Accessibility navigation


Artificial grammar learning in vascular and progressive non-fluent aphasias

Cope, T. E., Wilson, B., Robson, H., Drinkall, R., Dean, L., Grube, M., Jones, P. S., Patterson, K., Griffiths, T. D., Rowe, J. B. and Petkov, C. I. (2017) Artificial grammar learning in vascular and progressive non-fluent aphasias. Neuropsychologia, 104. pp. 201-213. ISSN 1873-3514

[img]
Preview
Text (Open access) - Published Version
· Available under License Creative Commons Attribution.
· Please see our End User Agreement before downloading.

1MB

It is advisable to refer to the publisher's version if you intend to cite from this work. See Guidance on citing.

To link to this item DOI: 10.1016/j.neuropsychologia.2017.08.022

Abstract/Summary

Patients with non-fluent aphasias display impairments of expressive and receptive grammar. This has been attributed to deficits in processing configurational and hierarchical sequencing relationships. This hypothesis had not been formally tested. It was also controversial whether impairments are specific to language, or reflect domain general deficits in processing structured auditory sequences. Here we used an artificial grammar learning paradigm to compare the abilities of controls to participants with agrammatic aphasia of two different aetiologies: stroke and frontotemporal dementia. Ten patients with non-fluent variant primary progressive aphasia (nfvPPA), 12 with non-fluent aphasia due to stroke, and 11 controls implicitly learned a novel mixed-complexity artificial grammar designed to assess processing of increasingly complex sequencing relationships. We compared response profiles for otherwise identical sequences of speech tokens (nonsense words) and tone sweeps. In all three groups the ability to detect grammatical violations varied with sequence complexity, with performance improving over time and being better for adjacent than non-adjacent relationships. Patients performed less well than controls overall, and this was related more strongly to aphasia severity than to aetiology. All groups improved with practice and performed well at a control task of detecting oddball nonwords. Crucially, group differences did not interact with sequence complexity, demonstrating that aphasic patients were not disproportionately impaired on complex structures. Hierarchical cluster analysis revealed that response patterns were very similar across all three groups, but very different between the nonsense word and tone tasks, despite identical artificial grammar structures. Overall, we demonstrate that agrammatic aphasics of two different aetiologies are not disproportionately impaired on complex sequencing relationships, and that the learning of phonological and non-linguistic sequences occurs independently. The similarity of profiles of discriminatory abilities and rule learning across groups suggests that insights from previous studies of implicit sequence learning in vascular aphasia are likely to prove applicable in nfvPPA. [Abstract copyright: Copyright © 2017 The Authors. Published by Elsevier Ltd.. All rights reserved.]

Item Type:Article
Refereed:Yes
Divisions:Life Sciences > School of Psychology and Clinical Language Sciences > Department of Psychology
Life Sciences > School of Psychology and Clinical Language Sciences > Department of Clinical Language Sciences
ID Code:72356
Uncontrolled Keywords:Aphasia, Frontotemporal dementia, Grammar, Implicit learning, Stroke
Publisher:Elsevier

Downloads

Downloads per month over past year

University Staff: Request a correction | Centaur Editors: Update this record

Page navigation