Valantis Fyndanis

To date, the evidence regarding the effect of bilingualism/multilingualism on short-term memory (STM) and working memory (WM) capacity is inconclusive. This study investigates whether multilingualism has a positive effect on the verbal STM and WM capacity of neurotypical middle-aged and older individuals. Eighty-two L1-Norwegian sequential bilingual/multilingual academics were tested with tasks measuring verbal STM/WM capacity. Degree of bilingualism/multilingualism for each participant was estimated based on a comprehensive questionnaire. Different measures of bilingualism/multilingualism were used. Data on potentially influencing non-linguistic factors were also collected. Correlation and regression analyses showed that multilingualism impacts both verbal STM and verbal WM. In particular, all analyses showed that number of known foreign languages was the strongest predictor of verbal STM and WM capacity. The results are discussed in light of recent studies on the impact of bilingu...

This study investigates the relationship between verb-related morphosyntactic production (VRMP) and locality (i.e., critical cue being adjacent to the target or not), verbal Working Memory (vWM), nonverbal/visuospatial WM (nvWM), verbal short-term memory (vSTM), nonverbal/visuospatial STM (nvSTM), speed of processing, and education. Eighty healthy middle-aged and older Greek-speaking participants were administered a sentence completion task tapping into production of subject–verb Agreement, Time Reference/Tense, and grammatical Aspect in local and nonlocal configurations, and cognitive tasks tapping into vSTM, nvSTM, vWM, nvWM, and speed of processing. Aspect elicited worse performance than Time Reference and Agreement, and Time Reference elicited worse performance than Agreement. There were main effects of vSTM, vWM, education, and locality: the greater the participants’ vSTM/vWM capacity, and the higher their educational level, the better their VRMP; nonlocal configurations elicit...

The ability of persons with non-fluent aphasia (PWAs) to produce sentential negation has been investigated in several languages, but only in small samples. Accounts of (morpho)syntactic impairment in PWAs have emphasized various factors, such as whether the negative marker blocks or interferes with verb movement, the position of the Negation Phrase in the syntactic hierarchy or the interpretability of negation. This study investigates the ability of German- and Italian-speaking PWAs to construct negative sentences, as well as the role of verbal working memory (WM) capacity and education in task performance and production of sentential negation. German and Italian differ in the syntactic properties of the negative markers that are relevant here (nicht and non, respectively). A sentence anagram task tapping into the construction of negative and affirmative declarative sentences was administered to 9 German- and 7 Italian-speaking PWAs, and to 14 German- and 11 Italian-speaking age- an...

<b>Purpose:</b> The present work investigated whether verbal working memory (WM) affects morphosyntactic production in configurations that do not involve or favor similarity-based interference and whether WM interacts with verb-related morphosyntactic categories and/or cue–target distance (locality). It also explored whether the findings related to the questions above lend support to a recent account of agrammatic morphosyntactic production: Interpretable Features' Impairment Hypothesis (Fyndanis, Varlokosta, & Tsapkini, 2012).<b>Method: </b>A sentence completion task testing production of subject–verb agreement, tense/time reference, and aspect in local and nonlocal conditions and two verbal WM tasks were administered to 8 Greek-speaking persons with agrammatic aphasia (PWA) and 103 healthy participants.<b>Results: </b>The 3 morphosyntactic categories dissociated in both groups (agreement > tense > aspect). A significant interaction emerged in both groups between the 3 morphosyntactic categories and WM. There was no main effect of locality in either of the 2 groups. At the individual level, all 8 PWA exhibited dissociations between agreement, tense, and aspect, and effects of locality were contradictory.<b>Conclusions: </b>Results suggest that individuals with WM limitations (both PWA and healthy older speakers) show dissociations between the production of verb-related morphosyntactic categories. WM affects performance shaping the pattern of morphosyntactic production (in Greek: subject–verb agreement > tense > aspect). The absence of an effect of locality suggests that executive capacities tapped by WM tasks are involved in morphosyntactic processing of demanding categories even when the cue is adjacent to the target. Results are consistent with the Interpretable Features' Impairment Hypothesis (Fyndanis et al., 2012).<b><br></b><b>Supplemental Material S1.</b> Rating scale profile of speech characteristics. <b><br></b><b>Supplemental Material S2.</b> Residuals model on Dataset 1; fitted against [...]

Comparative research on aphasia and aphasia rehabilitation is challenged by the lack of comparable assessment tools across different languages. In English, a large array of tools is available, while in most other languages, the selection is more limited. Importantly, assessment tools are often simple translations and do not take into consideration specific linguistic and psycholinguistic parameters of the target languages. As a first step in meeting the needs for comparable assessment tools, the Comprehensive Aphasia Test is currently being adapted into a number of languages spoken in Europe. In this article, some key challenges encountered in the adaptation process and the solutions to ensure that the resulting assessment tools are linguistically and culturally equivalent, are proposed. Specifically, we focus on challenges and solutions related to the use of imageability, frequency, word length, spelling-to-sound regularity and sentence length and complexity as underlying propertie...

In this paper, the process of designing an annotated Greek Corpus of Aphasic Discourse (GREECAD) is presented. Given that resources of this kind are quite limited, a major aim of the GREECAD was to provide a set of specifications which could serve as a methodological basis for the development of other relevant corpora, and, therefore, to contribute to the future research in this area. The GREECAD was developed with the following requirements: a) to include a rather homogeneous sample of Greek as spoken by individuals with aphasia; b) to document speech samples with rich metadata, which include demographic information, as well as detailed information on the patients’ medical record and neuropsychological evaluation; c) to provide annotated speech samples, which encode information at the micro-linguistic (words, POS, grammatical errors, clause types, etc.) and discourse level (narrative structure elements, main events, evaluation devices, etc.). In terms of the design of the GREECAD, ...

The aim of this study is to determine the effect of language varieties on the spectral distribution of stressed and unstressed sonorants (nasals /m, n/, lateral approximants /l/, and rhotics /r/) and on their coarticulatory effects on adjacent sounds. To quantify the shape of the spectral distribution, we calculated the spectral moments from the sonorant spectra of nasals /m, n/, lateral approximants /l/, and rhotics /r/ produced by Athenian Greek and Cypriot Greek speakers. To estimate the co-articulatory effects of sonorants on the adjacent vowels’ F1 F4 formant frequencies, we developed polynomial models of the adjacent vowel’s formant contours. We found significant effects of language variety (sociolinguistic information) on the spectral moments of each sonorant /m/, /n/, /l/, /r/ (except between /m/ and /n/) and on the formant contours of the adjacent vowel. All sonorants (including /m/ and /n/) had distinct effects on adjacent vowel’s formant contours, especially for F3 and F4...

Numerous studies have shown that language impairments, particularly semantic deficits, are evident in the narrative speech of people with Alzheimer’s disease from the earliest stages of the disease. Here, we present a novel technique for capturing those changes, by comparing distributed word representations constructed from healthy controls and Alzheimer’s patients. We investigate examples of words with different representations in the two spaces, and link the semantic and contextual differences to findings from the Alzheimer’s disease literature.

Background: Aphasia research has been informed by linguistic theory to a great extent. Conversely, linguistic theory has also been informed by data from people with aphasia, albeit to a lesser extent. Aims: This overview to the Special Issue of Aphasiology entitled “Aphasia and linguistic theory: What we have captured so far” presents a narrative review that aims to illustrate the contribution of linguistic theory to aphasia research, and also includes a section that presents the articles making up the special issue. The narrative review, which is not exhaustive, highlights influential theoretical frameworks and linguistic constructs that have been central to accounts of language impairment in aphasia. Main Contribution: The overview illustrates the contribution of linguistic theory to aphasiology and paves the way for the development of a unified approach to aphasia, which will incorporate insights not only from theoretical linguistics, but also from other complementary fields, suc...

This publication provides an overview of research on a large range of topics relating to language processing and language use from a life-span perspective. It is unique in covering and combining psycholinguistic and sociolinguistic approaches, discussing questions such as: Is it beneficial to speak more than one language when growing old? How are languages processed in multilingual persons, and how does this change over time? What happens to language and communication in multilingual aphasia or dementia? How is multilingual ageing portrayed in the media? It is a joint, cross-disciplinary venture of researchers from the Centre for Multilingualism in Society across the Lifespan at The University of Oslo and the editors of this publication.

This exploratory study focuses on sequential bi-/multilinguals (specifically, nonimmigrant young Dutch native speakers who learned at least one foreign language (FL) at or after the age of 5) and investigates the impact of proficiency-based and amount-of-use-based degrees of multilingualism in different modalities (i.e., speaking, listening, writing, reading) on inhibition, disengagement of attention, and switching. Fifty-four participants completed a comprehensive background questionnaire, a nonverbal fluid intelligence task, a Flanker task, and the Trail Making Test. Correlational and regression analyses considering multilingualism related variables and other variables that may contribute to the cognitive abilities under investigation (e.g., years of formal education, socioeconomic status, physical activity, playing video-games) revealed that only proficiency-based degrees of multilingualism impacted cognitive abilities. Particularly, mean FL writing proficiency affected inhibitio...

Time reference, which has been found to be selectively impaired in agrammatic aphasia, is often interwoven with grammatical aspect. A recent study on Russian aphasia found that time reference and aspect interact: Past reference was less impaired when tested within a perfective aspect context (compared to when tested within an imperfective aspect context), and reference to the non-past was less impaired when tested within an imperfective aspect context (compared to when tested within a perfective aspect context). To explain this pattern, the authors argued that there are prototypical associations between time frames and aspectual values. The present study explores the relationship between time reference and aspect focusing on Greek aphasia and healthy ageing and using a sentence completion task that crosses time reference and aspect. The findings do not support prototypical matches between different time frames and aspectual values. Building on relevant studies, we propose that patte...

The present work investigated whether verbal working memory (WM) affects morphosyntactic production in configurations that do not involve or favor similarity-based interference and whether WM interacts with verb-related morphosyntactic categories and/or cue-target distance (locality). It also explored whether the findings related to the questions above lend support to a recent account of agrammatic morphosyntactic production: Interpretable Features' Impairment Hypothesis (Fyndanis, Varlokosta, & Tsapkini, 2012). A sentence completion task testing production of subject-verb agreement, tense/time reference, and aspect in local and nonlocal conditions and two verbal WM tasks were administered to 8 Greek-speaking persons with agrammatic aphasia (PWA) and 103 healthy participants. The 3 morphosyntactic categories dissociated in both groups (agreement > tense > aspect). A significant interaction emerged in both groups between the 3 morphosyntactic categories and WM. There was no...

Recent studies by Bastiaanse and colleagues found that time reference is selectively impaired in people with nonfluent agrammatic aphasia, with reference to the past being more difficult to process than reference to the present or to the future. To account for this dissociation, they formulated the PAst DIscourse LInking Hypothesis (PADILIH), which posits that past reference is more demanding than present/future reference because it involves discourse linking. There is some evidence that this hypothesis can be applied to people with fluent aphasia as well. However, the existing evidence for the PADILIH is contradictory, and most of it has been provided by employing a test that predominantly taps retrieval processes, leaving largely unexplored the underlying ability to encode time reference-related prephonological features. Within a cross-linguistic approach, this study tests the PADILIH by means of a sentence completion task that 'equally' taps encoding and retrieval abiliti...

Imageability is a psycholinguistic variable that indicates how well a word gives rise to a mental image or sensory experience. Imageability ratings are used extensively in psycholinguistic, neuropsychological, and aphasiological studies. However, little formal knowledge exists about whether and how these ratings are associated between and within languages. Fifteen imageability databases were cross-correlated using nonparametric statistics. Some of these corresponded to unpublished data collected within a European research network-the Collaboration of Aphasia Trialists (COST IS1208). All but four of the correlations were significant. The average strength of the correlations (rho = .68) and the variance explained (R (2) = 46%) were moderate. This implies that factors other than imageability may explain 54% of the results. Imageability ratings often correlate across languages. Different possibly interacting factors may explain the moderate strength and variance explained in the correla...

Imageability is a psycholinguistic variable that indicates how well a word gives rise to a mental image or sensory experience. Imageability ratings are used extensively in psycholinguistic, neuropsychological, and aphasiological studies. However, little formal knowledge exists about whether and how these ratings are associated between and within languages. Fifteen imageability databases were cross-correlated using nonparametric statistics. Some of these corresponded to unpublished data collected within a European research network-the Collaboration of Aphasia Trialists (COST IS1208). All but four of the correlations were significant. The average strength of the correlations (rho = .68) and the variance explained (R (2) = 46%) were moderate. This implies that factors other than imageability may explain 54% of the results. Imageability ratings often correlate across languages. Different possibly interacting factors may explain the moderate strength and variance explained in the correla...