Cynthia K Thompson

Northwestern University | NU · The Roxlyn and Richard Pepper Department of Communication Sciences and Disorderts, The Ken and Ruth Davee Department of Neurology, Cognitive Neurology and Alzheimer's Disease Center

Linguistic theory suggests non-canonical sentences subvert the dominant agent-verb-theme order in English via displacement of sentence constituents to argument (NP-movement) or non-argument positions (wh-movement). Both processes have been associated with the left inferior frontal gyrus and posterior superior temporal gyrus, but differences in neur...

Purpose: The present study tested whether (and how) language treatment changed online sentence processing in individuals with aphasia. Method: Participants with aphasia (n = 10) received a 12-week program of Treatment of Underlying Forms (Thompson & Shapiro, 2005) focused on production and comprehension of passive sentences. Before and after tre...

To introduce a Clinical Forum focused on the Complexity Account of Treatment Efficacy (C. K. Thompson, L. P. Shapiro, S. Kiran, & J. Sobecks, 2003), a counterintuitive but effective approach for treating language disorders. This approach espouses training complex structures to promote generalized improvement of simpler, linguistically related struc...

This scientific commentary refers to ‘Cerebral perfusion in post-stroke aphasia and its relationship to residual language abilities’, by Ivanova et al. (https://doi.org/10.1093/braincomms/fcad252).

Studies on the neural bases of sentence production have yielded mixed results, partly due to differences in tasks and participant types. In this study, 101 individuals with Primary Progressive Aphasia (PPA) were evaluated using a test that required spoken production following an auditory prime (Northwestern Assessment of Verbs and Sentences - Sente...

Background: The Northwestern Assessment of Verbs and Sentences (NAVS) assesses verb and sentence production and comprehension in aphasia. Results from the original English version and from its adaptation to German have shown that the NAVS is able to capture effects of verb-argument structure (VAS) complexity (i.e., lower accuracy for two-and three-...

Introduction Many words are categorially ambiguous and can be used as a verb (to paint) or as a noun (the paint) due to the presence of unpronounced morphology or “zero morphology”. On this account, the verb “paint” is derived from the noun “paint” through the addition of a silent category-changing morpheme. Past studies have uncovered the syntacti...

The article by Matchin, Ouden, Hickok, Hillis, Bonilha and Fridriksson¹ is written to discredit our work on the anatomy of word comprehension in patients with primary progressive aphasia (PPA).2,3 For reasons stated below, we believe that the authors have missed their target by a long shot. The question being addressed is the disagreement between s...

Studies investigating the effects of language intervention on the re-organization of language networks in chronic aphasia have resulted in mixed findings, likely related to – among other factors – the language function targeted during treatment. The present study investigated the effects of the type of treatment provided on neural reorganization. S...

Studies of word class processing have found verb retrieval impairments in individuals with primary progressive aphasia (Bak et al., 2001; Cappa et al., 1998; Cotelli et al., 2006; Hillis, Heidler-Gary, et al., 2006; Hillis, Oh, & Ken, 2004; Marcotte et al., 2014; Rhee, Antiquena, & Grossman, 2001; Silveri & Ciccarelli, 2007; Thompson, Lukic, et al....

Inconsistent findings have been reported about the impact of structural disconnections on language function in post-stroke aphasia. This study investigated patterns of structural disconnections associated with chronic language impairments using disconnectome maps. Seventy-six individuals with post-stroke aphasia underwent a battery of language asse...

Language and music rely on complex sequences organized according to syntactic principles that are implicitly understood by enculturated listeners. Across both domains, syntactic processing involves predicting and integrating incoming elements into higher-order structures. According to the Shared Syntactic Integration Resource Hypothesis (SSIRH; Pat...

Primary progressive aphasia is a neurodegenerative disease that selectively impairs language without equivalent impairment of speech, memory or comportment. In 118 consecutive autopsies on patients with primary progressive aphasia, primary diagnosis was Alzheimer’s disease neuropathological changes (ADNC) in 42%, corticobasal degeneration or progre...

Stroke-induced alterations in cerebral blood flow (perfusion) may contribute to functional language impairments in chronic aphasia, particularly in perilesional tissue. Abnormal perfusion in this region may also serve as a biomarker for predicting functional improvements with behavioral treatment interventions. Using pseudo-continuous arterial spin...

Background: Poststroke recovery depends on multiple factors and varies greatly across individuals. Using machine learning models, this study investigated the independent and complementary prognostic role of different patient-related factors in predicting response to language rehabilitation after a stroke. Methods: Fifty-five individuals with chr...

Background: Research on how patients with Broca’s aphasia and concomitant agrammatism process dependency structures online offers a window into the understanding of how language is organized in the mind. Previous studies have shown that patients evince differential performances on dependency structures generated at different levels of linguistic re...

We addressed an understudied topic in the literature of language disorders, that is, processing of derivational morphology, a domain which requires integration of semantic and syntactic knowledge. Current psycholinguistic literature suggests that word processing involves morpheme recognition, which occurs immediately upon encountering a complex wor...

Introduction Verb production in agrammatic aphasia is more impaired for verbs with complex (vs. simple) verb-argument structure (VAS, [1]). Namely, verbs requiring 2 or 3 arguments are more difficult to produce than 1-argument verbs, and optionally transitive verbs may be more difficult to produce than 1-argument verbs [2]. In agrammatism, producti...

We conducted a retrospective review of fMRI studies of complex syntax, in order to study the stability of the neural bases of mechanisms engaged in syntactic processing. Our review set out rigorous selection criteria of studies which we discuss, including transparency and minimality of the contrasts between stimuli, and the presence of whole brain...

Tests of grammar, repetition and semantics were administered to 62 prospectively enrolled right-handed participants with primary progressive aphasia (PPA). Structural brain images were obtained at the time of testing. Regression analyses uncovered 3 clearly delineated non-overlapping left hemisphere clusters where cortical thinning (atrophy) was si...

Language outcomes after speech and language therapy in post-stroke aphasia are challenging to predict. This study examines behavioral language measures and resting state fMRI (rsfMRI) as predictors of treatment outcome. Fifty-seven patients with chronic aphasia were recruited and treated for one of three aphasia impairments: anomia, agrammatism, or...

Grammar provides the framework for understanding and producing language. In apha-sia, an acquired language disorder, grammatical deficits are diversified and widespread. However, the few assessments for testing grammar in the German language do not consider current linguistic, psycholinguistic, and functional imaging data, which have been shown to...

Primary progressive aphasia (PPA) is a dementia syndrome associated with several neuropathologic entities, including Alzheimer’s disease (AD) and all major forms of frontotemporal lobar degeneration (FTLD). It is classified into subtypes defined by the nature of the language domain that is most impaired. The asymmetric neurodegeneration of the hemi...

Primary progressive aphasia (PPA) is a degenerative disease affecting language while leaving other cognitive facilities relatively unscathed. The agrammatic subtype of PPA (PPA-G) is characterized by agrammatic language production with impaired comprehension of noncanonical filler-gap syntactic structures, such as object-relatives [e.g., The sandwi...

This study reports the results of a longitudinal study examining the effects of treatment for sentence processing deficits for a 70-year-old gentleman (DK) with the agrammatic variant of Primary Progressive Aphasia (PPA). On entry into the study, he presented with a 2-year history of impaired verb and sentence processing and concomitant neural atro...

Evidence from psycholinguistic research indicates that sentence processing is impaired in Primary Progressive Aphasia (PPA), and more so in individuals with agrammatic (PPA-G) than logopenic (PPA-L) subtypes. Studies have mostly focused on offline sentence production ability, reporting impaired production of verb morphology (e.g., tense, agreement)...

Purpose This study examined grammatical production impairments in primary progressive aphasia (PPA), as measured by structured tests and narrative samples. We aimed to quantify the strength of the relationship between grammatical measures across tasks, and identify factors that condition it. Three grammatical domains were investigated: overall sent...

Functional neuroimaging and lesion-symptom mapping investigations implicate a left frontal-temporal-parietal network for sentence processing. The majority of studies have focused on sentence comprehension, with fewer in the domain of sentence production, which have not fully elucidated overlapping and/or unique brain structures associated with the...

Background: Language outcomes after speech and language therapy in post-stroke aphasia are challenging to predict. This study examines behavioral language measures and resting state fMRI (rsfMRI) as prognostics for response to language therapy. Methods: Seventy patients with chronic aphasia were recruited and treated for one of three deficits: anom...

Purpose Analysis of spontaneous speech samples is important for determining patterns of language production in people with aphasia. To accomplish this, researchers and clinicians can use either hand coding or computer-automated methods. In a comparison of the two methods using the hand-coding NNLA (Northwestern Narrative Language Analysis) and auto...

Investigating the neurobiology of language impairment and treatment in chronic stroke aphasia using fMRI requires an understanding of measurement variability within and between participants. In this multicenter study we evaluated the scan‐rescan reliability of an auditory and visual (written) story comprehension paradigm in stroke participants with...

Purpose Reorganization of language networks in aphasia takes advantage of the facts that (a) the brain is an organ of plasticity, with neuronal changes occurring throughout the life span, including following brain damage; (b) plasticity is highly experience dependent; and (c) as with any learning system, language reorganization involves a synergist...

Background: Impaired sentence comprehension is observed in the three major subtypes of PPA, with distinct performance patterns relating to impairments in comprehending complex sentences in the agrammatic (PPA-G) and logopenic (PPA-L) variants and word comprehension in the semantic subtype (PPA-S). However, little is known about basic combinatory p...

Studies investigating the effects of language intervention on the re-organization of language networks in chronic aphasia have resulted in mixed findings, likely related to – among other factors – the language function targeted during treatment and the language task used to elicit brain activation [1]. Most studies have focused on naming, reporting...

This paper examined the effects of treatment on both offline and online sentence processing and associated neuroplasticity within sentence processing and dorsal attention networks in chronic stroke-induced agrammatic aphasia. Twenty-three neurotypical adults and 19 individuals with aphasia served as participants. Aphasic individuals were randomly a...

Objective: To combine Magnetic Resonance Imaging-based cortical morphometry and diffusion white matter tractography to describe the anatomical correlates of repetition deficits in patients with primary progressive aphasia (PPA). Methods: The traditional anatomical model of language identifies a network for word repetition that includes Wernicke’s...

Word-class ambiguous words engender greater processing time and fMRI (BOLD signal) activation than unambiguous ones. Theoretical accounts of this phenomenon suggest that words with multiple meanings (1) are associated with multiple lexical entries and thus require greater selection demands, or (2) undergo computationally expensive grammatical proce...

The poster describes the positive effects of a linguistically-based language intervention (Treatment of Underlying Forms) on a participant with the agrammatic variant of Primary Progressive Aphasia (PPA-G), using behavioral, eye-tracking and functional neuroimaging (fMRI) measures.

Researchers have sought to understand how language is processed in the brain, how brain damage affects language abilities, and what can be expected during the recovery period since the early 19th century. In this review, we first discuss mechanisms of damage and plasticity in the post-stroke brain, both in the acute and the chronic phase of recover...

We developed an Italian version of the Northwestern Assessment of Verbs and Sentences (NAVS, Thompson, 2011), a test assessing verb and sentence deficits typically found in aphasia, by focusing on verb-argument structure and syntactic complexity effects, rarely captured by standard language tests. Twenty-one young healthy individuals underwent a c...

Comprehending and producing sentences is a complex endeavor requiring the coordinated activity of multiple brain regions. We examined three issues related to the brain networks underlying sentence comprehension and production in healthy individuals: First, which regions are recruited for sentence comprehension and sentence production? Second, are t...

Studies investigating the effects of language intervention on the re-organization of language networks in chronic aphasia have resulted in mixed findings, likely related to – among other factors – the language function targeted during treatment and the language task used to elicit brain activation [1]. Most studies have focused on naming, reporting...

Objective: To explore atrophy-deficit correlations of word comprehension and repetition in temporoparietal cortices encompassing the Wernicke area, based on patients with primary progressive aphasia (PPA). Methods: Cortical thickness in regions within and outside the classical Wernicke area, measured by FreeSurfer, was correlated with repetition...

Right hemisphere upregulation following sentence processing treatment in chronic agrammatic aphasia

Evidence from off-line tasks indicate that, among Primary Progressive Aphasia (PPA) subtypes, agrammatic (PPA-G) show difficulty on grammatical measures, whereas patients with logopenic PPA (PPA-L) generally do not. Only a few prior studies (none using electrophysiological (ERP) measures) have investigated on-line processing of grammatical informat...

The semantic variant of primary progressive aphasia (PPA-S) is diagnosed based on impaired single-word comprehension, but nonverbal impairments in face and object recognition can also be present, particularly in later disease stages. PPA-S is associated with focal atrophy in the left anterior temporal lobe (ATL), often accompanied by a lesser degre...

Prototypical items within a semantic category are processed faster than atypical items within the same category. This typicality effect reflects normal representation and processing of semantic categories and when absent may be reflective of lexical–semantic deficits. We examined typicality effects in individuals with semantic and nonsemantic varia...

Purpose: The purpose of this study is to compare the outcomes of the manually coded Northwestern Narrative Language Analysis (NNLA) system, which was developed for characterizing agrammatic production patterns, and the automated Computerized Language Analysis (CLAN) system, which has recently been adopted to analyze speech samples of individuals w...

The role of the right hemisphere (RH) in recovery from aphasia is incompletely understood. The present study quantified RH grey matter (GM) volume in individuals with chronic stroke-induced aphasia and cognitively healthy people using voxel-based morphometry. We compared group differences in GM volume in the entire RH and in RH regions-of-interest....

Stroke-induced alterations in cerebral blood flow (perfusion) may contribute to functional language impairments and recovery in chronic aphasia. Using MRI, we examined perfusion in the right and left hemispheres of 35 aphasic and 16 healthy control participants. Across 76 regions (38 per hemisphere), no significant between-subjects differences were...

Introduction: Sentence production impairments in aphasia often improve with treatment. However, little is known about how cognitive processes supporting sentence production, such as sentence planning, are impacted by treatment. Methods: The present study used eyetracking to examine changes in sentence production resulting from a 12-week language tr...

We examined sequential learning in individuals with agrammatic aphasia (n = 12) and healthy age-matched participants (n = 12) using an artificial grammar. Artificial grammar acquisition, 24-hour retention, and the potential benefits of additional training were examined by administering an artificial grammar judgment test (1) immediately following a...

Purpose: Visual-world eyetracking is increasingly used to investigate online language processing in normal and language impaired listeners. Tracking changes in eye movements over time also may be useful for indexing language recovery in those with language impairments. Therefore, it is critical to determine the test-retest reliability of results o...

Objective: To identify features of primary progressive aphasia (PPA) associated with Alzheimer disease (AD) neuropathology. A related objective was to determine whether logopenic PPA is a clinical marker for AD. Methods: A total of 139 prospectively enrolled participants with a root diagnosis of PPA constituted the reference set. Those with auto...