Rosemary Varley

• Doctor of Philosophy
• Professor (Full) at University College London

The coordination and options of rehabilitative measures are shown for the acute, subacute and chronic phase of aphasia. The significance of guidelines is emphasised, as is also the impact of the human interaction between the patient and the therapists. Individual planning of speech and language therapy executed by logopaedists/speech and language t...

INTRODUCTION Interventions to treat speech‐language difficulties in primary progressive aphasia (PPA) often use word accuracy as a highly comparable outcome. However, there are more constructs of importance to people with PPA that have received less attention. METHODS Following Core Outcome Set Standards for Development Recommendations (COSSTAD),...

In face-to-face contexts, discourse is accompanied by various cues, like gestures and mouth movements. Here, we asked whether the presence of gestures and mouth movements benefits discourse comprehension under clear and challenging listening conditions and, if so, whether this multimodal benefit depends on the communicative environment in which int...

Background The language profile of behavioral variant frontotemporal dementia (bvFTD) remains to be fully defined. Objective We aimed to quantify the extent of language deficits in this patient group. Methods We assessed a cohort of patients with bvFTD (n = 24) in relation to patients with semantic variant primary progressive aphasia (svPPA; n =...

Script Club: motivating change through remote group script training for people with primary progressive aphasia State of the art: Script training has been shown to improve fluency and grammatical well-formedness in non-fluent PPA, including when delivered via telehealth (Henry et al. Brain 2018;141 1799–1814). Research studies on script training h...

Barriers and facilitators to implementing telehealth interventions for people with primary progressive aphasia (PPA) and dementia: a systematic review Background: There is evidence supporting behavioural therapies such as speech and language therapy to manage symptoms of PPA and dementia. Access to behavioural therapies is dependent on individual...

Introduction The term primary progressive aphasia (PPA) describes a group of language-led dementias. Disease-modifying treatments that delay, slow or reverse progression of PPA are currently lacking, though a number of interventions to manage the symptoms of PPA have been developed in recent years. Unfortunately, studies exploring the effectiveness...

Purpose: As people living with thalidomide embryopathy (TE) are now entering their seventh decade, we examine the impact of ageing and the prevalence of comorbid health conditions reported in holistic needs assessments (HNAs) by individuals with TE, compare it with an age-matched sample of the general population, and explore the relationship betwe...

In a series of studies, we have explored claims of language mediation in various forms of thinking by recruiting people with severe (global) aphasia and dense impairment of language processing across modalities. These investigations reveal residual capacities in, for example, theory of mind reasoning and calculation, in some people with global apha...

The relationship between language and thought is the subject of long-standing debate. One claim states that language facilitates categorization of objects based on a certain feature (e.g. color) through the use of category labels that reduce interference from other, irrelevant features. Therefore, language impairment is expected to affect categoriz...

Word-finding difficulties have been associated with age and, in women, lowered sex hormone levels following menopause. However, there is limited understanding of the ways that specific aspects of word-finding are shaped by women's age, reproductive histories, and background factors such as education. The current study investigated the effects of ag...

People living with dementia are an under-served group, whose voices are often excluded from research studies due to their speech, language and communication difficulties. As part of a larger study into language processing in dementia, we invited five people with dementia and their carers to tell us about how dementia impacts on their everyday conve...

Aphasia is a language disorder that often involves speech comprehension impairments affecting communication. In face-to-face settings, speech is accompanied by mouth and facial movements, but little is known about the extent to which they benefit aphasic comprehension. This study investigated the benefit of visual information accompanying speech fo...

Language and music are two human-unique capacities whose relationship remains debated. Some have argued for overlap in processing mechanisms, especially for structure processing. Such claims often concern the inferior frontal component of the language system located within "Broca's area." However, others have failed to find overlap. Using a robust...

Background: Cognitive communication disorder (CCD) following traumatic brain injury (TBI) is well documented and these communication problems impede successful re-integration into community living. While there is growing evidence for intervention to both detect and treat the impact of these deficits across the rehabilitation continuum, there are b...

This study investigates, using behavioral and lesion-symptom mapping methods, the impact of visual speech information for word comprehension in aphasia and the neuroanatomic substrates of any benefit.

Background Conversation is challenging to measure. Quantitative and qualitative measures need to be sensitive to the conversation context, the purpose and the variable contributions of participants in order to capture meaningful change. Measurements also need to be consistent across independent raters. The reliability of global observational rating...

Human face-to-face communication is multimodal: it comprises speech as well as visual cues, such as articulatory and limb gestures. In the current study, we assess how iconic gestures and mouth movements influence audiovisual word recognition. We presented video clips of an actress uttering single words accompanied, or not, by more or less informat...

Statistical properties of language provide important cues for language learning and may be processed by domain-general cognitive systems. We investigated the relationship between implicit statistical learning (the unconscious detection of statistical regularities in input) and language production. Twenty typically developing (TD) children and nine...

Background Many speakers with non-fluent aphasia (NFA) are able to produce some well-formed word combinations such as ‘I like it’ or ‘I don't know’, although they may not use variations such as ‘He likes it’ or ‘I don't know that person’. This suggests that these utterances represent fixed forms. Aims This case series investigation explored the im...

Objectives To investigate acceptance of high-definition transcranial direct current stimulation (HD-tDCS) as a management option for tinnitus. Design Participants completed an online version of the Tinnitus Functional Index (TFI), after which they recorded their satisfaction ratings with different hypothetical intervention outcomes on a 10-point r...

Language and music are two human-unique capacities whose relationship remains debated. Some argue for overlap in processing mechanisms, especially for structure processing, but others fail to find overlap. Using fMRI, we examined the responses of language brain regions to diverse music stimuli, and also probed the musical abilities of individuals w...

The role of language in mediating or augmenting human thought is the subject of long-standing debate. One specific claim links language and the ability to categorize objects based on a certain feature. According to this view, language resources are critical for feature-based categorization because verbal labels can help maintain focus on the releva...

Background A common symptom of myalgic encephalomyelitis/chronic fatigue syndrome (ME/CFS) is post-exertional malaise (PEM). Various brain abnormalities have been observed in patients with ME/CFS, especially in insular and limbic areas, but their link with ME/CFS symptoms is still unclear. This pilot study aimed at investigating the association bet...

The ability to combine individual concepts of objects, properties, and actions into complex representations of the world is often associated with language. Yet combinatorial event-level representations can also be constructed from nonverbal input, such as visual scenes. Here, we test whether the language network in the human brain is involved in an...

Background Social communication impairments following acquired brain injury (ABI) are well-documented. There is evidence that group interventions are beneficial but research into validated instruments to measure group outcomes is a new field of investigation. Aims This study reports on the inter-rater reliability of three established social commun...

Statistical properties of language provide important cues for language learning and may be processed by domain-general cognitive systems. We explored the relationship between implicit statistical learning (the ability to detect statistical regularities in input) and language production. Twenty typically developing (TD) children and nine children wi...

Reduced social competence following severe acquired brain injury (ABI) is well-documented. This pilot study investigated a peer-led group intervention based on the claim that peer models may be a more effective mechanism for behaviour change than clinician-led approaches. Twelve participants with severe ABI were recruited from a post-acute neuroreh...

Background: A patient in PDOC must demonstrate functional object use or functional communication to confirm they have emerged from this state. A range of tasks and stimuli are used and patients must achieve 100% accuracy. As consciousness occurs along a continuum, determining emergence is not straightforward. Objective: To establish the opinions...

Background: We explore the efficacy of a new computer therapy for sentence comprehension and production impairments in post-stroke aphasia. The intervention is based upon the theoretical framework of usage-based Construction Grammar, which has yet to be systematically applied to the management of sentence processing disorders in aphasia. Components...

Objective: To determine the relationship between language abnormalities and broader cognitive impairment and thought disorder by examining language and cognition in schizophrenia and aphasia (a primary language disorder). Methods: Cognitive and linguistic profiles were measured with a battery of standardised tests, and compared in a clinical popula...

Consistent with longstanding findings from neuropsychology, several brain regions in left frontal and temporal cortex respond robustly and selectively to language. These regions, often referred to as the "language network", respond more strongly to meaningful stimuli (like words and sentences) than to stimuli devoid of meaning (like pseudowords and...

Everyday speech is produced with an intricate timing pattern and rhythm. Speech units follow each other with short interleaving pauses, which can be either bridged by fillers (erm, ah) or empty. Through their syntactic positions, pauses connect to the thoughts expressed. We investigated whether disturbances of thought in schizophrenia are manifest...

Formal thought disorder (FTD) in schizophrenia (SZ) is clinically manifested primarily through language production, where linguistic studies have reported numerous anomalies including lesser use of embedded clauses. Here, we explored whether problems of language may extend to comprehension and clause embedding in particular. A sentence-picture matc...

Everyday speech is produced with an intricate timing pattern and rhythm. Speech units follow each other with short interleaving pauses, which can be either bridged by fillers (erm, ah) or empty. Through their syntactic positions, pauses connect to the thoughts expressed. We investigated whether disturbances of thought in schizophrenia are manifest...

Formal thought disorder (FTD) is clinically manifested as disorganized speech, but there have been only few investigations of its linguistic properties. We examined how disturbance of thought may relate to the referential function of language as expressed in the use of noun phrases (NPs) and the complexity of sentence structures. We used a comic st...

Background: Familiar collocations (e.g., “it’s alright”) are an important part of everyday conversation. Such word combinations are often retained in speakers with Broca’s aphasia. However, only few investigations have studied the forms and functions of familiar collocations available to speakers with Broca’s aphasia. Aims: We first apply a frequen...

In factive clausal embedding ([He knows [that it is warm outside]]), the embedded clause is presupposed to be true. In non-factive embedding ([He thinks [that it is warm outside]]) there is no presupposition, and in counterfactive embedding ([It only seems [that it is warm outside]]) the embedded clause is presupposed to be false. These constructio...

Background: Reliance on formulaic language, i.e., holistically processed multiword chunks, is claimed to distinguish speakers with aphasia, speakers with right-hemisphere damage (RHD), and neurotypical controls (NC). Frequency and collocation strength of word combinations are indicators of formulaic language. Aims: We aimed to determine frequency a...

The domain of Communications Disorders has grown exponentially in the last two decades and has come to encompass much more than audiology, speech impediments and early language impairment. The realization that most developmental and learning disorders are language-based or language-related has brought insights from theoretical and empirical linguis...

Bilingualism studies report asymmetries in word processing across languages. Access to L2 words is slower and sensitive to semantic blocking. These observations inform influential models of bilingual processing, which propose autonomous lexicons with different processing routes. In a series of experiments, we explored an alternative hypothesis that...

Background: Language change can be a valuable biological marker of overall cognitive change in Alzheimer’s disease (AD) and other forms of dementia. Previous reports have described increased use of language formulas in AD, i.e., combinations likely processed in a holistic manner. Words that commonly occur together are more likely to become a formul...

Is thought possible without language? Individuals with global aphasia, who have almost no ability to understand or produce language, provide a powerful opportunity to find out. Surprisingly, despite their near-total loss of language, these individuals are nonetheless able to add and subtract, solve logic problems, think about another person's thoug...

BACKGROUND AND PURPOSE: There is currently little evidence on effective interventions for poststroke apraxia of speech. We report outcomes of a trial of self-administered computer therapy for apraxia of speech. / METHODS: Effects of speech intervention on naming and repetition of treated and untreated words were compared with those of a visuospatia...

Background and Purpose—There is currently little evidence on effective interventions for poststroke apraxia of speech. We report outcomes of a trial of self-administered computer therapy for apraxia of speech. Methods—Effects of speech intervention on naming and repetition of treated and untreated words were compared with those of a visuospatial s...

Efficient storage and retrieval of digital data is the focus of much commercial and academic attention. With personal computers, there are two main ways to retrieve files: hierarchical navigation and query-based search. In navigation, users move down their virtual folder hierarchy until they reach the folder in which the target item is stored. When...

Acquired apraxia of speech (AOS) is a motor speech disorder that affects the implementation of articulatory gestures and the fluency and intelligibility of speech. Oral apraxia (OA) is an impairment of nonspeech volitional movement. Although many speakers with AOS also display difficulties with volitional nonspeech oral movements, the relationship...

Processing of linear word order (linear configuration) is important for virtually all languages and essential to languages such as English which have little functional morphology. Damage to systems underpinning configurational processing may specifically affect word-order reliant sentence structures. We explore order processing in WR, a man with pr...

Language is more than a system used for interpersonal communication. Linguistic representations can also form a part of reasoning in other cognitive domains. However, it is unclear whether the role of language in non-verbal domains is a necessary one, or whether it represents an optional resource that is recruited under demanding or highly intentio...

The role of language in exact calculation is the subject of debate. Some behavioral and functional neuroimaging investigations of healthy participants suggest that calculation requires language resources. However, there are also reports of individuals with severe aphasic language impairment who retain calculation ability. One possibility in resolvi...

Some models of semantic memory claim that items from living and nonliving domains have different feature-type profiles. Data from feature generation and perceptual modality rating tasks were compared to evaluate this claim. Results from two living (animals, fruits/vegetables) and two nonliving (tools, vehicles) categories showed that sensorimotoric...

We explored the role of phonological representations of number words in exact calculation. The reaction times and accuracy of responses in multidigit addition problems were compared across three groups of participants (young healthy, older healthy, and 3 patients with severe aphasia) and two types of addition problems: phonologically long in Englis...

We report an intervention study focused on the speech production difficulties present in acquired apraxia of speech (AOS). The intervention was a self-administered computer therapy that targeted whole word production and incorporated error reduction strategies. The effectiveness of the therapy was contrasted to that of a visuospatial sham computer...

Gender priming studies have demonstrated facilitation of noun production following pre-activation of a target noun's grammatical gender. Findings provide support for models in which syntactic information relating to words is stored within the lexicon and activated during lexical retrieval. Priming effects are observed in the context of determiner p...

Background: We report an investigation of the stability of voice onset time (VOT) patterns in a participant with acquired apraxia of speech (AOS) (SI) and an age- And sex-matched control participant (S2). Methods: The VOT values of voiced </b d g/) and voiceless C/p t k/) plosive consonants were examined in minimal word pairs that were controlled f...

Although there is evidence that exact calculation recruits left hemisphere perisylvian language systems, recent work has shown that exact calculation can be retained despite severe damage to these networks. In this study, we sought to identify a "core" network for calculation and hence to determine the extent to which left hemisphere language areas...

A debated issue in the relationship between language and thought is how our linguistic abilities are involved in understanding the intentions of others ('mentalizing'). The results of both theoretical and empirical work have been used to argue that linguistic, and more specifically, grammatical, abilities are crucial in representing the mental stat...

We report an intervention for severe and chronic sentence comprehension difficulties that used the intact resources of one symbolic system (mathematics) to scaffold impaired capacity in a second symbolic system (language). The study evaluated the outcome of therapy for participant SO. SO retained the ability to understand structural principles such...

This article explores how consideration of acquired speech and language disorders from the perspective of neuroscience permits new insights into the content and design of therapy for people with aphasia. Key proposals are that aspects of current therapies often neglect the sensory-motor components of speech and language processing, and the intercon...

Language has been proposed as a medium that serves to promote spatial orientation through integrating geometric and featural information (Spelke, 200326. Spelke , E. S. 2003. “What makes us smart? Core knowledge and natural language”. In Language in mind: Advances in the study of language and thought, Edited by: Gentner , D. and Goldin-Meadow ,...

Artificial grammar learning (AGL) is a widely used experimental paradigm that investigates how syntactic structures are processed. After a familiarization phase, participants have to distinguish strings consistent with a set of grammatical rules from strings that violate these rules. Many experiments report performance solely at a group level and a...

Communication impairments such as aphasia and apraxia can follow brain injury and result in limitation of an individual's participation in social interactions, and capacity to convey needs and desires. Our research group developed a computerized treatment program which is based on neuroscientific principles of speech production (Whiteside and Varle...

The human capacity to communicate has been hypothesized to be causally dependent upon language. Intuitively this seems plausible since most communication relies on language. Moreover, intention recognition abilities (as a necessary prerequisite for communication) and language development seem to co-develop. Here we review evidence from neuroimaging...

This paper provides a brief review of three interventions for apraxia of speech (AOS) that are in preliminary stages of development with evidence at the level of Phase I intervention trials. The first, Rapid Syllable Transition Treatment (ReST), combines intervention for dysprosody and segmental accuracy in apraxia of speech (AOS). The second is a...

Investigating spatial cognition in individuals with acquired language impairments can inform our understanding of how components of language are involved in spatial representation. Using the reorientation paradigm of Hermer-Vazquez, Spelke, and Katsnelson (1999), we examined spatial cue integration (landmark-geometry conjunctions) in individuals wi...

This case study examines vowel production and coarticulation patterns in AOS as a function of utterance type. A female speaker with AOS, and a sex-matched control participant repeated target vowels in three conditions: isolated word, statement frames and question frames. The first two formant frequencies (F1 and F2) of the target vowels were measur...

Language has been proposed as a medium that serves to promote spatial orientation through integrating geometric and featural information (Spelke, 2003). This proposal has been explored in dual-task experiments where linguistic resources are blocked by verbal shadowing. Although some studies report disruption in using environmental cues for spatial...

In this article, we present 84 nonobjects we created by using the colored object pictures from Rossion and Pourtois (2004). These nonobjects were explored on a number of measures, including object resemblance, visual complexity, and an object decision task (ODT). Object resemblance for nonobjects is a construct comparable to the "word-likeness" of...

This cross-language study of working memory compared 30 English speakers and 30 Mandarin Chinese speakers on backward and forward digit and spatial span. Mandarin speakers had greater spans on forward digit and spatial span than did English speakers. Effects were most significant for digit span where the mean score of the English speakers was equiv...

The thesis of discontinuity between humans and nonhumans requires evidence from formal reasoning tasks that rules out solutions based on associative strategies. However, insightful problem solving can be often credited through talking to humans, but not to nonhumans. We note the paradox of assuming that reasoning is orthogonal to language and encul...

Subject InformationInvestigations: Preliminary ObservationsSummary and Conclusions Acknowledgements

We report a dissociation between higher order mathematical ability and language in the case of a man (SO) with severe aphasia. Despite severely impaired abilities in the language domain and difficulties with processing both phonological and orthographic number words, he was able to judge the equivalence of and to transform and simplify mathematical...

High-order constructs such as intelligence result from the interaction of numerous processing systems, one of which is language. However, in determining the role of language in intelligence, attention must be paid to evidence from lesion studies and, in particular, evidence of dissociation of functions where high-order cognition can be demonstrated...

Background: Difficulties experienced by novices in clinical reasoning have been well documented in many professions, especially medicine (Boshuizen and Schmidt 1992, 2000; Elstein, Shulman and Sprafka 1978; Patel and Groen 1986; Rikers, Loyens and Schmidt 2004). These studies have shown that novice clinicians have difficulties with both knowledge...

1Z4 In this chapter, we examine the relation between language and cognition in the light of recent evidence for reasoning without mediation by grammatical knowledge. Research on propositional reasoning (involving “theory of mind” understanding) in adult patients with aphasia reveals that reasoning can proceed in the absence of explicit grammatical...

This study used perceptual and acoustic analysis to profile the speech characteristics of a single case (SD) of foreign accent syndrome (FAS) and to investigate the effects of conceptual–semantic (imageability), lexical (word frequency), and post-lexical (word length) variables on word production. SD's speech errors were consistent with the reporte...

We address the issue of the relation between language and theory of mind (ToM) reasoning involving the understanding of others' mental states. In particular, we focus on the evidence from people with aphasia and consider methodological issues concerning the nature of ToM tasks and test instructions. Research to date points to the independence of To...

In a recent article, explore whether apraxia of speech (AOS) can be explained by disruption of the phonetic plans for high frequency syllables. This approach is a hybrid one, combining the notion of a mental syllabary with an explanation that the impairment in AOS results from reduced access to supra-segmental phonetic plans. In this commentary, we...

A central question in cognitive neuroscience concerns the extent to which language enables other higher cognitive functions. In the case of mathematics, the resources of the language faculty, both lexical and syntactic, have been claimed to be important for exact calculation, and some functional brain imaging studies have shown that calculation is...