scholarly journals A case for the involvement of phonological loop in sentence comprehension

2010 ◽  
Vol 48 (14) ◽  
pp. 4003-4011 ◽  
Author(s):  
Leonor J. Romero Lauro ◽  
Janine Reis ◽  
Leonardo G. Cohen ◽  
Carlo Cecchetto ◽  
Costanza Papagno
2003 ◽  
Vol 46 (5) ◽  
pp. 1138-1153 ◽  
Author(s):  
Klara Marton ◽  
Richard G. Schwartz

This study examined the interaction between working memory and language comprehension in children with specific language impairment (SLI), focusing on the function of the central executive component and its interaction with the phonological loop (A. D. Baddeley, 1986) in complex working memory tasks. Thirteen children with SLI and 13 age-matched (age range=7;0 [years;months] to 10;0) children with typical language development participated. The tasks combined traditional nonword repetition tests and sentence comprehension by using sentences that differed in length and syntactic complexity. The children with SLI exhibited larger processing and attentional capacity limitations than their age-matched peers. Increased word length and syntactic complexity resulted in a large performance decrease in nonword repetition in both groups. There were some variations in the error pattern, which may indicate qualitative differences between the 2 groups. The performance of the children with SLI in nonword repetition, across the different tasks, indicated a limitation in simultaneous processing rather than difficulty in encoding and analyzing the phonological structure of the nonwords. Furthermore, syntactic complexity had a greater effect on performance accuracy than did sentence length.


Author(s):  
Margreet Vogelzang ◽  
Christiane M. Thiel ◽  
Stephanie Rosemann ◽  
Jochem W. Rieger ◽  
Esther Ruigendijk

Purpose Adults with mild-to-moderate age-related hearing loss typically exhibit issues with speech understanding, but their processing of syntactically complex sentences is not well understood. We test the hypothesis that listeners with hearing loss' difficulties with comprehension and processing of syntactically complex sentences are due to the processing of degraded input interfering with the successful processing of complex sentences. Method We performed a neuroimaging study with a sentence comprehension task, varying sentence complexity (through subject–object order and verb–arguments order) and cognitive demands (presence or absence of a secondary task) within subjects. Groups of older subjects with hearing loss ( n = 20) and age-matched normal-hearing controls ( n = 20) were tested. Results The comprehension data show effects of syntactic complexity and hearing ability, with normal-hearing controls outperforming listeners with hearing loss, seemingly more so on syntactically complex sentences. The secondary task did not influence off-line comprehension. The imaging data show effects of group, sentence complexity, and task, with listeners with hearing loss showing decreased activation in typical speech processing areas, such as the inferior frontal gyrus and superior temporal gyrus. No interactions between group, sentence complexity, and task were found in the neuroimaging data. Conclusions The results suggest that listeners with hearing loss process speech differently from their normal-hearing peers, possibly due to the increased demands of processing degraded auditory input. Increased cognitive demands by means of a secondary visual shape processing task influence neural sentence processing, but no evidence was found that it does so in a different way for listeners with hearing loss and normal-hearing listeners.


2011 ◽  
Author(s):  
K. Takahashi ◽  
N. Maionchi-Pino ◽  
A. Magnan ◽  
R. Kawashima

1980 ◽  
Vol 1 (3) ◽  
pp. 279-294 ◽  
Author(s):  
Daniel B. Hier ◽  
Joni Kaplan

ABSTRACTWe have compared the verbal comprehension abilities of 34 right hemisphere damaged patients to 16 hospitalized control subjects of comparable age and educational attainment. The right hemisphere damaged patients performed as well as the control subjects on a vocabulary test, but were impaired in their ability to interpret proverbs and comprehend logico-grammatical sentences. Impairment on the proverbs test was the result of a decrease in the number of abstract interpretations, whereas impairment on the logico-grammatical sentence comprehension test was related to difficultes in grasping spatial and passive relationships. These comprehension impairments tended to correlate with visuospatial deficits and hemianopia, but not with the degree of hemiparesis or the presence of sensory extinction. Patients with anterior right hemisphere damage performed better on the logico-grammatical sentence conprehension test than patients with posterior damage. A variety of factors probably contribute to these verbal deficits including impaired intellect, inattention, an inability to grasp spatial relationships, and difficulties in manipulating the inner schemata of language.


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