A mapping theory of agrammatic comprehension deficits

This paper offers evidence for the Isomorphic Mapping Hypothesis, which holds that individuals with agrammatic aphasia tend to have difficulty comprehending sentences in which the order of NPs is not aligned with the structure of the corresponding event. We begin by identifying a set of constructions in English and Korean for which the IMH makes predictions distinct from those of canonical order and trace-based theories of agrammatic comprehension. Then, drawing on data involving the interpretation of those patterns by English-speaking and Korean-speaking agrammatics, we argue for the conceptual and empirical superiority of the isomorphic mapping account.     

Asyntactic thematic role assignment by Mandarin aphasics: a test of the Trace-Deletion Hypothesis and the Double Dependency Hypothesis

This study examines the comprehension patterns of various sentence types by Mandarin-speaking aphasic patients and evaluates the validity of the predictions from the Trace-Deletion Hypothesis (TDH) and the Double Dependency Hypothesis (DDH). Like English, the canonical word order in Mandarin is SVO, but the two languages differ in that the head noun precedes the relative clause in English, but it follows the relative clause in Chinese. According to the Default Principle as stated in the TDH, the word order discrepancy will make subject relative clauses more difficult to comprehend for Mandarin agrammatics than object relative clauses, but the DDH predicts that agrammatic patients from the two languages have the same pattern of selective deficits. The results of this study support the prediction of the TDH.     

Frog skin,time series,and other kinds of data: Nonisomorphic representation and analysis

Representational art is spatially congruent, or isomorphic, with objects in the world. In other words, they are the same in some important way. But not all representation is isomorphic. Data graphs are a type of nonisomorphic representation. A major goal of data graphs is to facilitate the rapid comprehension of differences or relations. This is done by providing a kind of analogy between something that can be “seen” (the relative heights of points) and some relevant information. This article discusses some rules about data graphing, then some new visualization tools are briefly critiqued.     

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.     

Incrementality and Prediction in Human Sentence Processing

We identify a number of principles with respect to prediction that, we argue, underpin adult language comprehension: (a) comprehension consists in realizing a mapping between the unfolding sentence and the event representation corresponding to the real-world event being described; (b) the realization of this mapping manifests as the ability to predict both how the language will unfold, and how the real-world event would unfold if it were being experienced directly; (c) concurrent linguistic and nonlinguistic inputs, and the prior internal states of the system, each drive the predictive process; (d) the representation of prior internal states across a representational substrate common to the linguistic and nonlinguistic domains enables the predictive process to operate over variable time frames and variable levels of representational abstraction. We review empirical data exemplifying the operation of these principles and discuss the relationship between prediction, event structure, thematic role assignment, and incrementality.     

Double-Agents and Trace-Deletion in Agrammatism

The Trace-Deletion Hypothesis (henceforth TDH; Grodzinsky 1986, 1995) states that syntactic traces are deleted in agrammatism and that whenever a trace is deleted, a default strategy is activated. The default strategy assigns the role of Agent to the first NP. In structures where a second NP receives the Agent role syntactically, the consequence is that the agrammatic representation contains two conflicting Agents for the same action. This is the mechanism that induces guessing and the random performance on comprehension tests that has often been observed for passives and certain other structures. In this paper, we isolate the default strategy of the TDH, using a sentence-picture matching task in which one of the pictures matches the meaning arrived at by the default strategy. Our results show that an agrammatic representation does not involve double-Agents, and thus the default strategy (and therefore the TDH) is refuted.     

Does morphology make the difference? Agrammatic sentence comprehension in German

This study examines the syntactic comprehension of seven German agrammatic speakers. The German language allows the study of the interaction of syntactic principles and morphological devices in the comprehension process. In addition, due to its relatively free word order, German allows the study of strictly minimal pairs of canonical and non-canonical sentences in addition to the rather controversial active-passive contrast. A central research question was whether the pattern of agrammatic comprehension predicted by the trace deletion hypothesis (TDH, Grodzinsky, 1990, 1995), relatively normal comprehension performance of canonical sentences and chance performance on non-canonical sentences, can be found in a language with richer morphology than English. The generalisability of the TDH-pattern to morphologically rich languages is not obvious, given that case morphology in particular can provide explicit cues to the detection of the agent and patient roles in a sentence. The results of this study indicate that morphology does not make a difference. Furthermore, the group results are in line with the TDH-predictions only for number marked sentences but not for case marked sentences. However, single case analysis reveals different patterns of syntactic comprehension in agrammatic patients, a spectrum that encompasses near-normal comprehension of canonical and non-canonical sentences, overall chance performance, and TDH-like profiles.     

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.     

The One-to-One Constraint in Analogical Mapping and Inference

Theories of analogical reasoning have assumed that a 1-to-1 constraint discourages reasoners from mapping a single element in 1 analog to multiple elements in another. Empirical evidence suggests that reasoners sometimes appear to violate the one-to-one constraint when asked to generate mappings, yet virtually never violate it when asked to generate analogical inferences. However, few studies have examined analogical inferences based on nonisomorphic analogs, and their conclusions are suspect due to methodological problems. We sought to elicit mixed inferences that could result from combining information from 2 possible mappings. Participants generated 2-to-1 correspondences when asked for explicit mappings, but did not produce mixed inferences. Multiple correspondences appear to arise from multiple isomorphic mappings, rather than from a single homomorphic mapping.     

An electrophysiological investigation of semantic and phonological processing in skilled and less-skilled comprehenders

The most prominent theories of reading consider reading comprehension ability to be a direct consequence of lower-level reading skills. Recently however, research has shown that some children with poor comprehension ability perform normally on tests of lower-level skills (e.g., decoding). One promising line of behavioral research has found semantic processing differences between good and poor comprehenders and suggests that impoverished semantic ability may be linked to poor comprehenders' difficulties. In the current study, we used event related potentials (ERP) to compare adult skilled and less-skilled comprehenders on a set of semantic and phonological processing tasks. The results revealed that the N400 component of the ERP and the P200 component were sensitive to differences between skilled and less-skilled comprehenders during a semantic processing task. Importantly, skilled and less-skilled comprehenders showed no differences in their ERP response during a phonological processing task. These findings provide neurophysiological support for the hypothesis that less-skilled comprehenders have a weakness in semantic processing that may contribute to their comprehension difficulties.     

Alignable and nonalignable differences in causal explanations

Prior research indicates that people may base their causal explanations on distinctive features between an event and a contrasting background instance in which the event did not occur. Research on similarity judgments suggests that there are two types of distinctive features: alignable differences, which are corresponding characteristics of a pair, and nonalignable differences, which are characteristics of one item for which there are no corresponding characteristics in the other. In three experiments, the hypothesis that people's evaluations of causal explanations vary as a function of feature alignment was examined. The results suggest that people will rate explanations differently on the basis of alignable or nonalignable differences, depending on the type of the event, and that alignability depends on the relational structure among the features of the event.     

Text comprehension and its relation to coherence and cohesion in children's fictional narratives

This study investigated the relation between children's text comprehension, their ability to produce a coherent and cohesive story, and the extent to which external cues aid these aspects of narrative production. Children with reading comprehension difficulties demonstrated deficits in both aspects of story organization, relative to same‐age skilled comprehenders and younger children of equivalent comprehension ability. Their performance was poor when a topic title was used to elicit the narrative, but performance improved when stories were elicited with more informative verbal and pictorial prompts. Stories with poorer structures did not contain proportionately fewer connectives in general, but the type of connective included differed in relation to story event structure. These findings are discussed in relation to the use of coherence and cohesion in narratives and their relation to comprehension skill.     

Temporal Estimation of Major News Events: Re-examining the Accessibility Principle

The way in which people estimate when an event occurred and the accuracy of their estimates are of concern both to psychologists interested in the structure of event memory and to other researchers who, for a variety of reasons, rely on the accuracy of people's temporal estimates. Over 2,000 subjects were asked to say when two major news events, Thatcher's resignation and the Hillsborough football disaster, happened. By embedding the questions in a face-to-face survey we hoped to maximize the probability of subjects using a relatively simple estimation heuristic, previously described as the accessibility principle. This predicts that underestimation of elapsed time should be associated with clearer memories. This hypothesis was not corroborated. We discuss which aspects of the accessibility principle can be retained. © 1997 by John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Neurological basis of language and sequential cognition: evidence from simulation,aphasia, and ERP studies

The current research addresses the hypothesis that certain aspects of sequential cognition have made substantial contributions to the human language processing capability, from a functional neurophysiology perspective. We first describe a cognitive sequence processing model that was developed based on the functional neuroanatomy of primate cortex and basal ganglia. We demonstrate how this model is capable of simulating the behavior of human infants in extracting serial, temporal and abstract structure from language-like sound sequences as revealed in recent psycholinguistic experiments. We then demonstrate how, through training, this model can perform adult level syntactic comprehension, based on dissociated processing streams for open vs. closed class words. The model subsequently predicts: (1) that impaired syntactic processing (as in agrammatic aphasia) will be associated with impairments in corresponding non-linguistic cognitive sequencing tasks, and (2) that neurophysiological processes (as revealed by ERPs) involved in syntactic processing should also be involved in the corresponding non-linguistic cognitive sequencing tasks. Data confirming these predictions are reviewed. We conclude that the study of sequential cognition will provide a new paradigm for the investigation of the neurophysiological bases of language.     

阅读理解困难儿童的理解监控能力研究

在理解监控水平研究的基础上,引入阅读目的因素,综合考察阅读理解困难儿童的理解监控能力.结果发现:(1)理解困难儿童的阅读目的和正常儿童一样,倾向于从文本信息中获取意义,但这种阅读目的的强度要落后于正常儿童;(2)理解困难儿童对阅读的理解监控水平落后于正常儿童,这是由于阅读目的的影响,他们的理解监控能力与正常儿童相当.     

Sequential processing in comprehension of hierarchical graphs

Hierarchical graphs represent the relationships between non-numerical entities or concepts (like computer file systems, family trees, etc). Graph nodes represent the concepts and interconnecting lines represent the relationships. We recorded participants' eye movements while viewing such graphs to test two possible models of graph comprehension. Graph readers had to answer interpretive questions, which required comparisons between two graph nodes. One model postulates a search and a combined search-reasoning stage of graph comprehension (two-stage model), whereas the second model predicts three stages, two stages devoted to the search of the relevant graph nodes and a separate reasoning stage. A detailed analysis of the eye movement data provided clear support for the three-stage model. This is in line with recent studies, which suggest that participants serialize problem solving tasks in order to minimize the overall processing load. Copyright © 2004 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Dissociations among functional categories in Korean agrammatism

This study investigated the hypothesis that the syntactic trees formed by individuals with agrammatic aphasia cannot be constructed any higher than an impaired node as suggested by the tree-pruning hypothesis (Friedman, 1994; Friedmann & Grodzinsky, 1997) and hypothesis. It also examined their following implication that the members of a certain functional category are subject to the same degree of impairment. Two experiments were conducted to investigate a Korean agrammatic patient's use and understanding of three functional categories--Mood, Tense, and Complementizer. The results showed a dissociation among functional categories that preserves the higher node while leaving the lower node impaired both in production and comprehension. Another dissociation was found among members of the same category depending on their linear position in the clause. These results contrast with the predictions of the tree-pruning hypothesis, suggesting that the nearer to the end of the clause a functional element is located, the better it is preserved in Korean agrammatism.     

记叙文中倒叙事件的时间表征

采用移动窗口阅读技术探讨记叙文中倒叙事件的时间表征模式。实验1检验了实验材料的适宜性, 实验2、3分别采用照应句范式和探测技术探讨时间顺序假设与背景信息假设的合理性。结果发现: 当事件E1和E3间的背景关系模糊时, 支持时间顺序假设; 事件E1和E3间的背景关系突出时, 支持背景信息假设。据此可以得出: 倒叙事件与前面事件间的背景关系突出时, 其表征为E2-E3-E1-E4模式, 背景关系模糊时, 则为E1-E2-E3-E4模式。     

Effects of verbal ability and fluid intelligence on children's emotion understanding

This study investigated the role of verbal ability and fluid intelligence on children's emotion understanding, testing the hypothesis that fluid intelligence predicts the development of emotion comprehension over and above age and verbal ability. One hundred and two children (48 girls) aged 3.6–6 years completed the Test of Emotion Comprehension (TEC) that comprised external and mental components, the Coloured Progressive Matrices and the Test for Reception of Grammar. Regression analysis showed that fluid intelligence was not equally related to the external and mental components of the TEC (Pons & Harris, 2000). Specifically, the results indicated that the external component was related to age and verbal ability only, whereas recognition of mental emotional patterns required abstract reasoning skills more than age and verbal ability. It is concluded that the development of fluid intelligence has a significant role in the development of mental component of emotion comprehension.