TY - JOUR
T1 - Neurocognitive recovery of sentence processing in aphasia
AU - Thompson, Cynthia K.
N1 - Funding Information:
This article stems from the 2018 Research Symposium at ASHA Convention, which was supported by the National Institute on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders of the National Institutes of Health under Award R13DC003383. The work reported here would not have been possible without the support of the National Institute on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders (Grants R01DC01948-1-20, RO1DC008552-11-15, P50DC012283, RO1DC007213, R03DC013386-01A1, R21DC010036, and R21DC007377), which has funded my work since 1992, and other funding agencies (i.e., the McDonnell-Pew Foundation, Program in Cognitive Neuroscience, Department of Education, National Institute of Disability and Rehabilitation Research, and the Department of Veterans Affairs Rehabilitation Research and Development). I wish to thank all of my co-authors, research associates, postdoctoral fellows, graduate and undergraduate students, research assistants, and staff who contributed to the research presented here, not only for their outstanding work but also for their unwavering commitment and dedication to the work we do. I also thank Audrey Holland for her helpful comments on this review article; Elena Barbieri and Matthew Walenski for their feedback and careful editing of previous versions of this review article; and Kaitlyn Litcofsky and Kathy Xie for their assistance with the tables and figures. Heartfelt gratitude is also extended to the many people with aphasia, their families, and unimpaired participants who have participated in our research.
PY - 2019/11
Y1 - 2019/11
N2 - Purpose: Reorganization of language networks in aphasia takes advantage of the facts that (a) the brain is an organ of plasticity, with neuronal changes occurring throughout the life span, including following brain damage; (b) plasticity is highly experience dependent; and (c) as with any learning system, language reorganization involves a synergistic interplay between organism-intrinsic (i.e., cognitive and brain) and organism-extrinsic (i.e., environmental) variables. A major goal for clinical treatment of aphasia is to be able to prescribe treatment and predict its outcome based on the neurocognitive deficit profiles of individual patients. This review article summarizes the results of research examining the neurocognitive effects of psycholinguistically based treatment (i.e., Treatment of Underlying Forms; Thompson & Shapiro, 2005) for sentence processing impairments in individuals with chronic agrammatic aphasia resulting from stroke and primary progressive aphasia and addresses both behavioral and brain variables related to successful treatment outcomes. The influences of lesion volume and location, perfusion (blood flow), and resting-state neural activity on language recovery are also discussed as related to recovery of agrammatism and other language impairments. Based on these and other data, principles for promoting neuroplasticity of language networks are presented. Conclusions: Sentence processing treatment results in improved comprehension and production of complex syntactic structures in chronic agrammatism and generalization to less complex, linguistically related structures in chronic agrammatism. Patients also show treatment-induced shifts toward normal-like online sentence processing routines (based on eye movement data) and changes in neural recruitment patterns (based on functional neuroimaging), with posttreatment activation of regions overlapping with those within sentence processing and dorsal attention networks engaged by neurotypical adults performing the same task. These findings provide compelling evidence that treatment focused on principles of neuroplasticity promotes neurocognitive recovery in chronic agrammatic aphasia.
AB - Purpose: Reorganization of language networks in aphasia takes advantage of the facts that (a) the brain is an organ of plasticity, with neuronal changes occurring throughout the life span, including following brain damage; (b) plasticity is highly experience dependent; and (c) as with any learning system, language reorganization involves a synergistic interplay between organism-intrinsic (i.e., cognitive and brain) and organism-extrinsic (i.e., environmental) variables. A major goal for clinical treatment of aphasia is to be able to prescribe treatment and predict its outcome based on the neurocognitive deficit profiles of individual patients. This review article summarizes the results of research examining the neurocognitive effects of psycholinguistically based treatment (i.e., Treatment of Underlying Forms; Thompson & Shapiro, 2005) for sentence processing impairments in individuals with chronic agrammatic aphasia resulting from stroke and primary progressive aphasia and addresses both behavioral and brain variables related to successful treatment outcomes. The influences of lesion volume and location, perfusion (blood flow), and resting-state neural activity on language recovery are also discussed as related to recovery of agrammatism and other language impairments. Based on these and other data, principles for promoting neuroplasticity of language networks are presented. Conclusions: Sentence processing treatment results in improved comprehension and production of complex syntactic structures in chronic agrammatism and generalization to less complex, linguistically related structures in chronic agrammatism. Patients also show treatment-induced shifts toward normal-like online sentence processing routines (based on eye movement data) and changes in neural recruitment patterns (based on functional neuroimaging), with posttreatment activation of regions overlapping with those within sentence processing and dorsal attention networks engaged by neurotypical adults performing the same task. These findings provide compelling evidence that treatment focused on principles of neuroplasticity promotes neurocognitive recovery in chronic agrammatic aphasia.
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U2 - 10.1044/2019_JSLHR-L-RSNP-19-0219
DO - 10.1044/2019_JSLHR-L-RSNP-19-0219
M3 - Review article
C2 - 31756151
AN - SCOPUS:85075471297
VL - 62
SP - 3947
EP - 3972
JO - Journal of Speech, Language, and Hearing Research
JF - Journal of Speech, Language, and Hearing Research
SN - 1092-4388
IS - 11
ER -