehension, repetition, and expression tasks were documented for four groups. These groups, retrospectively defined on the basis of initial scores on a fluency and a comprehension task, were: Low Fluency/Low Comprehension (LFLC), Low Fluency/High Comprehension (LFHC), High Fluency/Low Comprehension (HFLC), and High Fluency/High Comprehension (HFHC). Examination of each group's recovery revealed (1) equal improvement on nearly all language tasks for the two High Comprehension groups and (2) a more selective improvement largely in comprehension and imitation tasks for the two Low Comprehension groups. Implications of this selective improvement in initially low comprehending aphasics are discussed.     

Syntactic comprehension deficits in agrammatism

Eleven agrammatic and 16 fluent aphasic patients were given a comprehension task consisting of simple, active and passive reversible sentences. The purpose of the study is to reconsider the comprehension disorders in agrammatism, and particularly of passive reversible sentences, to test to what extent Grodzinsky's trace deletion hypothesis (TDH) is generalizable to other types of NP-movement, and finally to ascertain whether the pattern of impairment observed in agrammatism differs from that of fluent aphasic patients. The study confirms that trace analysis may be selectively impaired in agrammatism. However, this deficit is not the only mechanism underlying comprehension disorders and cannot be said to occur in all agrammatic patients. Comprehension disorders also involve the processing of clitic object pronouns which also underly NP-movement. Finally, the impairment found in fluent aphasic patients differs, both in type and severity, from that of agrammatic patients, thus confirming the peculiar aspects of the agrammatic comprehension deficit suggested by Grodzinsky's TDH.     

Critical reading of words and phrases in aphasia

To assess ability to read critically at the word and phrase level, four tests were administered to aphasic patients blocked on site of lesion and severity of auditory comprehension defect. Overall, site of lesion did not affect the quantitative scores or the patterns of errors in the four tests; this result suggests that there is a fixed order of difficulty in reading comprehension irrespective of the locus of the aphasic deficit. In contrast, profiles of performance differed significantly, depending on severity of comprehension difficulty. Patients with significant comprehension defect proved relatively superior at recognizing misspelled words; relatively poor at matching written nouns with their depicted referents; less likely to display improved comprehension when an additional substantive was included in a written phrase; relatively better at recognizing which words were the same parts of speech than at recognizing which words share salient semantic features; and relatively better at matching words which belonged together than at choosing the word which does not belong to a set. Taken together, the results suggest that strategies of reading may change in the presence of a severe aphasia, with such impaired patients relying less on semantic considerations and consequently more on orthographic information and on the distributional and sequential properties of words in sentences.     

A study of syntactic processing in aphasia I: behavioral (psycholinguistic) aspects

This paper presents the results of a study of syntactically based comprehension in aphasic patients. We studied 42 patients with aphasia secondary to left hemisphere strokes and 25 control participants. We measured off-line, end-of-sentence, performance (accuracy and reaction time) in two tasks that require comprehension--enactment and sentence-picture matching--and in grammaticality judgment, with whole sentence auditory presentation. We also used sentence-picture matching and grammaticality judgment as tasks in two self-paced listening studies with the same patients to measure on-line performance. In each task and presentation format, we presented sentences that tested the ability to assign and interpret three structural contrasts chosen to examine different basic syntactic operations: actives and passives, subject and object extracted relative clauses, and reflexive pronouns and matched sentences without these elements. We examined these behavioral data to determine patterns of impairment in individual patients and in groups of patients, using correlational analyses, factor analyses, and analyses of variance. The results showed that almost no individual patients had stable deficits referable to the ability to interpret individual syntactic structures, that a variety of structural features contributed to sentence processing complexity both on-line and off-line, that correct responses were associated with normal on-line and errors with abnormal performance, and that the major determinant of performance is a factor that affected performance on all sentence types. The results indicate that the major cause of aphasic impairments of syntactically based comprehension are intermittent reductions in the processing capacity available for syntactic, interpretive, and task-related operations.     

The effects of syntactic structure on discourse comprehension in patients with parsing impairments.

Syntactic complexity was systematically manipulated in sentence and discourse comprehension tasks. Aphasic patients, but not normal controls, showed effects of syntactic structure in the sentence comprehension task. Neither aphasic nor control subjects showed significant differences between the comprehension of syntactically simple and complex stories. This pattern confirms the clinical impression that some discourses can be understood by patients who cannot utilize syntactically based sentence comprehension mechanisms.     

Pantomime, praxis, and aphasia.

The production and comprehension of pantomimed movements by asphasic subjects were studied with respect to their relationship to the aphasic deficit on one hand and apraxia on the other. At issue was whether impaired use of pantomime is a manifestation of reduced symbolic capacity or purely a manifestation of an apraxic impairment of purposeful movement or both. Tests of pantomime included a Pantomime Recognition Test, a nonverbal Transitive Pantomime Production Test, and an Intransitive Pantomime Production Test (to oral command). Imitation of Nonmeaningful Movements served as a measure of apraxia, uncontaminated by symbolic or linguistic factors. Imitation of Meaningful Movements taken from the pantomime tasks was also tested. Independent measures of auditory comprehension, picture naming, and reading comprehension were used as indices of language impairment. Intellectual function was measured by the Performance scale of the WAIS. Thirty aphasic subjects were examined. Twenty healthy age-matched normals served to establish scoring standards for the pantomime tests. Multiple regression analysis revealed significant, independent contributions from both auditory comprehension and imitation of Nonmeaningful Movements to all of the tests of pantomime production and pantomime recognition. All measures of pantomime production and pantomime recognition were strongly intercorrelated. While the three language measures were strongly correlated with each other, auditory comprehension was the only one of them that was significantly and consistently related to the pantomime tests. None was related to the imitation of nonmeaningful movement. The results are taken as indicating (1) that pantomime production and imitation share common factors with both praxis and auditory comprehension; (2) apraxia entails impairment of both production and interpretation of purposeful movements. Possible theoretical accounts for these results are offered.     

Patterns of comprehension performance in agrammatic Broca's aphasia: a test of the Trace Deletion Hypothesis

We tested the core prediction of the Trace Deletion Hypothesis (TDH) of agrammatic Broca's aphasia, which contends that such patients' comprehension performance is normal for active reversible sentences but at chance level for passive reversible sentences. We analyzed the comprehension performance of 38 Italian Broca's aphasics with verified damage to Broca's area, who completed sentence-to-picture matching tasks using active and passive reversible sentences as stimuli. The results failed to confirm the predictions made by TDH: only a small minority (15%) performed at chance on passive sentences and better than chance on active sentences. Furthermore, the distribution of the 38 subjects' performance on passive sentences differed from that predicted by the TDH since many more subjects performed at better-than-chance levels than expected. We discuss the implication of these results for claims about the distribution of language processing mechanisms in the brain.     

Familiar idiom comprehension

Sentences containing idioms used either literally or figuratively were presented repeatedly for 100 msec per presentation. Half of the sentences were preceded by a paragraph. The number of presentations required to read the sentences and cued recall of the sentences were recorded. The serial brief presentations method provided predictable and meaningful results. Sentences containing idioms used literally required more presentations than those containing idioms used figuratively. Cued recall was better for idioms used literally than for those used figuratively. These results are interpreted as support for the Idiomatic Processing Model of idiom comprehension, which suggests that the figurative meaning is processed first; only if that one is inappropriate is the literal meaning processed.     

The development of idiom comprehension: an investigation of semantic and contextual processing skills

Two experiments compared 7- and 8-year-olds' and 9- and 10-year-olds' ability to use semantic analysis and inference from context to understand idioms. We used a multiple-choice task and manipulated whether the idioms were transparent or opaque, familiar or novel, and presented with or without a supportive story context. Performance was compared with that of adults (Experiment 1) and 11- and 12-year-olds (Experiment 2). The results broadly support Cacciari and Levorato's global elaboration model of figurative competence with a notable exception: Even the youngest children were able to use semantic analysis to derive the meanings of transparent idioms as well as being sensitive to meaning in context. The findings show that young children process language at both the small-grain phrase level and the discourse level to establish figurative meaning, and they demonstrate that the language processing skills that aid idiom comprehension, as well as idiom knowledge itself, are still not fully developed in 11- and 12-year-olds.