Akhavan Niloofar, Sen Christina, Baker Carolyn, Abbott Noelle, Gravier Michelle, Love Tracy
School of Speech, Language, and Hearing Sciences, San Diego State University, San Diego, CA 92182, USA.
Department of Cognitive Science, University of California San Diego, San Diego, CA 92122, USA.
Brain Sci. 2022 Feb 25;12(3):312. doi: 10.3390/brainsci12030312.
Using a visual world eye-tracking paradigm, we investigated the real-time auditory sentence processing of neurologically unimpaired listeners and individuals with aphasia. We examined whether lexical-semantic cues provided as adjectives of a target noun modulate the encoding and retrieval dynamics of a noun phrase during the processing of complex, non-canonical sentences. We hypothesized that the real-time processing pattern of sentences containing a semantically biased lexical cue (e.g., the venomous snake) would be different than sentences containing unbiased adjectives (e.g., the voracious snake). More specifically, we predicted that the presence of a biased lexical cue would facilitate (1) lexical encoding (i.e., boosted lexical access) of the target noun, snake, and (2) on-time syntactic retrieval or dependency linking (i.e., increasing the probability of on-time lexical retrieval at post-verb gap site) for both groups. For unimpaired listeners, results revealed a difference in the time course of gaze trajectories to the target noun (snake) during lexical encoding and syntactic retrieval in the biased compared to the unbiased condition. In contrast, for the aphasia group, the presence of biased adjectives did not affect the time course of processing the target noun. Yet, at the post-verb gap site, the presence of a semantically biased adjective influenced syntactic re-activation. Our results extend the cue-based parsing model by offering new and valuable insights into the processes underlying sentence comprehension of individuals with aphasia.
我们使用视觉世界眼动追踪范式,研究了神经功能正常的听众和失语症患者的实时听觉句子处理过程。我们考察了作为目标名词形容词提供的词汇语义线索,在复杂的非规范句子处理过程中,是否会调节名词短语的编码和检索动态。我们假设,包含语义偏向性词汇线索(如“有毒的蛇”)的句子的实时处理模式,将不同于包含无偏向性形容词(如“贪吃的蛇”)的句子。更具体地说,我们预测,对于两组而言,偏向性词汇线索的存在将促进:(1)目标名词“蛇”的词汇编码(即增强词汇通达),以及(2)准时的句法检索或依存关系链接(即在动词后间隙位置增加准时词汇检索的概率)。对于神经功能正常的听众,结果显示,与无偏向性条件相比,在偏向性条件下,词汇编码和句法检索过程中,对目标名词(蛇)的注视轨迹时间进程存在差异。相比之下,对于失语症组,偏向性形容词的存在并未影响处理目标名词的时间进程。然而,在动词后间隙位置,语义偏向性形容词的存在影响了句法重新激活。我们的研究结果扩展了基于线索的句法分析模型,为失语症患者句子理解的潜在过程提供了新的有价值的见解。