Mack Jennifer E, Ji Woohyuk, Thompson Cynthia K
Department of Communication Sciences and Disorders, Northwestern University, 2240 Campus Dr., Evanston, IL 60208, USA.
J Neurolinguistics. 2013 Nov;26(6):619-636. doi: 10.1016/j.jneuroling.2013.04.002.
Relatively little is known about the time course of access to the lexical representations of verbs in agrammatic aphasia and its effects on the prediction and integration of the verb's arguments. The present study used visual-world eyetracking to test whether verb meaning can be used by agrammatic aphasic individuals to predict and facilitate the integration of a subsequent noun argument. Nine adults with agrammatic aphasia and ten age-matched controls participated in the study. In Experiment 1, participants viewed arrays of four objects (e.g., jar, plate, stick, pencil) while listening to sentences containing either a verb that was semantically compatible only with the target object or an verb compatible with all four objects (e.g., ). For both participant groups, the restrictive condition elicited more fixations to the target object immediately after the verb. Experiment 2 differed from Experiment 1 in that the auditory sentences presented were incomplete (e.g., ). For controls, restrictive verbs elicited more target fixations immediately after the verb; however, the effects of verb type were noted downstream from the verb for the aphasic listeners. The results suggest that individuals with agrammatic aphasia have preserved ability to use verb information to facilitate integration of overt arguments, but prediction of upcoming arguments is impaired. Impaired lexical-semantic prediction processes may be caused by damage to the left inferior frontal gyrus, which has been argued to support higher-level lexical processes.
对于语法缺失性失语症患者获取动词词汇表征的时间进程及其对动词论元预测和整合的影响，我们了解得相对较少。本研究采用视觉世界眼动追踪技术，以测试语法缺失性失语症患者是否能够利用动词意义来预测并促进后续名词论元的整合。九名患有语法缺失性失语症的成年人和十名年龄匹配的对照组参与了该研究。在实验1中，参与者观看包含四个物体的阵列（如罐子、盘子、棍子、铅笔），同时听包含一个仅与目标物体语义兼容的动词或与所有四个物体都兼容的动词的句子（例如）。对于两个参与者组，在听到动词后，限制性条件会立即引发对目标物体更多的注视。实验2与实验1的不同之处在于，呈现的听觉句子是不完整的（例如）。对于对照组，限制性动词在动词之后立即引发更多对目标的注视；然而，对于失语症听众来说，动词类型的影响在动词之后的下游才被注意到。结果表明，患有语法缺失性失语症的个体保留了利用动词信息促进显性论元整合的能力，但对即将出现的论元的预测受损。词汇语义预测过程受损可能是由左侧额下回受损引起的，有人认为该区域支持更高层次的词汇过程。
