TY - JOUR
T1 - Effects of animacy and sentence type on silent reading comprehension in aphasia
T2 - An eye-tracking study
AU - DeDe, Gayle
AU - Kelleher, Denis
N1 - Funding Information:
This work was supported by the National Institutes of Health [ K23 DC010808 ]. The authors would like to thank the research participants and their families as well as the members of the Speech Language and Brain Lab who helped with data collection.
Publisher Copyright:
© 2020 Elsevier Ltd
PY - 2021/2
Y1 - 2021/2
N2 - The present study examined how healthy aging and aphasia influence the capacity for readers to generate structural predictions during online reading, and how animacy cues influence this process. Non-brain-damaged younger (n = 24) and older (n = 12) adults (Experiment 1) and individuals with aphasia (IWA; n = 11; Experiment 2) read subject relative and object relative sentences in an eye-tracking experiment. Half of the sentences included animate sentential subjects, and the other half included inanimate sentential subjects. All three groups used animacy information to mitigate effects of syntactic complexity. These effects were greater in older than younger adults. IWA were sensitive to structural frequency, with longer reading times for object relative than subject relative sentences. As in previous work, effects of structural complexity did not emerge on IWA's first pass through the sentence, but were observed when IWA reread critical segments of the sentences. Thus, IWA may adopt atypical reading strategies when they encounter low frequency or complex sentence structures, but they are able to use animacy information to reduce the processing disruptions associated with these structures.
AB - The present study examined how healthy aging and aphasia influence the capacity for readers to generate structural predictions during online reading, and how animacy cues influence this process. Non-brain-damaged younger (n = 24) and older (n = 12) adults (Experiment 1) and individuals with aphasia (IWA; n = 11; Experiment 2) read subject relative and object relative sentences in an eye-tracking experiment. Half of the sentences included animate sentential subjects, and the other half included inanimate sentential subjects. All three groups used animacy information to mitigate effects of syntactic complexity. These effects were greater in older than younger adults. IWA were sensitive to structural frequency, with longer reading times for object relative than subject relative sentences. As in previous work, effects of structural complexity did not emerge on IWA's first pass through the sentence, but were observed when IWA reread critical segments of the sentences. Thus, IWA may adopt atypical reading strategies when they encounter low frequency or complex sentence structures, but they are able to use animacy information to reduce the processing disruptions associated with these structures.
KW - Aging
KW - Aphasia
KW - Eye-tracking
KW - Reading comprehension
KW - Sentence comprehension
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U2 - 10.1016/j.jneuroling.2020.100950
DO - 10.1016/j.jneuroling.2020.100950
M3 - Article
AN - SCOPUS:85096194787
SN - 0911-6044
VL - 57
JO - Journal of Neurolinguistics
JF - Journal of Neurolinguistics
M1 - 100950
ER -