Mira Goral’s research while affiliated with Lehman College and other places

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Publications (127)


Participant information.
Participants' language background.
Overall results.
Translanguaging frequencies.
Translanguaging in conversations for people with aphasia living in Greater Johannesburg, South Africa
  • Article
  • Full-text available

February 2025

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6 Reads

The South African journal of communication disorders. Die Suid-Afrikaanse tydskrif vir Kommunikasieafwykings

Mellissa Bortz

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Mira Goral

Background: Challenges associated with language assessment in multilingual people with aphasia include the lack of linguistically and culturally appropriate assessment tools. Moreover, most multilingual people with aphasia are assessed in each of their languages separately. However, many multilingual people use elements from their complete linguistic repertoire rather than communicate in one language at a given conversation.Objectives: We aimed to examine language production in multilingual speakers with aphasia within a translanguaging approach to assessment, that is, without specifying a single target language. Our four research questions inquired about the characteristics of translanguaging in elicited language production and about the influence of task, topic and individual variables on translanguaging patterns.Method: We elicited individual monologues and group conversations from seven people with aphasia living in the Johannesburg Metropolitan Municipality in South Africa. We coded their language output in terms of the number of words used and the languages selected.Results: Participants used translanguaging to varying degrees. Five participants used both isiZulu and English in their responses; two participants each used only one language (isiZulu or English). Topic and context of conversation did not seem to affect the pattern of language use.Conclusion: Seven multilingual people with aphasia demonstrated the use of translanguaging during elicited language testing. An assessment procedure that allows for the use of multiple languages without restricting the conversation to one language is a feasible approach to assessing people from multilingual communities.Contribution: The study introduces an alternative approach to assessing multilingual people with aphasia and demonstrates its feasibility.

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Cognitive Reserve in Individuals with Frontotemporal Dementia: A Systematic Review

January 2025

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23 Reads

Background In comparison to robust evidence for cognitive reserve (CR) in individuals with Alzheimer’s‐related dementia, the literature on CR in frontotemporal dementia (FTD) is still emerging. A clear consensus on the relationship among CR, brain status, and clinical performance has not been reached. The aims of this systematic review were to: 1) document the FTD disorders represented in this literature and their diagnosis descriptions, 2) classify the sociobehavioral proxies of CR used, 3) identify the tools used to measure disease severity, clinical performance, and brain status, and 4) examine the relationship between CR and brain status in individuals with FTD. Method Systematic review of the literature was conducted using a comprehensive range of relevant search terms in Medline, PsychINFO, PubMed, and Web of Science. Eligibility criteria were for studies to: include at least one proxy of CR and one brain status measure for individuals with FTD, be published in a peer‐reviewed journal, and be published in English. The Newcastle‐Ottawa Quality Assessment Scale was used to assess the quality of the included studies and risk of bias based on three domains: participant selection, comparability of included groups, and quality of outcome measures. Result A total of 220 titles and abstracts were screened, with 13 studies meeting inclusion criteria. Together, these studies report 1,423 participants diagnosed with FTD. Across studies, three proxies of CR were incorporated as either continuous or categorical variables: education, occupation, and leisure. Seven tools were used to measure disease severity and three neuroimaging tools were used to measure brain status. All included studies reported significant associations between a CR proxy and a brain measure. However, only partial support was demonstrated for the CR theory in individuals with FTD when education, occupation, and leisure involvement were analyzed in relation to disease severity. Conclusion The variable results among studies could be related to the different tools used to measure CR, the numerous brain status measures incoporated, and the different ways researchers determine disease severity. Recommendations for future studies include incorporating longitudinal designs, using in‐depth neuropsychological testing, improving measurement of disease duration, and transparant reporting of statistical output.



Prediction ability in bilingual individuals: an eye tracking study with younger and older adults

November 2024

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83 Reads

Journal of Cultural Cognitive Science

Studies with monolingual speakers show that people predict upcoming linguistic elements during sentence processing. Linguistic prediction behavior has been found to be less consistent in studies with bilingual individuals performing in their non-native language and in neurotypical older monolingual adults. The present study utilized an eye-tracking paradigm to investigate whether bilingual younger and older neurotypical individuals predict upcoming nouns in sentences that include constraining verbs, and if they do so both in their first language (L1) and in their second language (L2). Data were analyzed from 44 Norwegian-English proficient bilingual adults; 27 younger (20–35 years, mean age 27) and 17 older adults (54–81 years, mean age 64) who completed the eye-tracking experiment in each of the two languages, as well as cognitive and linguistic tests. The results demonstrated similar prediction abilities in L1 and L2 for both the younger and older participants on sentences with constraining verbs. Older adults predicted slower than younger adults. Participants’ working memory span and language proficiency did not explain prediction performance; cognate status of the stimuli partially did. The study adds to the relatively sparse existing data on prediction abilities in bilingual people and in older individuals.




Self-Improved Language Production in Nonfluent Aphasia Through Automated Recursive Self-Feedback

September 2024

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27 Reads

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1 Citation

Background Persons with nonfluent aphasia (PWNA) use feedback from external agents (e.g., speech-language pathologists) and self-feedback to improve their language production. The extent to which PWNA can improve their language production using their self-feedback alone is underexplored. In a proof-of-concept study, we developed an automated recursive self-feedback procedure to demonstrate the extent to which two PWNA who used self-feedback alone improved their production of sentences from trained and untrained scripts. In the current study, we use the Rehabilitation Response Specification System as a framework to replicate our initial findings. Method We tested the effects of two treatments: script production with recursive self-feedback and script production with external feedback in four persons with chronic nonfluent aphasia. We compared the effects of treatment by measuring percent script produced, speaking rate, and speech initiation latency of trained and untrained scripts. The participants received the treatments remotely through mini tablets using two versions of a mobile app we developed. All the participants received each treatment intensively for 14 sessions across 2–3 weeks. We estimated clinical improvements of production of sentences from trained and untrained scripts through nonoverlap of all pairs analysis of performance pretreatment and posttreatment. Results Both treatments improved PWNA's language production. Recursive self-feedback improved speaking rate and speech initiation latency, which generalized to untrained scripts in all participants. External feedback treatment did not generalize to improvement in speaking rate in two participants. Conclusions Our findings confirm our initial evidence that PWNA can self-improve their sentence production from scripts through recursive self-feedback. This novel procedure enables PWNA to autonomously enhance their language production over time. Given the evidence and the mechanics of the procedure, we propose that its utility is not constrained by linguistic idiosyncrasies across cultures. Consequently, it has the potential to bypass linguistic barriers to aphasia care. Supplemental Material https://doi.org/10.23641/asha.27007060


Table 3
Figure 4
Table 6
Bootstrapped divergence points between older and younger participants, for sentences with constraining verbs, and sentences with cognate and non-cognate verbs, in each language (2000 iterations).
Prediction ability in bilingual individuals: An eye tracking study with younger and older adults

June 2024

·

75 Reads

Studies with monolingual speakers show that people predict upcoming linguistic elements during sentence processing. Linguistic prediction behavior has been found to be less consistent in studies with bilingual individuals performing in their non-native language and in neurotypical older monolingual adults. The present study utilized an eye-tracking paradigm to investigate whether bilingual younger and older neurotypical individuals predict upcoming nouns in sentences that include constraining verbs, and if they do so both in their first language (L1) and in their second language (L2). Data was analyzed from 44 Norwegian-English proficient bilingual adults (27 younger and 17 older adults) who completed the eye-tracking experiment in each of the two languages, as well as cognitive and linguistic tests. The results demonstrated similar prediction abilities in L1 and L2 for both the younger and older participants. Older adults were slower than younger adults, although they did look to the target images only at the end of the predictive window. Participants' working memory span, language proficiency, and the cognate status of the stimuli did not explain prediction performance. The study adds to the relatively sparse existing data on prediction abilities in bilingual people and in older individuals.



Citations (55)


... The underlying mechanism of learning for our recursive self-feedback treatment is recursive functional learning. This mechanism uses self-feedback loops and usedependent plasticity to optimize subsystems (e.g., linguistic and nonlinguistic) engaged during goal-directed tasks (Imaezue, 2023;Imaezue & Goral, 2024;Imaezue et al., 2023). Based on this idea, we proposed that recursive selffeedback may be beneficial for PWNA with relatively preserved cognitive nonlinguistic processes . ...

Reference:

Self-Improved Language Production in Nonfluent Aphasia Through Automated Recursive Self-Feedback
Toward Self-Regulated Learning in Aphasia Rehabilitation: A Proposed Framework
  • Citing Article
  • March 2024

... Multilingual people who have aphasia typically experience impairments in all their languages, although patterns of greater or lesser relative impairment in one of the languages have been reported (Goral & Lerman, 2020). Aphasia assessment of multilingual people is used to determine not only the extent and type of impaired and preserved abilities in each language, but also in which language to provide therapy, because this factor influences the effectiveness of speech-language therapy (Goral & Lerman, 2020;Goral et al., 2023;Grasemann et al., 2021). Currently, assessment is typically conducted in one language only or in several of a multilingual person's languages, separately. ...

Cross-language generalization of language treatment in multilingual people with post-stroke aphasia: A meta-analysis

Brain and Language

... brain areas, according to Goral and Lerman (2023), work together to help us learn and use language. For instance, when a child learns their first language, these parts of the brain work together to process sounds, store words, and develop the ability to speak. ...

Advances in the Neurolinguistic Study of Multilingual and Monolingual Adults: In honor of Professor Loraine K. Obler
  • Citing Book
  • September 2023

... We developed recursive self-feedback: a novel procedure for determining the extent to which self-feedback alone can be used to improve an agent's task performance over time (Fehér et al., 2017;Imaezue et al., 2023). Recursive self-feedback is the utilization of self-feedback loops during performance of a specific goal-directed task . ...

Recursive Self-feedback Improved Speech Fluency in Two Patients with Chronic Nonfluent Aphasia
  • Citing Article
  • July 2023

... This was true for both within-language and cross-language results. The finding of better outcomes for treatment in a language acquired from birth is consistent with previous reports of better post-stroke recovery of the first-acquired language (e.g., Faroqi-Shah et al., 2010;Kuzmina et al., 2019;Goral, 2022). Although the better recovery of the first-acquired language has not been found consistently in the literature on multilingual people with aphasia, it has been reported in many instances, and as early as in Ribot (1881) who proposed that the first-acquired language would be more resilient to the effect of aphasia. ...

What Can Aphasia Tell Us about How the First-Acquired Language Is Instantiated in the Brain?

Languages

... The role of bilingualism in connection with aging, the development of grammatical properties across the lifespan, and the interaction with general cognitive abilities (i.e., language processing speed, working memory, inhibitory control, etc.) has been the focus of decades of productive research (Bialystok, 2016;Ivanova et al., 2016;Rossi and Diaz, 2016), pointing toward a potential cognitive "bilingual advantage" that life-long bilinguals hold over their monolingual counterparts. Various domains of grammar show age-related effects, such as lexical retrieval (Goral et al., 2007;Goral, 2014) and the processing involving syntactic complex units (Kemper et al., 2001). The inter-and intra-speaker variation found in old-age language is truly a treasure trove of important linguistic data that we, as a community of scientists, are just beginning to investigate (Pichler et al., 2018). ...

Bilingualism, language, and aging
  • Citing Chapter
  • November 2012

... Both noun and verb naming scores were extracted and included in the analyses if the treatment targeted both noun and verb retrieval (Goral et al., 2012;Lerman, 2022;Lerman et al., 2019Lerman et al., , 2022Lerman et al., , 2023Li et al., 2021;Lopez et al., 2022) or if the treatment provided (i.e., phonological component analysis; Leonard et al., 2008) could apply to word retrieval in general (Masson-Trottier et al., 2022). However, if the verb naming task required the production of the verb in a sentence context (e.g., "The mailman delivers the package"), then the measure was excluded from the analyses. ...

Rehabilitating an attrited language in a bilingual person with aphasia
  • Citing Article
  • April 2022

Clinical Linguistics & Phonetics

... Both noun and verb naming scores were extracted and included in the analyses if the treatment targeted both noun and verb retrieval (Goral et al., 2012;Lerman, 2022;Lerman et al., 2019Lerman et al., , 2022Lerman et al., , 2023Li et al., 2021;Lopez et al., 2022) or if the treatment provided (i.e., phonological component analysis; Leonard et al., 2008) could apply to word retrieval in general (Masson-Trottier et al., 2022). However, if the verb naming task required the production of the verb in a sentence context (e.g., "The mailman delivers the package"), then the measure was excluded from the analyses. ...

Strengthening the semantic verb network in multilingual people with aphasia: within- and cross-language treatment effects*
  • Citing Article
  • February 2022

Bilingualism: Language and Cognition

... Here, we provide a few reflections, in line with previously reported guidelines (Ghali et al., 2021), to support successful international clinical research partnerships for future cultural adaptation/translations of the FEMAT and other assessment tools. The main consideration for successful international collaboration was time. ...

Developing a Framework for a Remote, International Research Collaboration Among Graduate Students: Lessons Learned During the COVID-19 Pandemic

... The main goal of language therapy for persons with aphasia (hereafter referred to as PWAs) is to improve their functional communication and connected speech, while the methods used in therapy primarily aim to enhance impaired language skills [1][2][3]. Lexical access and naming difficulties are among the most pronounced symptoms of aphasia [4,5]. Additionally, there is evidence that narrative production in PWAs is also impaired. ...

Aphasia in Multilingual Patients

Current Neurology and Neuroscience Reports