Department of Linguistics, University of Potsdam.
Department of Cognitive Science and Artificial Intelligence, Tilburg University.
Cogn Sci. 2021 Apr;45(4):e12956. doi: 10.1111/cogs.12956.
Can sentence comprehension impairments in aphasia be explained by difficulties arising from dependency completion processes in parsing? Two distinct models of dependency completion difficulty are investigated, the Lewis and Vasishth (2005) activation-based model and the direct-access model (DA; McElree, 2000). These models' predictive performance is compared using data from individuals with aphasia (IWAs) and control participants. The data are from a self-paced listening task involving subject and object relative clauses. The relative predictive performance of the models is evaluated using k-fold cross-validation. For both IWAs and controls, the activation-based model furnishes a somewhat better quantitative fit to the data than the DA. Model comparisons using Bayes factors show that, assuming an activation-based model, intermittent deficiencies may be the best explanation for the cause of impairments in IWAs, although slowed syntax and lexical delayed access may also play a role. This is the first computational evaluation of different models of dependency completion using data from impaired and unimpaired individuals. This evaluation develops a systematic approach that can be used to quantitatively compare the predictions of competing models of language processing.
失语症患者的句子理解障碍能否用分析过程中因依存关系完成而产生的困难来解释？研究了两种不同的依存关系完成困难模型，即刘易斯和瓦希什特（2005 年）的激活基础模型和直接访问模型（DA；麦克利尔，2000 年）。使用来自失语症患者（IWAs）和对照组的参与者的数据比较了这些模型的预测性能。数据来自涉及主语和宾语关系从句的自我调整听力任务。使用 k 折交叉验证评估模型的相对预测性能。对于 IWAs 和对照组，基于激活的模型比 DA 提供了稍好的定量拟合数据。使用贝叶斯因子进行的模型比较表明，假设基于激活的模型，间歇性缺陷可能是导致 IWAs 损伤的最佳解释，尽管语法和词汇延迟访问速度较慢也可能起作用。这是首次使用来自受损和未受损个体的数据对依存关系完成的不同模型进行计算评估。这种评估开发了一种系统的方法，可以用于定量比较语言处理竞争模型的预测。
