ProResA · The time course of pronoun resolution in post-stroke and progressive aphasia

The time course of pronoun resolution in post-stroke and progressive aphasia

Aphasia is a communication disorder affecting language ability following brain damage or degeneration. These impairments render the skilled communication needed for successful everyday living impossible, with impact on mental health, quality of life and career burden. People with aphasia find processing sentences difficult and particularly struggle to understand and produce pronouns (e.g. she/him). Although language impairments in aphasia have been studied, aphasic individuals' sentence interpretation in time-sensitive measurements and the spatio-temporal dynamics of their brain responses have only scarcely been examined. We do not know why people with aphasia experience these problems. The existing theoretical and experimental investigations are limited. This project seeks to fill this gap in knowledge. It aims to determine how PWA work out who or what a pronoun refers to, by examining moment-by-moment sentence-comprehension and its associated brain activity in both post-stroke aphasia and primary progressive aphasia (a form of aphasia resulting from brain degeneration). More specifically, this action seeks to generate scientific knowledge on post-stroke aphasia and primary progressive aphasia by investigating the time course of how people with aphasia precisely work out to whom a pronoun (e.g. she/him/herself) refers during moment-by-moment on-line sentence processing. According to WHO estimates, aphasia affects 1.1 million individuals per year. Without understanding the nature of language breakdown in aphasia, we cannot develop effective treatments. This action aims to fill this important gap by answering the following research questions: (i) Do cross-linguistic data from Turkish, French and English individuals with stroke aphasia show similar levels of pronoun processing impairments? (ii)Which spatio-temporal components characterize the brain responses during pronoun resolution in stroke aphasia and normal controls? (iii) Do individuals with primary progressive aphasia maintain their pronoun resolution ability intact as the disease progresses? To what extent oculomotor and working memory impairments influence the maintenance of pronouns? (iv) Can an eye-movement database to be built from the studies proposed here be useful in machine learning to determine the likelihood of healthy aging individuals’ probability of acquiring adverse language-impairing symptoms? Findings of this action will inform both the theory and clinical assessment of sentence-level processing in the aphasia types with direct implications for the treatment of these debilitating disorders.

Текст от CORDIS, на английски · Данни: CORDIS, © Европейски съюз