TY - JOUR
T1 - Recovery of offline and online sentence processing in aphasia
T2 - Language and domain-general network neuroplasticity
AU - Barbieri, E.
AU - Mack, Jennifer
AU - Chiappetta, Brianne
AU - Europa, Eduardo
AU - Thompson, Cynthia K.
N1 - Funding Information:
The work reported here is part of a larger, multi-site project examining the neurobiology of language recovery in people with aphasia (NIH-NIDCD Clinical Research Center grant P50DC012283, PI: Cynthia K. Thompson). No part of the study procedures or analyses was pre-registered prior to the research being undertaken. We are grateful to Dr. Aya Meltzer-Asscher for her contributions to task development and pre-testing, to Sarah Chandler for assistance with data collection and language training, and to James Higgins for helpful discussions on the analysis of neuroimaging data. Finally, we thank Amanda Salman for her assistance with manuscript preparation.
Publisher Copyright:
© 2019 Elsevier Ltd
PY - 2019/11
Y1 - 2019/11
N2 - This paper examined the effects of treatment on both offline and online sentence processing and associated neuroplasticity within sentence processing and dorsal attention networks in chronic stroke-induced agrammatic aphasia. Twenty-three neurotypical adults and 19 individuals with aphasia served as participants. Aphasic individuals were randomly assigned to receive a 12-week course of linguistically-based treatment of passive sentence production and comprehension (N = 14, treatment group) or to serve as control participants (N = 5, natural history group). Both aphasic groups performed two offline tasks at baseline and three months following (at post-testing) to assess production and comprehension of trained passive structures and untrained syntactically related and unrelated structures. The aphasic participants and a healthy age-matched group also performed an online eyetracking comprehension task and a picture-verification fMRI task, which were repeated at post-testing for the aphasic groups. Results showed that individuals in the treatment, but not in the natural history, group improved on production and comprehension of both trained structures and untrained syntactically related structures. Treatment also resulted in a shift toward more normal-like eye movements and a significant increase in neural activation from baseline to post-testing. Upregulation encompassed right hemisphere regions homologs of left hemisphere regions involved in both sentence processing and domain-general functions and was positively correlated with treatment gains, as measured by offline comprehension accuracy, and with changes in processing strategies during sentence comprehension, as measured by eyetracking. These findings provide compelling evidence in favor of the contribution of both networks within the right hemisphere to the restoration of normal-like sentence processing patterns in chronic aphasia.
AB - This paper examined the effects of treatment on both offline and online sentence processing and associated neuroplasticity within sentence processing and dorsal attention networks in chronic stroke-induced agrammatic aphasia. Twenty-three neurotypical adults and 19 individuals with aphasia served as participants. Aphasic individuals were randomly assigned to receive a 12-week course of linguistically-based treatment of passive sentence production and comprehension (N = 14, treatment group) or to serve as control participants (N = 5, natural history group). Both aphasic groups performed two offline tasks at baseline and three months following (at post-testing) to assess production and comprehension of trained passive structures and untrained syntactically related and unrelated structures. The aphasic participants and a healthy age-matched group also performed an online eyetracking comprehension task and a picture-verification fMRI task, which were repeated at post-testing for the aphasic groups. Results showed that individuals in the treatment, but not in the natural history, group improved on production and comprehension of both trained structures and untrained syntactically related structures. Treatment also resulted in a shift toward more normal-like eye movements and a significant increase in neural activation from baseline to post-testing. Upregulation encompassed right hemisphere regions homologs of left hemisphere regions involved in both sentence processing and domain-general functions and was positively correlated with treatment gains, as measured by offline comprehension accuracy, and with changes in processing strategies during sentence comprehension, as measured by eyetracking. These findings provide compelling evidence in favor of the contribution of both networks within the right hemisphere to the restoration of normal-like sentence processing patterns in chronic aphasia.
KW - Aphasia
KW - Eyetracking
KW - Online sentence processing
KW - Sentence comprehension
KW - Treatment of underlying forms
KW - fMRI
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U2 - 10.1016/j.cortex.2019.06.015
DO - 10.1016/j.cortex.2019.06.015
M3 - Article
C2 - 31419597
AN - SCOPUS:85070526721
VL - 120
SP - 394
EP - 418
JO - Cortex
JF - Cortex
SN - 0010-9452
ER -