Periodic Reporting for period 1 - ProResA (The time course of pronoun resolution in post-stroke and progressive aphasia)
Période du rapport: 2020-02-01 au 2022-01-31
Within the framework of this action, four full journal articles in international high-impact journals and eight conference dissemination and/or proceeding papers were published. Four journal articles are underway. These project outcomes have been significantly limited by travel restrictions, and closure of lab infrastructures for months, and by an overload in health care sectors which made it difficult to collect data in clinics and hospitals.
These (prospective) publications report on the following work completed so far:
An important objective of this action was to investigate cross-linguistic data on pronoun processing in aphasia. Solid work has been done with regard to this objective. Pronoun processing outcomes in Turkish post-stroke aphasia, a typologically distant language on which little research has been conducted, has been empirically investigated using eye-movement monitoring experiments. Results from this study point to differential patterns of impairments when compared to well-studied languages. Aphasiological and theoretical considerations are addressed in conference presentations, and a publication is underway.
Another study has been conducted on French individuals with PPA, showing that they have cognitive capacity shortages during sentence repetition. Following this study, a conference presentation was done, and publication is underway. In 2022, an investigation using eye-movement monitoring to examine the resolution of pronouns in real-time is planned with this population.
Another aim of this action was to examine whether individuals with primary progressive aphasia maintain their pronoun resolution ability. Work addressing this objective has been quite slow border closures and curfews. With regard to this strand, three experiments have been programmed, stimulus materials have been normed with control subjects. These experiments investigate pronoun impairment during (i) comprehending complex sentence structures, (ii) simple sentence structures and (iii) during production of pronouns in sentence contexts in English. Recruitment of individuals with primary progressive aphasia is yet pending and will commence in the first quarter of 2022.
In respect to another objective of this action, involving machine learning techniques to uncover determiners of pronoun outcomes in aphasia, initial work has already begun. Utilising a three-based random forest machine learning algorithm, our systematic review from 474 PWA speaking 16 different languages has identified important linguistic variables that largely predict pronoun impairments. Our models have shown pronoun impairment is consistently present in aphasia regardless of the type of aphasia or language spoken but there are important cross-linguistic differences. A full-length journal publication is already out.
Within the framework of ProResA knowledge transfer activities have been taking place. Most importantly, supervision of two PhD students is going with similar themes to ProResA action, intensifying efforts into knowledge and skill transfer. The outcomes from these doctoral studies will significantly complement outcomes from this action.