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Distinct Contributions of Working Memory and Attentional Control to Sentence Comprehension in Noise in Persons With Stroke.

ABSTRACT: Purpose Sentence comprehension deficits are common following a left hemisphere stroke and have primarily been investigated under optimal listening conditions. However, ample work in neurotypical controls indicates that background noise affects sentence comprehension and the cognitive resources it engages. The purpose of this study was to examine how background noise affects sentence comprehension poststroke using both energetic and informational maskers. We further sought to identify whether sentence comprehension in noise abilities are related to poststroke cognitive abilities, specifically working memory and/or attentional control. Method Twenty persons with chronic left hemisphere stroke completed a sentence-picture matching task where they listened to sentences presented in three types of maskers: multispeakers, broadband noise, and silence (control condition). Working memory, attentional control, and hearing thresholds were also assessed. Results A repeated-measures analysis of variance identified participants to have the greatest difficulty with the multispeakers condition, followed by broadband noise and then silence. Regression analyses, after controlling for age and hearing ability, identified working memory as a significant predictor of listening engagement (i.e., mean reaction time) in broadband noise and multispeakers and attentional control as a significant predictor of informational masking effects (computed as a reaction time difference score where broadband noise is subtracted from multispeakers). Conclusions The results from this study indicate that background noise impacts sentence comprehension abilities poststroke and that these difficulties may arise due to deficits in the cognitive resources supporting sentence comprehension and not other factors such as age or hearing. These findings also highlight a relationship between working memory abilities and sentence comprehension in background noise. We further suggest that attentional control abilities contribute to sentence comprehension by supporting the additional demands associated with informational masking. Supplemental Material https://doi.org/10.23641/asha.14984511.

SUBMITTER: Fitzhugh MC

PROVIDER: S-EPMC8740654 | biostudies-literature |

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature

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Project description:Sentence comprehension involves maintaining and continuously integrating linguistic information and, thus, makes demands on working memory (WM). Past research has demonstrated that semantic WM, but not phonological WM, is critical for integrating word meanings across some distance and resolving semantic interference in sentence comprehension. Here, we examined the relation between phonological and semantic WM and the comprehension of center-embedded relative clause sentences, often argued to make heavy demands on WM. Additionally, we examined the relation between phonological and semantic WM and the comprehension of transitive and dative active and passive sentences, which may also draw on WM resources depending on the number of propositions that must be maintained and the difficulty of processing passive clauses. In a large sample of individuals with aphasia (N = 56), we assessed whether comprehension performance on more complex vs. simpler active-passive or embedded relative clause sentences would be predicted by semantic but not phonological WM when controlling for single word comprehension. For performance on the active-passive comprehension task, we found that semantic WM, but not phonological WM, predicted comprehension of dative sentences when controlling for comprehension of transitive sentences. We also found that phonological WM, but not semantic WM, predicted mean comprehension for reversible active-passive sentences when controlling for trials with lexical distractors. On the relative clause comprehension task, consistent with prior results, we found that semantic WM, but not phonological WM, predicted comprehension of object relative clause sentences and relative clause sentences with a passive construction. However, both phonological WM and semantic WM predicted mean comprehension across all relative clause types for reversible trials when controlling for trials with lexical distractors. While we found evidence of semantic WM’s role in comprehension, we also observed unpredicted relations between phonological WM and comprehension in some conditions. Post-hoc analyses provided preliminary evidence that phonological WM maintains a backup phonological representation of the sentence that may be accessed when sentence comprehension processing is less efficient. Future work should investigate possible roles that phonological WM may play across sentence types.

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Distinct Contributions of Working Memory and Attentional Control to Sentence Comprehension in Noise in Persons With Stroke.

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