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

ended

European populations are aging, and aging individuals are more vulnerable to neurological diseases which often result in language impairments (i.e. aphasia). These impairments render the skilled communication needed for successful everyday living impossible, with impact on mental health, quality of life and career burden. Although language impairments in aphasia have been studied, aphasic individuals' sentence interpretation in time-sensitive measurements including the time course and source of their brain responses have only scarcely been examined. This action seeks to generate scientific knowledge on primary progressive aphasia (PPA, a form of aphasia resulting from progressive brain degeneration) and post-stroke aphasia by investigating the time course of how people with aphasia precisely work out to whom a pronoun (e.g. her/herself) refers during moment-by-moment on-line sentence processing. This action aims to fill this important gap by answering the following research questions: (i) Does pronoun processing become impaired in PPA as the disease progresses, and if so how? (ii) How is pronoun processing modulated in the brain with respect to its moment-by-moment time course and locations of brain responses in aphasia and unimpaired individuals? (iii) Is pronoun processing impaired in aphasia in typologically different languages (i.e. Dutch, French and Turkish)? (iv) What are the factors influencing pronoun processing difficulty in aphasia? Findings of this interdisciplinary action will inform both the theories of language breakdown in aphasia and clinical assessment of sentence-level processing in the aphasia types with direct implications for treatment of these debilitating disorders. Importantly, when this action is complete, an eye-movement / machine learning database of aphasic processing, which can potentially be used to determine early sensitive markers of (primary progressive) aphasia, will be made publicly available for future research re-use.