Cognitive vs. Linguistic Training in Children with Developmental Language Disorder: Exploring Their Effectiveness on Verbal Short-Term Memory and Verbal Working Memory.

The present study explores comparatively the effectiveness of a cognitive (verbal short-term memory (vSTM), verbal working memory (vWM)) and of a linguistic training (10-week duration each) in the diffusion of gains in cognitive abilities (vSTM and vWM) of in school-aged Greek-speaking children with developmental language disorder (DLD). To this purpose, two computerized training programs i.e., a linguistic and a cognitive one, were developed and applied to three groups (A, B, and C) of children with DLD (N = 49, in total). There were three assessments with two vSTM tasks (non-word repetition and forward digit span) and a vWM task (backward digit span): pre-therapeutically (time 1), where no significant between-group differences were found, post-therapeutically I (time 2), and post-therapeutically II (time 3) and two training phases. In phase Ι, group A received meta-syntactic training, whereas group B vSTM/vWM training and group C received no training. In phase ΙΙ, a reversal of treatment was performed for groups A and B: group A received vSTM/vWM while group B meta-syntactic training. Again, group C received no training. Overall, the results indicated a significant performance improvement for the treatment groups and revealed beneficial far-transfer effects as language therapy can affect vSTM and vWM in addition to direct and near transfer effects. In addition, the intervention type order affected performance as follows: first, better performance on the vSTM task (non-word repetition) was shown when the linguistic treatment was delivered first; second, better performance on the vWM in Time 2 and Time 3 was shown by group B, for which the cognitive treatment was delivered first. Concluding, not only intervention type but also intervention type order can affect performance in DLD.

Time reference, morphology and prototypicality: tense production in stroke aphasia and semantic dementia in Greek.

The present study aims at investigating verb inflection in aphasia and semantic dementia. In particular, it addresses the contribution of time reference and morphological complexity. Moreover, it investigates whether the lexical properties of the verb, such as argument structure and lexical aspect interact with the production of tense. Ten individuals with (different types of) stroke aphasia and five individuals with semantic dementia and their respective control groups conducted a sentence completion task. Three tenses were tested: past perfective, past imperfective and present. All tenses had to be produced with three different verb classes, which differed with respect to syntactic and semantic properties: unergative, unaccusative and transitive verbs. The findings imply problems with marking aspect and an interaction between inflection and lexical aspect but no effect of morphological complexity or across the board difficulties with reference to the past in aphasia. Moreover, the results suggest problems with inflection in semantic dementia, an interaction between inflection and lexical aspect and a selective difficulty with imperfective tenses. The study contributes to a better understanding of inflection problems in aphasia and it provides evidence for inflection problems in semantic dementia.

Lexical and Grammatical Factors in Sentence Production in Semantic Dementia: Insights From Greek.

Purpose: Language production in semantic dementia (SD) is characterized by a lexical-semantic deficit and largely preserved argument structure and inflection production. This study investigates (a) the effect of argument structure on verb retrieval and (b) the interrelation between inflection marking and verb retrieval in SD. Method: Seven individuals with SD and 7 healthy controls performed 2 sentence elicitation tasks. In Experiment 1, participants described the action taking place in a video. In Experiment 2, they watched the same videos preceded by a phrase prompting the production of past tense. Three verb classes were tested: (a) unergative (e.g., to walk), (b) unaccusative (e.g., to fall), and (c) transitive with 1 object (e.g., to read a book). Results: There was not any quantitative difference among the verb classes in Experiment 1, but error analysis hinted at difficulties related with argument structure complexity. The findings of Experiment 2 suggest no general effect of inflection on verb retrieval; nevertheless, inflection marking impeded the retrieval of verbs with complex argument structure. Large individual variation was established. Conclusions: Argument structure complexity may challenge speakers with SD. Verb retrieval and inflection marking seem to interrelate at the expense of the former. Inflection production may be affected at severe stages of the disease. Supplemental Material: https://doi.org/10.23641/asha.6030779.

Production of modal and negative particles in Greek aphasia.

This study aims at investigating the production of the Greek modal and negative particles by non-fluent aphasic patients. These particles belong to the highest part of the verb periphrasis, so they are likely to be impaired in non-fluent aphasia, according to some hypotheses about agrammatic language. Moreover, there is an agreement relation between modality and negation, allowing the examination of agreement relationships in the clause domain. The data are compared to the predictions of recent theories on agrammatic language. The data provide evidence that modality is impaired in agrammatic aphasia, whilst agreement relations between clausal elements are spared.