Effects of executive attention on sentence processing in aphasia.
Eleni Peristeri, Ianthi Maria Tsimpli, Efthimios Dardiotis and 1 others
PMID 32952261WHAT IT FOUND
Greek-speaking men with agrammatic aphasia struggled to revise misleading sentences and showed a specific attention shifting problem: moving from global to local detail was harder than moving from local to global.
Attention shifting performance was linked to sentence judgment performance.
Key findings
01Patients were slower and less accurate than controls overall, and within the patient group garden path subject sentences were slower and less accurate than unambiguous object sentences.
02In the attention task, patients had a global-to-local reaction-time switch cost of 1298 milliseconds and a local-to-global switch cost of 454 milliseconds, while controls did not show a significant switch-level difference.
03For patients, larger global-to-local attention switch costs were associated with faster grammaticality judgments and higher accuracy on garden path sentences; for controls, larger local-to-global switch costs were associated with faster reading of the determiner region.
STILL TO COME
How it was doneWhat they foundWhat it means for SLPs
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What it does not show
The study included only 15 patients and 15 controls, so it is small and cannot show how well the findings apply to other people with aphasia. All participants were Greek-speaking men with agrammatic aphasia, so the results may not transfer to women, other languages, or aphasia types without agrammatism. The design measured associations at one time point. It did not test whether improving attention shifting changes sentence comprehension. The language task depended on judging whether sentences were grammatical. The paper notes that this offline judgment may not fully reflect real-time comprehension.
Declared interests
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.
The easy way to misread this
Do not conclude that attention-shifting training will improve sentence comprehension in aphasia. The study found associations between attention switching costs and sentence-task performance in 15 patients and 15 controls, not a treatment effect.