Topic Overview:
In aphasia, a language impairment due to cerebrovascular accident or other brain injury, the production and comprehension of complex sentences is impaired. For example, sentences like, "I saw the girl who the boy kissed," or, "The girl was kissed by the boy," elicit highly impaired patient performance in standard clinical measures and pose daily communication challenges to language-impaired adults.  It remains unclear, however, exactly how impaired adults try (and often fail) to understand such sentences in real time.  In this seminar, Dickey will review evidence from a series of studies examining the real-time comprehension of complex sentences by adults with aphasia.  Evidence suggests that, following brain damage, a significant residual capacity for automatic processing of these challenging sentences remains; however, this capacity may go undetected using traditional clinical measures. Furthermore, this intact processing capacity may be what underlies successful response to language treatment that targets complex sentences.  Treatment that directly stimulates aphasic adults' ability to use this residual capacity has significant evidence of efficacy, and psycholinguistic tasks that tap this ability may be useful in predicting treatment outcomes in aphasia.