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Working memory and inference revision in Brain-Damaged and normally aging adults
Abstract
This study examined the association between estimated working memory (WM) capacity and comprehension of passages that required revision of an initial interpretation. Predictions stemmed from the recently elaborated theory of capacity-constrained comprehension (Just & Carpenter, 1992, Psychological Review, 99, 122-149), which includes as a major feature the principle that WM influences comprehension only as processing demands approach or exceed the limits of capacity. As anticipated from task analysis, correlations between unilaterally brain-damaged patients' estimated WM capacity and discourse comprehension performance were minimal for nondemanding measures, and increased in magnitude with task processing requirements. Most notably, a meaningful correlation (/r/ greater than .50) emerged only for the task judged to involve the most demanding comprehension processes, for adults with right hemisphere brain damage. No meaningful associations between estimated WM capacity and task performance were observed for normally aging subjects, who were not expected to have difficulty with any of our comprehension measures. The nature of WM deficits in brain-damaged adults (total capacity, vs. resource allocation, vs. slow or otherwise faulty component processing operations) is considered, and some existing work is interpreted from a cognitive resource perspective. Theoretical implications and clinical applicability of the working memory/resource framework are also discussed.
... Over the last 25 years or so, there has been a steady accrual of evidence within the aphasia literature establishing the influential relationship between extra-linguistic, cognitive processes and aphasia symptoms and outcomes (Baldo, Paulraj, Curran & Dronkers, 2015;Brownsett et al., 2014;Dignam et al., 2017;Marinelli, Spaccavento, Craca, Marangolo & Angelelli, 2017;Martin & Saffran, 1999;Murray, 2012Murray, , 2017aMurray, Holland, & Beeson, 1997a, 1997b, 1997cPaek & Murray, 2015;Petroi, Koul & Corwin, 2014;Tompkins, Bloise, Timko & Baumgaertner, 1994;Ziegler, Kerkhoff, Cate, Artinger & Zierdt, 2001). That is, regardless of aphasia profile, difficulties across the cognitive domains of attention (e.g., Lee & Pyun, 2014;Murray, 2012;Villard & Kiran, 2015), memory (e.g., Mayer & Murray, 2012;Valilla-Rohter & Kiran, 2013;Vukovic, Vuksanovic, & Vukovic, 2008), and executive functioning (e.g., Baldo et al., 2015;Dean, Della Sala, Beschin, & Cocchini, 2017;Murray, 2017a) have been identified among individuals with aphasia, which can negatively affect their language abilities at the phonological, morphosyntactic, lexical-semantic, pragmatic, and discourse levels (Caplan, Michaud & Hufford, 2013;Dean et al., 2017;Friedman & Gvion, 2007;Meteyard, Bruce, Edmundson & Oakhill, 2015;Murray, 2000Murray, , 2012Murray et al., 1997aMurray et al., , 1997cPenn, Frankel, Watermeyer & Russell, 2010;Tompkins et al., 1994;Ziegler et al., 2001). ...
... Over the last 25 years or so, there has been a steady accrual of evidence within the aphasia literature establishing the influential relationship between extra-linguistic, cognitive processes and aphasia symptoms and outcomes (Baldo, Paulraj, Curran & Dronkers, 2015;Brownsett et al., 2014;Dignam et al., 2017;Marinelli, Spaccavento, Craca, Marangolo & Angelelli, 2017;Martin & Saffran, 1999;Murray, 2012Murray, , 2017aMurray, Holland, & Beeson, 1997a, 1997b, 1997cPaek & Murray, 2015;Petroi, Koul & Corwin, 2014;Tompkins, Bloise, Timko & Baumgaertner, 1994;Ziegler, Kerkhoff, Cate, Artinger & Zierdt, 2001). That is, regardless of aphasia profile, difficulties across the cognitive domains of attention (e.g., Lee & Pyun, 2014;Murray, 2012;Villard & Kiran, 2015), memory (e.g., Mayer & Murray, 2012;Valilla-Rohter & Kiran, 2013;Vukovic, Vuksanovic, & Vukovic, 2008), and executive functioning (e.g., Baldo et al., 2015;Dean, Della Sala, Beschin, & Cocchini, 2017;Murray, 2017a) have been identified among individuals with aphasia, which can negatively affect their language abilities at the phonological, morphosyntactic, lexical-semantic, pragmatic, and discourse levels (Caplan, Michaud & Hufford, 2013;Dean et al., 2017;Friedman & Gvion, 2007;Meteyard, Bruce, Edmundson & Oakhill, 2015;Murray, 2000Murray, , 2012Murray et al., 1997aMurray et al., , 1997cPenn, Frankel, Watermeyer & Russell, 2010;Tompkins et al., 1994;Ziegler et al., 2001). Importantly, this line of research has afforded support to contemporary conceptualizations of not only aphasia, in which deficits in cognitive functions other than language are accredited with generating or intensifying linguistic symptoms Kurland, 2011;Murray & Kean, 2004), but also more broadly, the neurobiology of language, in which diffuse cortical and subcortical structures and distributed connectivity support language in concert with other functional processes and control mechanisms (Cahana-Amitay & Albert, 2015;Meyer, Cunitz, Obleser & Friederici, 2014;Tremblay & Dick, 2016;Xing, Lacey, Skipper-Kallal, Zeng, & Turkeltaub, 2017). ...
... The following cognitive test battery, designed to assess the various cognitive functions that have been suggested to support sentence processing in healthy and impaired populations (Montgomery et al., 2016;Murray, 2012), was administered to each participant: (a) to assess nonverbal STM and WM abilities, respectively, forward and backward Visual Memory Span subtests of the Wechsler Memory Scale -Revised (WMS-R; Wechsler, 1987), which involves tapping a series of squares in the same or reverse order, respectively, as demonstrated by the test examiner, (b) to examine auditory-verbal WM, the test protocol of Tompkins et al. (1994), which involves listening to sets of sentences (with an increasing number of sentences per set) and for each sentence determining if it does or does not make sense (i.e., true or false judgment) and then for each set recalling the last word of each sentence, (c) to determine the presence and severity of visual neglect, the six conventional subtests (i.e., line crossing, letter cancelation, star cancellation, figure and shape copying, line bisection, and representational drawing) of the Smith, 1994), and (e) to inspect caregiver' perceptions of the presence and frequency of behaviors associated with attention impairments (e.g., "had difficulty concentrating") in the aphasic participants, the Rating Scale of Attentional Behavior (Ponsford & Kinsella, 1991), on which higher scores suggest greater issues with attention. The administration order of these tests was randomized across participants to avoid order or fatigue effects. ...
The purpose of this study was to characterize further the nature of sentence processing deficits in acquired aphasia. Adults with aphasia and age- and education-matched adults with no brain damage completed a battery of formal cognitive-linguistic tests and an experimental sentence judgment task, which was performed alone and during focused attention and divided attention or dual-task conditions. The specific aims were to determine whether (a) increased extra-linguistic cognitive demands (i.e., focused and divided conditions) differentially affected the sentence judgement performances of the aphasic and control groups, (b) increased extra-linguistic cognitive demands interact with stimulus parameters (i.e., syntactic complexity, number of propositions) known to influence sentence processing, and (c) syntactic- or material-specific resource limitations (e.g., sentence judgment in isolation), general cognitive abilities (e.g., short-term and working memory test scores), or both share a significant relationship with dual-task outcomes. Accuracy, grammatical sensitivity, and reaction time findings were consistent with resource models of aphasia and processing accounts of aphasic syntactic limitations, underscoring the theoretical and clinical importance of acknowledging and specifying the strength and nature of interactions between linguistic and extra-linguistic cognitive processes in not only individuals with aphasia, but also other patient and typical aging populations.
... Verbal working memory was assessed using a picture span task (Dede et al., 2014) and a listening span protocol (Tompkins, Bloise, Timko, & Baumgaertner, 1994). During the picture span, participants heard a sequence of one-syllable concrete nouns at a rate (Wechsler, 1997). ...
... Dede et al. (2014) found that for the picture span, test-retest reliability was excellent and construct validity and internal consistency were acceptable in individuals with aphasia. The listening span protocol (Tompkins et al., 1994) has been used in previous studies to assess auditory-verbal working memory in individuals with aphasia (Murray, Timberlake, & Eberle, 2007;Sung et al., 2009). Individuals were asked to remember the last word in each of a series of simple statements. ...
... Participants were instructed to respond with only one finger and to rest their finger on the neutral button (3 on the response box) in between trials. Validity and reliability were demonstrated in healthy adults and individuals with focal right hemisphere damage as well as individuals with left hemisphere damage with and without resulting aphasia (Lehman & Tompkins, 1998;Tompkins et al., 1994). Scores on working memory measures are included in Table 2. ...
Neuropsychological testing of distinct cognitive domains holds promise as a prognostic indicator of aphasia therapy success; however, it is unclear the degree to which cognitive assessments may also predict generalization abilities. The present study aimed to assess the relationship between working memory skills and stimulus generalization from a visual picture-naming treatment to an auditory definition-naming task. Seven individuals with aphasia completed verbal and nonverbal assessments of working memory prior to participating in a cued picture-naming treatment for anomia. After treatment ended, stimulus generalization percentages were calculated for definition naming for the same items that were trained using picture naming. Scores on two nonverbal working memory measures, the backward spatial span and the 1-back, and one verbal working memory assessment, the picture span, were positively correlated with generalization percentage. These results provide preliminary evidence of the relationship between working memory and stimulus generalization. When comparing performance across working memory measures, the spatial span and the picture span were highly correlated in this sample. We propose that despite the verbal and nonverbal distinction, these tasks may have tapped into working memory similarly by relying on a shared central processing mechanism.
... Working memory is of interest to aphasiologists because it has been hypothesized to underlie language processing problems in PWA and has been implicated as a contributor to language comprehension deficits in aphasia (Caspari et al., 1998;Sung et al., 2009;Tompkins, Bloise, Timko, & Baumgaertner, 1994). This assumption has resulted from findings of significant correlations between performance on verbal WM tasks and general language measures (e.g., Caspari, et al., 1998;Laures-Gore, Marshall, & Verner, 2011;Sung et al., 2009) making it difficult to determine the nature and direction of the relationship, or the cause of the relationship. ...
... Daneman & Carpenter, 1980) and PWA (e.g. Caspari et al., 1998;Tompkins et al., 1994), particularly for individuals with non-fluent aphasia (Ivanova et al., 2015;Ivanova, Kuptsova, & Dronkers, 2017). To perform complex span tasks, participants must comprehend sentences presented either orally or orthographically while also recalling a final word (either the last word in the sentence or a word presented after the sentence). ...
... Though some researchers attribute correlational findings among listening or reading span and general language (comprehension and/or production) scores as evidence that WM impairments contribute to language impairments in PWA (e.g. Caspari et al., 1998;Tompkins et al., 1994), others have suggested an alternative explanation (Christensen & Wright, 2010;Martin, 1999;Wright & Fergadiotis, 2012). Martin (1999) asserted that the language deficit accounts for the lower WM scores on these complex span tasks for adults with aphasia. ...
Compared to neurologically healthy adults, persons with aphasia (PWA) demonstrate impaired performance on working memory (WM) tasks. These deficits in WM are thought to underlie language processing problems in PWA. However, most studies use WM tasks that are verbal in nature, making it difficult to determine if these deficits are due to domain-general attentional processes related to WM or domain-specific verbal abilities. The purpose of the current study was to examine WM performance in PWA and healthy controls using verbal and spatial WM tasks. Additionally, this study investigated the relationship among WM performance and performance on short-term memory and domain-general attentional tasks. Fourteen PWA and 13 control participants completed verbal and spatial n-back tasks, the Flanker arrows task, and forward digit and spatial span tasks. The results revealed that the PWA performed worse than the control participants on the verbal tasks, but there were no group differences on the spatial tasks. Further, PWA showed significantly greater conflict and interference effects on the Flanker arrows task than control participants. These findings suggest that although WM deficits are primarily evident in the verbal domain in PWA, they are not solely the result of domain-specific verbal deficits; the ability to inhibit irrelevant information may contribute to WM deficits in PWA.
... The tactic we have adopted at this stage in our research is fairly general: using widely available assessment tools with normative data such as The Delis-Kaplan Executive Function System (Delis, Kaplan, & Kramer, 2001) to gain a broad perspective on the central executive. In addition, work by Tompkins and her colleagues with RHD patients (e.g., Tompkins, 1990;Tompkins, Eloise, Timko, & Baumgaertner, 1994;Tompkins, Boada, & McGarry, 1992) has highlighted the importance of one particular component of the executive system, working memory (Baddeley, 1986;Baddeley & Hitch, 1994;Caplan & Waters, 1999;Just, Carpenter, & Keller, 1996). Tompkins's work suggests that patients with RHD show apparently normal appreciation of, for example, metaphoric 'alternative meanings when the experimental context is designed to minimize any requirement for strategic planning or conscious effort by participants, but show deficits when the task requirements are altered to maximize strategic requirements. ...
... Tompkins's work suggests that patients with RHD show apparently normal appreciation of, for example, metaphoric 'alternative meanings when the experimental context is designed to minimize any requirement for strategic planning or conscious effort by participants, but show deficits when the task requirements are altered to maximize strategic requirements. Additionally, Tompkins et al. (1994) have reported that capacity of working memory, often tied to prefrontal regions (Crosson et al., 1999;Smith & Jonides, 1999), correlates with discourse comprehension performance for patients with RHD. ...
... The Tompkins Working Memory Span procedure is not as widely known as the others. Tompkins et al. (1994) adapted the classic reading (listening) span test of Daneman and Carpenter (1980) for use with patients with acquired braininjury. This variant is a complex memory test that requires active processing of information in addition to simple retention: participants judge the truth value of sentences while retaining the final word in each of a set of sentences for later recall. ...
... Among the other types of validity, however, the only excellent rating was for the concurrent validity of the English version of the Eye Movement WM Span test (Ivanova & Hallowell, 2014). Only the Listening Span task of Tompkins et al. (1994) provided evidence of predictive validity. Discriminant validity was documented in six (out of nine) of these tests. ...
... Regardless of response modality, the complex span tasks had greater language demands (i.e., all required sentence processing) compared to the updating tasks. In fact, Tompkins et al. (1994) warned that their complex listening span test was likely unsuitable for individuals with severe aphasia. ...
... Despite an excellent rating for construct validity across most of the verbal WM tests used in the eligible studies (Table 10), ratings for other aspects of validity indicated substantial problems. For example, all of the tests received poor ratings for content/face validity, and only one test (Listening Span of Tompkins et al., 1994) had evidence of predictive validity. Reliability and measurement error were uniformly problematic for all of these WM tests. ...
Impairments of short-term and working memory (STM, WM), both verbal and non-verbal, are ubiquitous in aphasia. Increasing interest in assessing STM and WM in aphasia research and clinical practice as well as a growing evidence base of STM/WM treatments for aphasia warrant an understanding of the range of standardised STM/WM measures that have been utilised in aphasia. To date, however, no previous systematic review has focused on aphasia. Accordingly, the goals of this systematic review were: (1) to identify standardised tests of STM and WM utilised in the aphasia literature, (2) to evaluate critically the psychometric strength of these tests, and (3) to appraise critically the quality of the investigations utilising these tests. Results revealed that a very limited number of standardised tests, in the verbal and non-verbal domains, had robust psychometric properties. Standardisation samples to elicit normative data were often small, and most measures exhibited poor validity and reliability properties. Studies using these tests inconsistently documented demographic and aphasia variables essential to interpreting STM/WM test outcomes. In light of these findings, recommendations are provided to foster, in the future, consistency across aphasia studies and confidence in STM/WM tests as assessment and treatment outcome measures.
... Since then ample empirical evidence has been accumulated demonstrating that individuals with aphasia have reduced WM capacity (for a review, see Murray, Ramage, & Hopper, 2001; Wright & Fergadiotis, 2012; Wright & Shisler, 2005). Numerous studies have shown that participants with aphasia perform worse on WM tasks than control participants who have no neurological, cognitive, or language impairments (Tompkins et al., 1994) and that reduced WM capacity negatively impacts linguistic performance (Caspari, Parkinson, LaPointe, & Katz, 1998; Wright, Newhoff, Downey, & Austermann, 2003), with language comprehension being particularly susceptible to a decreased WM capacity (Sung et al., 2009; Wright, Downey, Gravier, Love, & Shapiro, 2007). Furthermore, participants with aphasia have demonstrated more pronounced STM/ WM deficits than individuals with left hemisphere brain damage but without any language impairment (Kasselimis et al., 2013; although previously Burgio & Basso, 1997, on a 646 M.V. Ivanova et al. smaller sample have demonstrated that the presence of aphasia had no effect on memory task performance). ...
... Still, despite the mounting evidence demonstrating that WM capacity is reduced in aphasia, the precise link between WM impairments and language processing remains elusive. Some of the previous studies have been able to find a significant relationship between WM capacity and scores on language tests (Caspari et al., 1998; Potagas, Kasselimis, & Evdokimidis, 2011; Sung et al., 2009; Tompkins et al., 1994), while others did not (Christensen & Wright, 2010; Ivanova & Hallowell, 2012 Mayer & Murray, 2012). The inconsistency in findings has been attributed to specific stimuli in WM tasks (Mayer & Murray, 2012), mismatch in processing load between WM and language tasks used (Christensen & Wright, 2010; Ivanova & Hallowell, 2012), and variability of the aphasia groups (Ivanova & Hallowell, 2014). ...
... hypothesis, participants with aphasia performed significantly worse on the WM task compared to non-brain-damaged individuals without any cognitive, language, or neurological impairments. These results replicate numerous previous findings that demonstrate a reduction in WM resources as one of the prominent cognitive impairments in aphasia (Ivanova & Hallowell, 2012 Mayer & Murray, 2012; Potagas et al., 2011; Sung et al., 2009; Tompkins et al., 1994; Wright et al., 2007). No differences in the degree of verbal WM impairment between participants with fluent and non-fluent aphasia were observed. ...
Background: Experimental studies of short-term memory and working memory (WM) in aphasia fail to discriminate cognitive impairments of different aphasia types-non-fluent, Broca-type aphasia and fluent, Wernicke-type aphasia. However, based on the varying fundamental features of these two aphasia syndromes, the potentially different underlying mechanisms of impairment and scant preliminary evidence of varying cognitive deficits, a differential relationship between cognitive function and language processing in these two groups can be predicted. Aims: The current study investigates the hypothesis concerning the differential impact of cognitive impairments in individuals with fluent versus non-fluent aphasia types. Methods & Procedures: Participants with fluent (n=19) and non-fluent (n=16) aphasia and participants without brain damage (n=36) were presented with an eye-tracking WM task. Additionally, individuals with aphasia completed two language comprehension tasks. Outcomes & Results: Results revealed significant decrease in WM capacity in individuals with aphasia compared with participants without brain damage. The two aphasia groups performed similarly on the WM and language tasks. Furthermore, for participants with non-fluent aphasia, it was revealed that WM makes a significant contribution to language comprehension, while for fluent individuals this relationship was not significant. Conclusions: Overall, the present data support the claim that there are cognitive deficits in aphasia and that these cognitive deficits tend to exacerbate the language impairments of persons with non-fluent aphasia types. The results are discussed in the context of varying mechanisms of impairment in different types of aphasia. The present findings have important implications both for the assessment and the treatment of individuals with aphasia and for understanding the nature of aphasia.
... 1.2. The nature of complex-span tasks to date Caspari et al. (1998) and Tompkins et al. (1994) used different versions of the original Daneman and Carpenter (1980) reading/listening span tasks with syntactically simpler and shorter sentences. In a typical complex span task (or WM span task), a processing task (e.g., sentence reading, arithmetic problem-solving, visual-spatial tracking), is given along with a set of stimuli (e.g., letters, words, shapes) to be remembered for later recall. ...
... Another important concern regarding the processing component of reading/listening span tasks is that it often entails true/false judgments (e.g., Friedmann & Gvion, 2003;Sung et al., 2009;Tompkins et al., 1994;Wright, Newhoff, Downey, & Austermann, 2003). The metalinguistic skills required may pose additional problems for participants with language impairments. ...
... The observed differences in performance on the recall components of WM tasks support the notion that the MLS task is sensitive to general reductions in processing resources, or limited capacity for controlled processing in people with aphasia with a broad range of linguistic deficits. Such sensitivity has been found using other complex span tasks administered to people with aphasia (Tompkins et al., 1994;Wright et al., 2003). In contrast to previous studies, validity of an MLS task as a measure of WM capacity in individuals without aphasia was demonstrated. ...
... The task was also included in order to examine whether a relationship exists between working memory and inference comprehension. The working memory measure consisted of a working memory reading span task that was developed by Daneman and Carpenter (1980) and adapted by Tompkins et al. (1994). The reading span task provides a measure of the processing and storage elements of working memory (Tompkins, et al., 1994). ...
... The working memory measure consisted of a working memory reading span task that was developed by Daneman and Carpenter (1980) and adapted by Tompkins et al. (1994). The reading span task provides a measure of the processing and storage elements of working memory (Tompkins, et al., 1994). The processing component of the working memory reading span task involved reading a sentence and judging whether the statement is true or false. ...
... Working memory span score was calculated based on the total number of words that were recalled (see Table III). Mean accuracy scores on the Working Memory Span Task (Tompkins, et al., 1994) for the participants with TBI and their matched controls were 21.0 (SD = 5.6) and 27.3 (SD = 4.7). The performances on the working memory task of the TBI and NBI participants were compared using the Mann-Whitney Rank Sum Test. ...
... N. Martin andSaffran (1997, 1999) found a positive relationship between STM and learning abilities for word lists in participants with aphasia. Also, recent studies demonstrated limited working memory (WM) capacity in aphasia (Caspari, Parkinson, LaPointe & Katz, 1998;Friedmann & Gvion, 2003;Tompkins, Bloise, Timko & Baumgaertner, 1994;Wright, Downey, Gravier, Love, & Shapiro, 2007;Wright, Newhoff, Downey, & Austermann, 2003;Wright & Shisler, 2005). ...
... 1. Studies in which broad conclusions regarding the role of WM in language processing in aphasia were based on significant differences between WM capacity of participants with and without aphasia (e.g., Tompkins et. al., 1994;Wright et. al., 2003) and significant correlations between WM and general language measures (e.g., Caspari et. al., 1998;Wright et. al., 2003). ...
... Despite numerous broad references to the construct of WM and to the notion of limited capacity, few researchers have directly investigated WM and its relevance to aphasia (for reviews see Shisler, 2005 and; see also Caspari et al., 1998;Friedmann & Gvion, 2003;Tompkins et al., 1994;Wright et al., 2003Wright et al., , 2007. ...
... Early investigations of WM in aphasia referred to a rather nebulous construct of WM, postulating a limited capacity for language processing in aphasia and its negative impact on linguistic performance. Tompkins, Bloise, Timko, and Baumgaertner (1994) were the first to demonstrate reduced WM capacity in individuals with left hemisphere damage, some of whom had aphasia. Later, Caspari, Parkinson, LaPointe, and Katz (1998) demonstrated a relationship between WM capacity and general measures of language impairment, such as the Western Aphasia Battery (Kertesz, 1982) and Reading Comprehension Battery for Aphasia (LaPointe & Horner, 1979). ...
... 1.2. The nature of complex-span tasks to date Caspari et al. (1998) and Tompkins et al. (1994) used different versions of the original Daneman and Carpenter (1980) reading/listening span tasks with syntactically simpler and shorter sentences. In a typical complex span task (or WM span task), a processing task (e.g., sentence reading, arithmetic problem-solving, visual-spatial tracking), is given along with a set of stimuli (e.g., letters, words, shapes) to be remembered for later recall. ...
... Another important concern regarding the processing component of reading/listening span tasks is that it often entails true/false judgments (e.g., Friedmann & Gvion, 2003;Sung et al., 2009;Tompkins et al., 1994;Wright, Newhoff, Downey, & Austermann, 2003). The metalinguistic skills required may pose additional problems for participants with language impairments. ...
Deficits in working memory (WM) are an important subset of cognitive processing deficits associated with aphasia. However, there are serious limitations to research on WM in aphasia largely due to the lack of an established valid measure of WM impairment for this population. The aim of the current study was to address shortcomings of previous measures by developing and empirically evaluating a novel WM task with a sentence-picture matching processing component designed to circumvent confounds inherent in existing measures of WM in aphasia. The novel WM task was presented to persons with (n = 27) and without (n = 33) aphasia. Results demonstrated high concurrent validity of a novel WM task. Individuals with aphasia performed significantly worse on all conditions of the WM task compared to individuals without aphasia. Different patterns of performance across conditions were observed for the two groups. Additionally, WM capacity was significantly related to auditory comprehension abilities in individuals with mild aphasia but not those with moderate aphasia. Strengths of the novel WM task are that it allows for differential control for length versus complexity of verbal stimuli and indexing of the relative influence of each, minimizes metalinguistic requirements, enables control for complexity of processing components, allows participants to respond with simple gestures or verbally, and eliminates reading requirements. Results support the feasibility and validity of using a novel task to assess WM in individuals with and without aphasia.
Learning outcomes: Readers will be able to:
• Discuss the limitations of current working memory measures for individuals with aphasia.
• Describe how task design features of a new working memory task for people with aphasia address shortcomings of existing measures.
• Summarize the evidence supporting the validity of the novel working memory task.
... Second, several participants were excluded from the main RJ analysis due to mechanical failures or experimenter error (2 RBD, 1 control) or insufficient accuracy (< 90%) in the Isolation condition (3 RBD; 1 of these with many outlying RTs that were ''too slow''). The only obvious demographic or clinical difference between those participants excluded and those retained was in word recall errors on the auditory working memory task (Tompkins et al., 1994; Table 1), a measure of simultaneous language computation and storage operations. Four of the five excluded from the RBD group made more errors than the group mean on this measure. ...
... In concert with our earlier findings about the relationship of suppression function and discourse comprehension after RBD, this study suggests several possibilities for future testing of the potentially dynamic ways in which suppression and processing capacity/allocation may interact in determining comprehension performance. In considering the following discussion, it should be remembered that both suppression function (e.g., Gernsbacher, 1990;Tompkins et al., 2000) and processing capacity (e.g., Tompkins et al., 1994Tompkins et al., , 2000 vary widely between individuals within any single group, brain-damaged or not. ...
... (See Brownell, Griffin, Winner, Friedman, & Happé, in press, for additional discussion of how right prefrontal regions, together with their connections to other structures support aspects of discourse comprehension and social cognition, i.e., Theory of Mind.) Work by Tompkins and her colleagues provides additional perspective on the deficits associated with RHD that should be taken into account (e.g., Tompkins, 1990;Tompkins, Bloise, Timko, & Baumgaertner, 1994;and Tompkins, Boada, & McGarry, 1992). One main finding of this program of research is that the deficits of RHD patients in metaphor comprehension are most notable in tasks requiring effortful or strategic processing. ...
... Additionally, Tompkins et al. (1994) has reported that working memory capacity assessed independently correlates positively with RHD patients' performance in discourse comprehension. ...
The denotation of a word or concept is typically considered as its literal or dictionary meaning. The connotation, usually is more broadly construed, often in the emotive aspects. The contrast between denotation and connotation is expressed largely in terms of the degree of generality. The aphasic patient groups perform quite differently. The anterior lesioned group's average results represent denotative meaning distinctions less clearly than connotative and less constrained associations. The hierarchical clustering solution for the anterior-lesioned group shows a relatively clean discrimination between human and nonhuman terms except that the concept dog is not seen as belonging particularly well to either the human or the nonhuman cluster. In contrast, on receipt of a word, the right hemisphere characteristically generates diffuse activation related to the word's semantic content, including even weakly associated connotative components. This diffuse activation of both closely and distantly associated concepts is one central claim of Beeman's model. Invoking an underspecified neurological framework for any cognitive task often results in a dangerously powerful account.
... After familiarizing participants with a live voice and a computerized narrative practice item, Set A stories (N=5) were presented and followed by eight questions each. (Tompkins, Bloise, Timko, & Baumgaertner 1994), to assess recall ability as well as accuracy in responding to sets of true or false statements, with the sets increasing in size from two to five statements each. ...
... For the NBD group, better average RTs in the TTC condition were associated with higher accuracy in both the TTC condition and an estimated auditory working memory task that requires the simultaneous processing and storage of language (Tompkins et al., 1994). The first association is not surprising: individuals with better-established mental models of trait information ought to be able to determine more quickly when later information is consistent with that trait. ...
... Francis et al. visual elevator accuracy DS(4) and timing, DS(1,2,4) elevator counting with reversal, DS(1,2) telephone search, DS(1,2,3,4) telephone search with counting, DS(1,2,3,4) lottery DS(2,4) Reading comprehension: maze reading (probe task), DS(1,2) Reading Comprehension Battery for Aphasia-Second Edition, DS(1,3,4) GORT-4 DS(1,2,4) Majerus et al. (2005) (Tompkins et al., 1994) Reading speed and comprehension: reading passages (probe task), DS(increased rate) ...
Purpose
The aim of this systematic review is to provide a critical overview of short-term memory (STM) and working memory (WM) treatments in stroke aphasia and to systematically evaluate the internal and external validity of STM/WM treatments.
Method
A systematic search was conducted in 2014 February and then updated in 2016 December using 13 electronic databases. We provided descriptive characteristics of the included studies, and assessed their methodological quality using the Risk of Bias in N-of-1 Trials (RoBiNT) quantitative scale, which was completed by two independent raters.
Results
The systematic search and inclusion/exclusion procedure yielded 17 single case or case-series studies with 37 participants for inclusion. Nine studies targeted auditory STM consisting of repetition and/or recognition tasks, whereas eight targeted attention and WM, such as attention process training (ATP) including n-back tasks with shapes and clock faces, and mental math tasks. In terms of their methodological quality, quality scores on the RoBiNT scale ranged from 4 to 17 (mean = 9.5) on a 0–30 scale, indicating high risk of bias in the reviewed studies. Effects of treatment were most frequently assessed on STM, WM, and spoken language comprehension. Transfer effects on communication and memory in activities of daily living were tested in only 5 studies.
Conclusions
Methodological limitations of the reviewed studies make it difficult, at present, to draw firm conclusions about the effects of STM/WM treatments in post-stroke aphasia. Further studies with more rigorous methodology and stronger experimental control are needed to determine the beneficial effects of this type of intervention. To understand the underlying mechanisms of STM/WM treatment effects and how they relate to language functioning, a careful choice of outcome measures and specific hypotheses about potential improvements on these measures are required. Future studies need to include outcome measures of memory functioning in everyday life and psychosocial functioning more generally to demonstrate the ecological validity of STM and WM treatments.
... From this original candidate set of 24 film clips (please see Appendix for details), we selected 11 for use in the current study on the basis of each film clip's ability to: (a) reliably elicit the target emotion more strongly than all other emotions; and (b) elicit a target emotion of moderate to strong intensity (i.e., 4 or greater on a scale from 0-6). The 11 film clips, Tompkins, Bloise, Timko, and Baumgaertner (1994). b Culbertson and Zillmer (2001). ...
Introduction: Recognizing emotions in others is a pivotal part of socioemotional functioning and plays a central role in social interactions. It has been shown that individuals suffering from Parkinson’s disease (PD) are less accurate at identifying basic emotions such as fear, sadness, and happiness; however, previous studies have predominantly assessed emotion processing using unimodal stimuli (e.g., pictures) that do not reflect the complexity of real-world processing demands. Dynamic, naturalistic stimuli (e.g., movies) have been shown to elicit stronger subjective emotional experiences than unimodal stimuli and can facilitate emotion recognition.
Method: In this experiment, pupil measurements of PD patients and matched healthy controls (HC) were recorded while they watched short film clips. Participants’ task was to identify the emotion elicited by each clip and rate the intensity of their emotional response. We explored (a) how PD affects subjective emotional experience in response to dynamic, ecologically valid film stimuli, and (b) whether there are PD-related changes in pupillary response, which may contribute to the differences in emotion processing reported in the literature.
Results: Behavioral results showed that identification of the felt emotion as well as perceived intensity varies by emotion, but no significant group effect was found. Pupil measurements revealed differences in dilation depending on the emotion evoked by the film clips (happy, tender, sadness, fear, and neutral) for both groups.
Conclusions: Our results suggest that differences in emotional response may be negligible when PD patients and healthy controls are presented with dynamic, ecologically valid emotional stimuli. Given the limited data available on pupil response in PD, this study provides new evidence to suggest that the PD-related deficits in emotion processing reported in the literature may not translate to real-world differences in physiological or subjective emotion processing in early-stage PD patients.
... En relación a la participación de la memoria de trabajo en la generación de inferencias elaborativas, los datos resultan congruentes tanto con los estudios que destacan su contribución de manera general a la comprensión lectora (Daneman & Carpenter, 1980;Nation, Adams, Bowyer-Crane & Snowling, 1999;Savage et ál., 2007;Swanson & Ashbaker, 2000, (ver Oakhill, Yuill & Parkin, 1986Swanson & Berninger,1995;Yuill, Oakhill & Parkin, 1989), como con las investigaciones de naturaleza mas específica que muestran la intervención de este componente en la generación de inferencias elaborativas (Cain & Oakhill, 2006;George, Mannes & Hoffman, 1997;Perfetti, et ál., 2005;Tompkins, Bloise & Timko, 1994;Withney, Ritchie & Clark, 1991). De manera consistente, los dos índices de memoria de trabajo utilizados en este estudio presentaron correlaciones moderadas con el desempeño en la tarea de inferencias elaborativas. ...
... Finally, evidence for reduced working memory capacity detectable in higher-order language processing has been found by Tompkins, Bloise, Timko, and Baumgaertner (1994), who developed a study to investigate the relationship between working memory capacity and comprehension of passages that demanded revision of an initial interpretation. These researchers were especially interested in analyzing the role of the right hemisphere in this process. ...
A growing interest in cognition in aging has been observed because of both the epidemiologic factor of an increase in the lifespan of the world's population and the cognitive changes behaviorally and biologically detectable in this population. The most complex of language components and fundamental in social interaction, discourse production and comprehension are among the most scarcely explored cognitive functions in this context. This review presents and discusses discourse processing in healthy aging with regard to theoretical, behavioral, and neuroimaging evidence. Cognitive and neurobiological models are reviewed, such as the Hemispheric Asymmetry Reduction in Older Adults (HAROLD) model and the Posterior-Anterior Shift in Aging (PASA) model. Among the neuropsycholinguistic research developed to characterize discourse processing in aging individuals, which has contributed to the prevention and treatment of language impairment and the maintenance of communicative competence in aging, studies on the relationship between discourse and working memory, attention, and some executive components are discussed. Regarding neuroimaging data, very few studies that have included cognitive tasks and discourse stimuli were found. Such studies suggest that discourse processing requires not only the participation of both brain hemispheres, but also a more prominent activation of frontal regions. Considering the great complexity and usefulness of discourse in elderly adults' daily communication and the emergence of cognitive deficits related to aging in complex information processing, the necessity of further behavioral and neuroimaging studies, including discourse processing tasks, comparing tasks involving executive, attentional, and mnemonic demands becomes evident.
... The right hemisphere damage (RHD) literature may shed further insights on the relationship between WM and inferencing. Inference comprehension in RHD has correlated with WM under high but not low resource-demanding conditions (Tompkins, Bloise, Timko, & Baumgaertner, 1994). In contrast, WM has correlated with social inferencing in some studies, but the modest magnitude of the correlations indicates that WM does not entirely account for inferencing ability (Bibby & McDonald, 2005;Turkstra, 2008). ...
Purpose: The goal of the current research study was to advance our knowledge of cognitive-communicative disorders following traumatic brain injury (TBI) by identifying the cognitive and communicative processes underlying narrative discourse ability. The study 1) examined the role of working memory (WM) and inferencing in narrative discourse, 2) tested key assumptions posited by the Structure Building Framework (SBF; Gernsbacher, 1990), a cognitive model of normative discourse comprehension and 3) attempted to disambiguate the relationship between discourse comprehension and discourse production. Methods: Forty-four native English speakers participated, comprising 21 individuals with TBI, all with closed-head injuries, and 23 non-brain-injured (NBI) comparison individuals. Participants completed six core study tasks yielding seven measures of interest: verbal and nonverbal working memory updating (WMU-V, WMU-NV), predictive inference, the Discourse Comprehension Test (DCT; Brookshire & Nicholas, 1993), a picture story comprehension task (PSC) and story retelling (story grammar and story completeness). Three regression analyses were performed. In the first and second set of models, WM and inferencing were predictors for discourse comprehension and production outcomes, respectively. In the third set of models, discourse comprehension measures were predictors production outcomes. Results: WMU-V and WMU-NV were found to be highly collinear. Thus, only WMU-V was used as the WM measure in the regression models. WM and inferencing accounted for one-third of the variance in DCT but the model for PSC was nonsignificant. WM and inferencing were not significant predictors for either story grammar or story completeness. DCT and PSC did not significantly predict story grammar. However, the discourse comprehension measures accounted for 60% of the variance in story completeness with DCT as the significant predictor. Discussion: Findings were interpreted as supporting SBF assumptions of domain-generality of cognitive processes and mechanisms involved in discourse and partially supporting assumptions that the same cognitive substrates are marshalled for comprehension and production processes. WM was more strongly associated with comprehension processes. Yet, comprehensions measures were highly predictive of narrative content, a production measure, suggestive of shared mental representations and share cognitive substrates outside of WM. In recent accounts, declarative memory has been shown to be critical for short-term recall, highlighting its potential for subserving both discourse comprehension and production systems and merits consideration for future investigations of the cognitive-communicative underpinnings of discourse ability.
... (1) Forward digit span-to evaluate short-term auditory memory/attention (score from 1-9). (2) Working memory/auditory listening span (Tompkins, Bloise, Timko, & Baumgaertner, 1994)-involves increasing lists of true/false statements. The total number of final words correctly recalled was analyzed (out of 42 total). ...
Introduction:
Patients with Parkinson's disease (PD) are perceived more negatively than their healthy peers, yet it remains unclear what factors contribute to this negative social perception.
Method:
Based on a cohort of 17 PD patients and 20 healthy controls, we assessed how naïve raters judge the emotion and emotional intensity displayed in dynamic facial expressions as adults with and without PD watched emotionally evocative films (Experiment 1), and how age-matched peers naïve to patients' disease status judge their social desirability along various dimensions from audiovisual stimuli (interview excerpts) recorded after certain films (Experiment 2).
Results:
In Experiment 1, participants with PD were rated as significantly more facially expressive than healthy controls; moreover, ratings demonstrated that PD patients were routinely mistaken for experiencing a negative emotion, whereas controls were rated as displaying a more positive emotion than they reported feeling. In Experiment 2, results showed that age-peers rated PD patients as significantly less socially desirable than control participants. Specifically, PD patients were rated as less involved, interested, friendly, intelligent, optimistic, attentive, and physically attractive than healthy controls.
Conclusions:
Taken together, our results point to a disconnect between how PD patients report feeling and attributions that others make about their emotions and social characteristics, underlining significant social challenges of the disease. In particular, changes in the ability to modulate the expression of negative emotions may contribute to the negative social impressions that many PD patients face.
... This is not surprising given the strong association between language and WM (Daneman & Merikle, 1996;Just & Carpenter, 1992) and that WM engages brain areas often damaged in aphasia (Chein, Moore, & Conway, 2011;D'Esposito & Postle, 2015;Ricker, AuBuchon, & Cowan, 2010;Rottschy et al., 2012;Sreenivasan, Curtis, & D'Esposito, 2014). Numerous previous investigations of WM in aphasia have reported decreased WM capacity in individuals with aphasia compared to age-matched neurologically healthy control groups (Christensen & Wright, 2010;DeDe, Ricca, Knilans, & Trubl, 2014;Ivanova & Hallowell, 2014;Tompkins, Bloise, Timko, & Baumgaertner, 1994; for a review see; Salis et al., 2015;Wright & Fergadiotis, 2012). Many studies have established strong relationships between decreased WM capacity and language comprehension (Ivanova, Dragoy, Kuptsova, Ulicheva, & Laurinavichyute, 2015;Sung et al., 2009;Wright, Downey, Gravier, Love, & Shapiro, 2007). ...
Background: Overall, there is growing consensus that working memory (WM) should be routinely assessed in individuals with aphasia as it can contribute significantly to their level of language impairment and be an important factor in treatment planning. However, there is still no consensus in the field as to which tasks should be used to assess WM in aphasia. The two main alternatives are adapted complex span tasks and N-back tasks. Both have been used interchangeably in previous studies of WM in aphasia, even though the correspondence between the two tasks has not been properly established. Aims: The current study investigates the relationship between two WM tasks—complex span and N-back tasks—in a large sample of individuals with aphasia. The relationships of these tasks to measures of language comprehension are also explored, as well as differences in performance patterns between individuals with non-fluent and fluent aphasia. Methods & Resources: Forty-four participants with aphasia (non-fluent: n = 27; fluent: n = 13; mixed: n = 4) were examined with a modified listening span task (Ivanova & Hallowell, 2014), an auditory verbal 2-back task, and a standardised Russian language comprehension test. Outcomes & Results: Results revealed a moderate relationship between the two WM measures, but demonstrated a divergence in terms of their relationship to language comprehension. Performance on the modified listening span task was related to language comprehension abilities, but performance on the 2-back task was not, suggesting that the two tasks primarily index different underlying cognitive mechanisms. Furthermore, the relationship between the modified listening span task and language comprehension was significant for individuals with non-fluent aphasia, but not for those with fluent aphasia. Conclusions: Overall, the data demonstrate that while performance of individuals with aphasia was related on the two tasks, the two tasks cannot be substituted for one another without further inquiries into their underlying differences.
... Bowers et al., 1987;Ross, 1996;Ross et al., 1997;Tompkins, Baumgaertner, Lehman et al., 1997). A significant association of working memory capacity and the ability to resolve conflicting information in spoken discourse comprehension (r ϭ Ϫ.67) has been reported for patients with focal right hemisphere damage (Tompkins, Bloise, Timko et al., 1994). It is therefore likely that brain structures involved in working memory contribute to the recognition of emotional prosody under distracting task demands. ...
Little is known about the underlying dimensions of impaired recognition of emotional pros-ody that is frequently observed in patients with Parkinson's disease (PD). Because patients with PD also suffer from working memory deficits and impaired time perception, the present study examined the contribution of (a) working memory (frontal executive functioning) and (b) processing of the acoustic parameter speech rate to the perception of emotional prosody in PD. Two acoustic parameters known to be important for emotional classifications (speech duration and pitch variability) were systematically varied in prosodic utterances. Twenty patients with PD and 16 healthy controls (matched for age, sex, and IQ) participated in the study. The findings imply that (1) working memory dysfunctions and perception of emotional prosody are not independent in PD, (2) PD and healthy control subjects perceived vocal emotions categorically along two acoustic manipulation continua, and (3) patients with PD show impairments in processing of speech rate information.
... To conclude, these trends, based on a limited number of subjects, are intriguing in their potential support for deficits in context use by RHD individuals under conditions of increased processing demands. They are being monitored in ongoing work using a larger sample of RHD patients. of cognitive resources (Tompkins et al., 1994;Murray, 2000;Slansky & McNeil, 1997). According to the Capacity Theory of Attention, the degree to which tasks interfere with one another reflects the way in which those tasks compete for the same limited pool of cognitive resources (Kanheman, 1973;Norman & Bobrow, 1975;Wickens, 1989). ...
... A2 = active sentences with 2-place verbs; A3 = active sentences with 3-place verbs. (Obler, Fein, Nicholas, & Albert, 1991;Obler, Nicholas, Albert, & Woodward, 1985;Rochon, Waters, & Caplan, 1994;Waters, Rochon, & Caplan, 1998 작업기억과제(e.g., Carpenter, Miyake, & Just, 1995;Caspari, Parkinson, LaPointe, & Katz, 1998;Daneman & Merikle, 1996;Just & Carpenter, 1992;Miyake et al., 1994;Tompkins, Bloise, Timko, & Baumgaertner, 1994)가 대부분 문장폭과제(sentence span task) (Daneman & Carpenter, 1980) ...
Objectives: The purpose of the current study was to investigate the effects of syntactic structure as a function of the canonicity of word-order on sentence comprehension ability and to explore the relationship between working memory capacity and sentence comprehension ability for Korean-speaking normal elderly adults. Methods: A total of 51 normal elderly individuals participated in the study. The sentence comprehension task (SCT) consisted of three syntactic structures (active sentences with 2-place verbs, active sentences with 3-place verbs, and passive sentences) with the canonicity of word order being manipulated for each syntactic structure. A total of 36 sentences were administered to participants using a sentence-picture paradigm. Digit and word span tasks were used as working memory measures. Results: A two-way repeated ANOVA revealed significant effects for sentence type and the canonicity. A two-way interaction was significant, indicating that performance was differentially affected by sentence type as a function of canonicity. Participants showed the worst performance on passive sentences under the canonical word order; when sentences followed the non-canonical word order, they exhibited worse performance on active sentences with 3-place verbs. The SCT was highly correlated with working memory measures. Conclusion: Even though Korean is considered a free word-order language, these results suggest that the canonicity of word order affects sentence comprehension ability for normal elderly adults. More studies need to be conducted to further examine the critical factors that are associated with age-related changes in sentence comprehension ability. © 2015 Korean Academy of Speech-Language Pathology and Audiology.
... The limited research that has investigated reading comprehension and cognition in adults with acquired brain injury supports a relationship between specific cognitive impairments and reading comprehension performance (Laatsch & Krisky, 2006;Mann, 2006;Schmitter-Edgecombe & Bales, 2005;Salmen, 2004;Tompkins, Bloise, Timko, & Baumgaertner, 1994). Recent work comparing reading comprehension performance of adults with ABI to matched controls has suggested students with brain injury struggle to recognise paraphrased information as measured by a sentence verification task and recall fewer communication units as measured by a free recall task . ...
Adults with mild to moderate acquired brain injury (ABI) often pursue post-secondary or professional education after their injuries in order to enter or re-enter the job market. An increasing number of these adults report problems with reading-to-learn. The problem is particularly concerning given the growing population of adult survivors of ABI. Despite the rising need, empirical evaluation of reading comprehension interventions for adults with ABI is scarce. This study used a within-subject design to evaluate whether adult college students with ABI with no more than moderate cognitive impairments benefited from using reading comprehension strategies to improve comprehension of expository text. Integrating empirical support from the cognitive rehabilitation and special education literature, the researchers designed a multi-component reading comprehension strategy package. Participants read chapters from an introductory-level college anthropology textbook in two different conditions: strategy and no-strategy. The results indicated that reading comprehension strategy use was associated with recall of more correct information units in immediate and delayed free recall tasks; more efficient recall in the delayed free recall task; and increased accuracy recognising statements from a sentence verification task designed to reflect the local and global coherence of the text. The findings support further research into using reading comprehension strategies as an intervention approach for the adult ABI population. Future research needs include identifying how to match particular reading comprehension strategies to individuals, examining whether reading comprehension performance improves further through the incorporation of systematic training, and evaluating texts from a range of disciplines and genres.
... A composite score from three WM tasks was used to document the participants' WM and to classify them by WM when addressing Question 3. Characterizing WM with a composite score is consist with the work of Waters and Caplan (2003) who reported better test-retest reliability and greater stability of participants' WM classification with the use of composite measures of two or three WM tasks than with the use of any single measure. In the current study the WM composite score was derived from the sentence span task from Tompkins, Bloise, Timko, and Baumgaertner (1994) and with the alphabet and subtract-2 span tasks from Waters and Caplan (2003). ...
There is a relatively robust and continually growing literature addressing the hypothesis that working memory (WM) competencies play an important role in language comprehension. This hypothesis has been investigated as the source for the language comprehension deficits that are a hallmark of aphasia. Additionally, it has been hypothesized that individuals with limited WM facility are negatively affected in second language acquisition and language use. The current study investigated this latter hypothesis and explored the relationship between working memory and sentencelevel auditory language comprehension in native English (L1) speakers with English as their first language and nonnative English (L2) speakers with Korean as their first and English as their second language. It was hypothesized that individuals who demonstrate poorer performance on measures of WM would perform more poorly on sentence comprehension tasks that are more difficult as manipulated by presentation rate and linguistic complexity, and these relationships would emerge more prominently in the L2 group than the L1 group.The results showed that WM performance significantly predicted auditory comprehension performance under all conditions in both high and lower functioning WM groups. As hypothesized, the L2 low-WM group performed significantly more poorly on the syntactically more complex sentences than the L2 high-WM group. However, the WM group effects were not present in the L1 group. Manipulations of presentation rates did not differentially affect auditory comprehension performance as a function of WM group either in the L1 or L2 groups.
... . 모든 (Martin & Ayla, 2004;McNeil et al., 1991;Sung et al., 2009;Wright et al., 2007) (Caplan & Waters, 1999;Freidmann & Gvion, 2003;Martin & Ayala, 2004) 혹은 구어적 정보를 기억하는 것 (Sung et al., 2009;Tompkins, Bloise & Timko, 1994;Wright et al., 2007) ...
Objectives: There are currently studies that approach aphasia in relations to other cognitive deficits, particularly for attention disorders, as well as damages of the language system itself. Executive attention is regarded as a sub-element of working memory in addition to storage and processing. Based on this research trend, this paper examines aphasia patients' executive attention and analyzes relationship between executive attentions and language abilities. Methods: The Stroop task was conducted to the participants in aphasia group (n=15) and a normal group (n=15) of this study. The Stroop task was modified into computerized- pointing tasks in consideration of aphasic patients' characteristics. The task systematically manipulates the congruent conditions (congruent vs. incongruent) and the proportions of congruency (25% vs. 75%). Reaction time (conflict resolution) and wrong response rates (goal maintenance) were compared between two groups, and a correlation between verbal language and execution attentions scores was being analyzed. Results: There were no differences between two groups of reaction time (conflict resolution), but wrong response rates (goal maintenance) of aphasia group was significantly lower than those of normal group. There was no significant correlation between executive attentions and language abilities of the aphasia group. Conclusion: People with aphasia appear to show diverse performances in a cognitive test including executive attention, and therefore it is difficult to predict language abilities of aphasic patients with only a cognitive test. Therefore, this paper suggests that in order to understand overall cognitive-language processing abilities of aphasic patients, both a comprehensive language test and a cognitive test should be conducted. © 2013 Korean Academy of Speech-Language Pathology and Audiology.
... Caspari and colleagues (1998) concluded that the working memory capacity is a useful predictor of the language comprehension performance and the preserved working memory system is important for successful comprehension. Tompkins, Bloise, Timko, and Baumgaertner (1994) investigated the working memory ability in adults with right and left hemisphere brain damage as one part of their study. They included 25 adults with right hemisphere brain damage (RHD), 25 with left hemisphere brain damage (LHD), and 25 NI individuals. ...
... Furthermore, findings and their interpretation on the relationship between reduced WM capacity and sentence comprehension deficits in PWA are controversial. Several studies have suggested that WM measures are significantly and highly correlated with sentence comprehension performance in PWA (Caspari et al, 1998;Sung et al., 2008;Tompkins, Bloise, Timko, & Baumgaertner, 1994;Wright et al., 2007). Some researchers have argued that reduced WM capacity is related to sentence comprehension impairments in PWA (e.g., Miyake et al., 1994). ...
... Finally, as working memory seems important for verbal fluency performance due to the need to self-generate category cues and monitor the products of retrieval [54,71], we also presented them with two memory tests. The critical one was listening span, a working memory test in which participants have to listen to a series of sentences and retain the final word of each sentence for spoken recall at the end of the series while simultaneously judging each sentence as true or false [65]. An additional test of word span controlled for phonological memory. ...
We examined the hypothesis that formal education and literacy impact the richness and precision of semantic knowledge but not the organization of semantic categories and basic mechanisms of access to them.
In Experiment 1, adults of varying levels of formal education were presented with semantic fluency tests and a superordinate naming task. Experiment 2 examined the impact of reading proficiency on adults of varying degrees of literacy. They were presented with simple semantic, alternating semantic and phonemic fluency tasks, as well as with literacy-related, reasoning and memory tests.
Fluency was analyzed in terms of overall performance, sequential order and speed of responses. Despite lower performance, illiterates and adults with null or limited formal education displayed taxonomic clustering and retrieval by semantic subcategory, as did participants with higher formal education levels. Yet, formal education and literacy slightly speed up access to categories, probably providing useful cues for generating category exemplars.
... Prat et al. (2012) reported that lower working memory ability, as well as lower vocabulary scores, were correlated with greater activation in the RH, thus offering an explanation as to why only some studies find RH activation. This result echoes the studies by Tompkins and colleagues (e.g. Tompkins, Bloise, Timko, & Baumgaertner, 1994), who looked at how reduced working memory resources can account for language impairments in RHD patients. All the above-reported studies dealt either with nominal metaphors or else with the metaphorical meanings of noun pairs, displayed on a screen-a presentation that is a far remove from daily conversations. ...
... Leonard and Baum (2005) noted that the ability of such individuals to use context to resolve ambiguities is preserved even with increased processing demands, such as increased speech rate. Tompkins, Bloise, Timko, & Baumgaertner (1994) showed that individuals with RHD were able to use contextual information to revise their initial interpretations of passages under certain conditions. In the condition with the highest processing demands (making inferences about the attitudes of characters), performance for the RHD group was correlated to their performance on a working memory measure. ...
... Nonlinguistic cognitive impairments have been implicated as potential contributors to language difficulties in aphasia (Korda & Douglas, 1997;McNeil, Odell, & Tseng, 1991;Murray, Holland, & Beeson, 1998;Tompkins, Bloise, Timko, & Baumgaertner, 1994) and specifically in reading (Caspari, Parkinson, LaPointe, & Katz, 1998;Mayer & Murray, 2002). McNeil and colleagues (1991) have argued that to account for the variability in aphasic performance, a more global cognitive functioning perspective on aphasia needs to be adopted. ...
... En relación a la participación de la memoria de trabajo en la generación de inferencias elaborativas, los datos resultan congruentes tanto con los estudios que destacan su contribución de manera general a la comprensión lectora (Daneman & Carpenter, 1980;Nation, Adams, Bowyer-Crane & Snowling, 1999;Savage et ál., 2007;Swanson & Ashbaker, 2000, (ver Oakhill, Yuill & Parkin, 1986Swanson & Berninger,1995;Yuill, Oakhill & Parkin, 1989), como con las investigaciones de naturaleza mas específica que muestran la intervención de este componente en la generación de inferencias elaborativas (Cain & Oakhill, 2006;George, Mannes & Hoffman, 1997;Perfetti, et ál., 2005;Tompkins, Bloise & Timko, 1994;Withney, Ritchie & Clark, 1991). De manera consistente, los dos índices de memoria de trabajo utilizados en este estudio presentaron correlaciones moderadas con el desempeño en la tarea de inferencias elaborativas. ...
En la actualidad se considera la comprensión lectora
como un proceso constructivo que depende de la participación
de componentes para crear una representación
en la mente del lector. La construcción de este modelo
mental requiere de la elaboración de inferencias puente
y elaborativas. El objetivo del trabajo fue evaluar el rol
diferencial de los procesos controlados y conscientes
en la ejecución de ambos tipos de inferencias. Se evaluaron
107 niños de 8 y 9 años, alumnos de escuelas de
gestión pública y privada de Mar del Plata, Argentina.
Se utilizaron siete tareas de evaluación de las Funciones
Ejecutivas y dos tareas de realización de inferencias.
Los resultados mostraron una asociación fuerte entre el
funcionamiento ejecutivo y la generación de inferencias
elaborativas.
... Finally, evidence for reduced working memory capacity detectable in higher-order language processing has been found by Tompkins, Bloise, Timko, and Baumgaertner (1994), who developed a study to investigate the relationship between working memory capacity and comprehension of passages that demanded revision of an initial interpretation. These researchers were especially interested in analyzing the role of the right hemisphere in this process. ...
A growing interest in cognition in aging has been observed because of both the epidemiologic factor of an increase in the lifespan of the world's population and the cognitive changes behaviorally and biologically detectable in this population. The most complex of language components and fundamental in social interaction, discourse production and comprehension are among the most scarcely explored cognitive functions in this context. This review presents and discusses discourse processing in healthy aging with regard to theoretical, behavioral, and neuroimaging evidence. Cognitive and neurobiological models are reviewed, such as the Hemispheric Asymmetry Reduction in Older Adults (HAROLD) model and the Posterior-Anterior Shift in Aging (PASA) model. Among the neuropsycholinguistic research developed to characterize discourse processing in aging individuals, which has contributed to the prevention and treatment of language impairment and the maintenance of communicative competence in aging, studies on the relationship between discourse and working memory, attention, and some executive components are discussed. Regarding neuroimaging data, very few studies that have included cognitive tasks and discourse stimuli were found. Such studies suggest that discourse processing requires not only the participation of both brain hemispheres, but also a more prominent activation of frontal regions. Considering the great complexity and usefulness of discourse in elderly adults' daily communication and the emergence of cognitive deficits related to aging in complex information processing, the necessity of further behavioral and neuroimaging studies, including discourse processing tasks, comparing tasks involving executive, attentional, and mnemonic demands becomes evident.
... including measures to estimate frontal lobe function and executive resource availability (e.g., the ability to switch strategies or to inhibit the influence of irrelevant information). All participants completed the following tests: (a) a verbal working memory (listening) span test adapted by Tompkins and colleagues (Tompkins, Bloise, Timko, & Baumgaertner, 1994) from an earlier test of working memory by Daneman and Carpenter (1980), (b) the Color Trail-Making test (D'Elia, Satz, Uchiyama, & White, 1997), (c) the Tower of London test (Culbertson & Zillmer, 2001), (d) the Warrington Recognition Memory test for faces and words (Warrington, 1984), (e) Benton Phoneme Discrimination and Face Recognition subtests (Benton, Hamsher, Varney, & Spreen, 1983), (f) the Forward Digit Span test, and (g) the Semantic Verbal Fluency test: simple (naming animals) and alternating (male names and vegetables). The results from statistical analyses of the various neuropsychological measures indicated that the PD and the HC group performed in a comparable manner on many cognitive and frontal lobe tasks (p Ͼ .05); ...
Objective:
Our study assessed how nondemented patients with Parkinson's disease (PD) interpret the affective and mental states of others from spoken language (adopt a "theory of mind") in ecologically valid social contexts. A secondary goal was to examine the relationship between emotion processing, mentalizing, and executive functions in PD during interpersonal communication.
Method:
Fifteen adults with PD and 16 healthy adults completed The Awareness of Social Inference Test, a standardized tool comprised of videotaped vignettes of everyday social interactions (McDonald, Flanagan, Rollins, & Kinch, 2003). Individual subtests assessed participants' ability to recognize basic emotions and to infer speaker intentions (sincerity, lies, sarcasm) from verbal and nonverbal cues, and to judge speaker knowledge, beliefs, and feelings. A comprehensive neuropsychological evaluation was also conducted.
Results:
Patients with mild-moderate PD were impaired in the ability to infer "enriched" social intentions, such as sarcasm or lies, from nonliteral remarks; in contrast, adults with and without PD showed a similar capacity to recognize emotions and social intentions meant to be literal. In the PD group, difficulties using theory of mind to draw complex social inferences were significantly correlated with limitations in working memory and executive functioning.
Conclusions:
In early PD, functional compromise of the frontal-striatal-dorsal system yields impairments in social perception and understanding nonliteral speaker intentions that draw upon cognitive theory of mind. Deficits in social perception in PD are exacerbated by a decline in executive resources, which could hamper the strategic deployment of attention to multiple information sources necessary to infer social intentions.
Purpose
Individuals with aphasia (IWA) show various impairments in speech, language, and cognitive functions. Working memory (WM), a cognitive system that functions to hold and manipulate information in support of complex, goal-directed behaviors, is one of the impaired cognitive domains in aphasia. The present study intended to examine the effects of a WM training program on both memory and language performance in IWA.
Method
This quasi-experimental study with an active control group was performed on 25 people with mild or moderate Broca’s aphasia aged 29-61 years resulting from left hemisphere damage following ischemic stroke. Participants were assigned into two groups, including a training group (n = 13) and a control group (n = 12). The treatment and control groups received WM training and routine speech therapy, respectively. Two separate lists of WM tests, including one list for both pre-training assessment and training program and a second list for the post-training assessment, were used in this study.
Results
The treatment group showed significant improvements in both trained and non-trained WM tasks (near transfer effect) and language performance (far transfer effect) compared to the control group.
Conclusion
Given the good generalizability of the WM training program on both WM and language performance, WM training is suggested as part of the rehabilitation program in aphasia.
L’objectif de cette thèse était d’explorer les bases cognitives et cérébrales des processus de compréhension du langage figuré via l’utilisation d’outils de neuroimagerie (EEG et IRMf). Nous nous sommes particulièrement intéressés aux processus inférentiels sémantiques et pragmatiques. Afin de mieux les cerner, nous avons étudié la compréhension de la métaphore verbale nouvelle (« catapulter ses paroles ») et de l’ironie verbale (« Il est détesté de tous. Cet homme est très populaire. »). Ce choix repose sur l’hypothèse selon laquelle chacune de ces figures sollicite spécifiquement un type de processus inférentiel ; de nature sémantique pour la métaphore et pragmatique pour l’ironie. Conformément à cette hypothèse, nos résultats indiquent que la compréhension des métaphores verbales nouvelles se fonde sur des processus de recherche et d’intégration d’informations sémantiques, supportant l’hypothèse d’un traitement séquentiel. L’examen des bases cérébrales du traitement de ces expressions précédées d’un contexte a mis en évidence des régions cérébrales postérieures, suggérant la mise en œuvre d’un processus de manipulation conceptuelle. Concernant le traitement de l’ironie, nous avons observé un processus tardif d’intégration d’informations plus important pour les énoncés ironiques comparés aux énoncés littéraux, suggérant un traitement pragmatique plus difficile. Enfin, nous avons mis en évidence un réseau fronto-temporal bilatéral lors du traitement de l’ironie, dont une part serait sensible au contraste entre le contexte et l’énoncé et à l’humour des énoncés. Nos résultats sont confrontés aux théories psycholinguistiques et cognitives du traitement du langage figuré.
A major challenge in understanding the origin of clinical symptoms in neuropsychological impairments is capturing the complexity of the underlying cognitive structure. This paper presents a practical guide to path modeling, a statistical approach that is well-suited for modeling multivariate outcomes with a multi-factorial origin. We discuss a step-by-step application of such a model to the problem of nonfluency in aphasia. Individuals with aphasia are often classified into fluent and nonfluent groups for both clinical and research purposes, but despite a large body of research on the topic, the origin of nonfluency remains obscure. We propose a model of nonfluency inspired by the psycholinguistic approach to sentence production, review several bodies of work that have independently suggested a relationship between fluency and various elements in this model, and implement it using path modeling on data from 112 individuals with aphasia from the AphasiaBank. The results show that word production, comprehension, and working memory deficits all contribute to nonfluency, in addition to syntactic impairment which has a strong and direct impact on fluency. More generally, we demonstrate that a path model is an excellent tool for exploring complex neuropsychological symptoms such as nonfluency.
Speakers invariably use sentences or utterances in context to convey thoughts and goals to a listener. Utterances in context constitute the domain of discourse, which can be distinguished from other levels of language description. We examine several topics bearing on impaired discourse resulting from acquired brain injury in adults. We first mention some caveats to the findings reviewed and then provide summaries of representative impairments in production and then comprehension of conversational and narrative discourse. We end by discussing some topics that fall beyond the scope of this article but that are nonetheless related to discourse.
For most people the left hemisphere is considered the basic one if it comes to the language functions; however recently also the right hemisphere has been recognized as playing the key role in the language processes. The author discusses the significance of the right hemisphere (RH) for regulation of the language functions; concisely presents information from the clinical experience, neuroanatomic and neuroimaging examinations and indicates that the right hemisphere damage (RHD) affects the language communication. Until recently, it was believed that people with right hemisphere damage did not suffer from speech and language disorders, and their examination by means of diagnostic tools used in aphasia did not reveal disorders of aphasia type. Today, it is known that some language functions are determined not by the left, but the right hemisphere of brain.
Purpose:
This study examined right hemisphere (RH) neuroanatomical correlates of lexical-semantic deficits that predict narrative comprehension in adults with RH brain damage. Coarse semantic coding and suppression deficits were related to lesions by voxel-based lesion symptom mapping (VLSM).
Method:
Participants were 20 adults with RH cerebrovascular accidents. Measures of coarse coding and suppression deficits were computed from lexical decision reaction times at short (175 ms) and long (1000 ms) prime-target intervals. Lesions were drawn on MRI images, and through normalization were registered on an age-matched brain template. VLSM analysis was applied to build a general linear model at each voxel. Z-score maps were generated for each deficit and results were interpreted using Automated Anatomical Labeling procedures.
Results:
A deficit in coarse semantic activation was associated with lesions to RH posterior middle temporal gyrus, dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (DLPFC), and lenticular nuclei. A maintenance deficit for coarsely-coded representations involved RH temporal pole and DLPFC more medially. Ineffective suppression implicated lesions to RH inferior frontal gyrus and subcortical regions, as hypothesized, along with rostral temporal pole.
Conclusion:
Beyond their scientific implications, these lesion-deficit correspondences may help inform the clinical diagnosis and enhance decisions about candidacy for deficit-focused treatment to improve narrative comprehension in RH damage.
The aim of this review is to systematically examine the literature concerning multicomponent working memory (WM)-comprising a central executive (CE), two storage components (phonological loop, PL and visuo-spatial sketchpad, VSSP), and episodic buffer (EB)-in pediatric traumatic brain injury (TBI). Electronic searches were conducted of MEDLINE, PsychINFO and EMBASE up to October 2014 with the inclusion criteria of children and adolescents with TBI, and quantitative methods to assess at least one component of WM. Meta-analytic procedures calculated pooled effect sizes for WM outcomes. Of the studies examined, 27 met the inclusion criteria. Children with TBI exhibited deficits in the CE and PL, but not in the VSSP, and no study could be found which examined the EB. Qualitative analysis found that greater TBI severity was associated with poorer CE functioning in five out of nine studies. Differences in patterns of brain activation were evident in four out of five fMRI studies that examined WM in TBI children and controls. Deficits in CE were associated with poorer mathematical skills in the only study that examined relations between WM and academic deficits. Notwithstanding the heterogeneity of the studies reviewed, TBI places children at risk of WM deficits. Moreover, this meta-analysis suggests that various components of WM have differential vulnerability to pediatric TBI, with significant deficits found in the CE and PL, but not in the VSSP (although the VSSP has rarely been examined to date). Future studies should be theoretically driven, employ tasks assessing all components of the WM model and examine the functional ramifications (including academic outcomes) of WM deficits in this population.
Background:
Aphasia following stroke refers to impairments that affect the comprehension and expression of spoken and/or written language, and co-occurring cognitive deficits are common. In this paper we focus on short-term and working memory impairments that impact on the ability to retain and manipulate auditory-verbal information. Evidence from diverse paradigms (large group studies, case studies) report close links between short-term/working memory and language functioning in aphasia. This evidence leads to the hypothesis that treating such memory impairments would improve language functioning. This link has only recently been acknowledged in aphasia treatment but has not been embraced widely by clinicians.
Aims:
To examine the association between language, and short-term and working memory impairments in aphasia. To describe practical ways of assessing short-term and working memory functioning that could be used in clinical practice. To discuss and critically appraise treatments of short-term and working memory reported in the literature.
Methods & procedures:
Taking a translational research approach, this paper provides clinicians with current evidence from the literature and practical information on how to assess and treat short-term and working memory impairments in people with aphasia. Published treatments of short-term and/or working memory in post-stroke aphasia are discussed through a narrative review.
Main contributions:
This paper provides the following. A theoretical rationale for adopting short-term and working memory treatments in aphasia. It highlights issues in differentially diagnosing between short-term, working memory disorders and other concomitant impairments, e.g. apraxia of speech. It describes short-term and working memory assessments with practical considerations for use with people with aphasia. It also offers a description of published treatments in terms of participants, treatments and outcomes. Finally, it critically appraises the current evidence base relating to the treatment of short-term and working memory treatments.
Conclusions:
The links between short-term/working memory functioning and language in aphasia are generally acknowledged. These strongly indicate the need to incorporate assessment of short-term/working memory functioning for people with aphasia. While the supportive evidence for treatment is growing and appears to highlight the benefits of including short-term/working memory in aphasia treatment, the quality of the evidence in its current state is poor. However, because of the clinical needs of people with aphasia and the prevalence of short-term/working memory impairments, incorporating related treatments through practice-based evidence is advocated.
To analyze cognitive functions of post-stroke aphasia patients compared to patients having right hemispheric stroke and left hemispheric lesions without aphasia, and to look for a relationship between cognitive deficits and aphasia severity.
Thirty-six patients with right hemispheric stroke (group 1), 32 with left hemispheric lesion without aphasia (group 2), and 26 left hemispheric stroke patients with aphasia (group 3) completed a set of tests in the computerized neurocognitive function batteries for attention, executive function and intelligence and Korean version of Western Aphasia Battery. Data analyses explored cognitive characteristics among the three groups and the correlation between cognitive deficits and aphasia severity.
Right hemispheric and left hemispheric stroke patients without aphasia showed similar findings except for digit span forward test. Cognitive tests for working memory and sustained attention were significantly impaired in the aphasic patients, but intelligence was shown to be similar in the three groups. Significant correlation between cognitive deficit and aphasia severity was only shown in some attention tests.
Cognitive deficits may be accompanied with post-stroke aphasia and there are possible associations between language and cognitive measures. Therefore, detection and treatment towards coexisting cognitive impairment may be necessary for efficient aphasia treatment.
Probabilistic preferences are often facilitative in language processing and may assist in discourse prediction. However, occasionally these sources of information may lead to inaccurate expectations. The current study investigated a test case of this scenario. An eye-tracking experiment examined the interpretation of ambiguous personal pronouns in the context of implicit causality biases. We tested whether reference resolution may be facilitated online by contrastive accent in cases of a bias-inconsistent referent. Implicit causality biases directed looks to the biased noun phrase; however, when the name of the bias-inconsistent antecedent was accented (e.g., JOHN envied Bill because he
\(\ldots \)), this tendency was modulated. Contrastive accent seems to dampen the occasionally confusing prediction of implicit causality biases in referential processing. This demonstrates one way in which the spoken language comprehension system copes with occasional misguidance of otherwise helpful probabilistic information.
Coarse coding is the activation of broad semantic fields that can include multiple word meanings and a variety of features, including those peripheral to a word's core meaning. It is a partially domain-general process related to general discourse comprehension and contributes to both literal and non-literal language processing. Adults with damage to the right cerebral hemisphere (RHD) and a coarse coding deficit are particularly slow to activate features of words that are relatively distant or peripheral. This manuscript reports a pre-efficacy study of Contextual Constraint Treatment (CCT), a novel, implicit treatment designed to increase the efficiency of coarse coding with the goal of improving narrative comprehension and other language performance that relies on coarse coding. Participants were four adults with RHD. The study used a single-subject controlled experimental design across subjects and behaviours. The treatment involved pre-stimulation, using a hierarchy of strong and moderately biased contexts, to prime the intended distantly related features of critical stimulus words. Three of the four participants exhibited gains in auditory narrative discourse comprehension, the primary outcome measure. All participants exhibited generalisation to untreated items. No strong generalisation to processing non-literal language was evident. The results indicate that CCT yields both improved efficiency of the coarse coding process and generalisation to narrative comprehension.
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