1. INSTRUCTOR NOTE: Before beginning the PPT itself, here are points you (the student) should consider - Thanks, WK
What type of research is it? (descriptive, comparative, analytical)
What questions does the paper address?
Who are Thompson and Shapiro?
What are the main conclusions of the paper?
What evidence supports those conclusions? (logical connection between data and interpretation is sound/not sound)
What is the quality of the evidence? (validity, qualitative vs. quantitative data)
Methods, limitations, data shown vs. what authors claim, use of proper controls in the experiment
Why are the conclusions important?
Significant advance in knowledge? Lead to new insights/research directions?

2. Complexity of Treatment of Syntactic deficits C. Thompson L
Complexity of Treatment of Syntactic deficits C. Thompson L. Shapiro American Journal of Speech-Language Pathology 13, (2007)
“Tricia O.”
2009

3. PURPOSE/ QUESTION For pts with agrammatic aphasia….
..and treatments addressing sentence structural impairments using complex sentences….
Q: Is training simple structures first and then building to more complex, the best method?
Outcome:
Training complex sentences improves simpler structures ONLY WHEN underlying linguistic properties are shared by both
Training simple structures first and building to more complex, does provide full benefit of treatment (little or no generalization occurs)

4. BACKGROUND: AGRAMMATIC APHASIA
Broca’s aphasia
Deficits in grammatical structure:
Short, simple sentences
Structurally impoverished word strings
Noun phrase, verb phrase misordered
Grammatical morphemes substituted/ omitted
Difficulty with complex sentences: passives and object relative clause constructions (comprehension and production)

5. BACKGROUND - CONT’D: TREATMENT FOR AGRAMMATISM
Mapping Therapy
Treatment of Underlying Forms (TUF)
Verbs: thematic roles
Syntactic properties of sentences
Primary focus: syntactically simple sentences
- comprehension only
Primary focus: syntactically complex features (passive sentences)
- comprehension + production
Claim: Training complex linguistic materials
Improved production and comprehension of structures
greater generalization to untrained sentences

6. AUTHORS’ CLAIM
Generalization occurs when untrained and trained structures are LINGUISTICALLY RELATED
COMPLEXITY ACCOUNT OF TREATMENT EFFICACY (“CATE”):
“Training complex structures results in generalization to less complex structures when untreated structures encompass processes relevant to treated ones”

7. BACKGROUND: SYNTACTIC COMPLEXITY - THEORETICAL CONSIDERATIONS
Structural complexity influenced by:
# of propositions (aligned with number of verbs in a sentence)
# of embedding in a sentence
Order in which elements appear in a sentence (canonical vs. noncanonical: Types of syntactic dependencies within a sentence)
Argument structure
Distance between crucial elements in a sentence

8. BACKGROUND: SYNTAX All sentences are similarly formed through
Phrase structure building operations
Argument structure of selected verbs
Number of selected verbs influence selected building complexity
Merge and Move are operations in sentence formation
NOTE: Complexity variables affect human sentence processing

9. “MERGE” – AN ILLUSTRATION
-2 categories merge to
yield a higher order
category
–a series of merge
operations builds the
syntactic structure
MERGE
V + N = VP
ARGUMENT
STRUCTURE
-role of verbs in merge
participants that “go with”
verb + verb
(to be grammatical) -
ARGUMENT STRUCTURE - THEMATIC ROLE – assigned each verb argument (agent, theme, goal)
i.e., thief chased artist (2 argument verb: thief- agent; artist – theme / the direct object argument)
“The artist (agent)
chased
the thief (theme)”
assigned to each verb
Argument (agent, theme/
direct object argument,
goal)
THEMATIC
ROLE

10. “MOVE” – AN ILLUSTRATION
NP Movement
(argument position)
Passive
Sentences
(“the artist was chased by
the thief”)
Sentence
Raising
Structures
(“The thief seems to have
chased the artist”)
Wh- Movement
(nonargument position)
Object-extracted
Wh- question
(“who did the thief chase?”)
Object cleft
(“It was the artist who
the thief chased”)
Object relative
(“The man saw the
artist who the thief
chased”) NO
MOVEMENT
(“The thief
MOVE
Noncanonical – order of the words in the sentences have been moved from their basic (underlying) position to other sentence positions
Sentences with movement (more complex) > sentences without movement
wh- movement – moved material lands in the Specifier position of the complementizer phrase (Spec CP – a nonargument position) – involve displacement of the direct object argument from its underlying position to a different position
(I.e., it was the artist who chased the thief)
a.1. Object-extracted wh- question: who did the chief chase?
a.2. Object cleft: it was the artist who the thief chased
a.3 Object relative: The man saw the artist who the thief chased
b) NP movement - - land in the specifier position of the tense phrase (spec, TP – argument position)
(I.e., The artist was chased by the thief)
occurs because , in underlying form, both sentences have an empty subject position
B1. Passive – the artist was chased by the thief – the object (NP) is moved to the subject position of same clause
B2. Subject raising – the thief seems to have chased the artist – subject NP is raised from a lower clause to a higher clause (resulting in an embedded sentence
NOTE: both take only the internal argument and do not assign an external thematic role to the subject position
Movement crosses clausal boundaries (lower to higher clause) creating
greater distance between moved element and its original site
Clausal embedding which further influences sentence complexity

11. (nonargument position)
MOVEMENT HIERARCHY
No movement
NP Movement
(argument position)
Passive
Sentences
Sentence
Raising
Structures
Wh- Movement
(nonargument position)
Object-extracted
Wh- question
Object cleft
Object relative

12. RELEVANCE OF MERGE AND MOVE IN SENTENCE PROCESSING
SEMANTIC PRIMING EFFECT
Faster reaction times if:
semantically related
Auditory:
“Which doctor did
the supervisor call to
help with emergency?”
Visual: Strings of letters
(+/- semantically
related to moved sentence
constituent)
If visual string is
a word/nonword
RESULTS
RESPONSE
STIMULI
SENSITIVITY TO ORIGIN
OF MOVED SENTENCE
CONSTITUENT
Faster reaction times after
the verb (vs. before the verb)
Results:
CROSS MODAL LEXICAL PRIMING TASKS
(Ability to process sentences with movement)

13. RESULTS OF OTHER CMLP TASKS
Similar results with anomaly detection and eye-tracking while listening paradigms (Dickey and Thompson, 2004)
Following Wh- therapy to movement in aphasic patients with agrammatism – patients were able to reject anomalous sentences with movement (i.e., “the girl wore the shirt her mother fried for her”)

14. TREE PRUNING HYPOTHESIS (Syntactic Tree Structure and complexity)
When the lower nodes are
impaired, projecting higher
nodes in the tree is impossible
Japanese patients (Hagiwara, 1995):
CP vs. tense and negation
Hebrew-speaking patients
(Friedmann & Grodinsky, 1997):
agreement vs. tense

15. OVERVIEW OF TREATMENT STUDIES AND FINDINGS
“It was the artist who chased the thief”
“The artist was chased by the thief” NP
Trained
Simpler
Wh-
Trained
wh-
Simpler

16. COMPLEXITY IN TREATMENT OF Wh- MOVEMENT
Increased object cleft production
(significantly above baseline levels)
Wh- production emerged
Similar learning curves for object
clefts and wh- production
Object relative clause
+ objective clefts
+ wh- questions
-Successful generalization to simpler and
complex wh-questions (involving
movement within an embedded clause)
Minimal generalization to wh-questions
with more complex structures and
embedded clauses
No generalization to object clefts
(similar to hypothesis:
wh- movement does not improve
NP movement)
Object relative clause (“the man saw the artist who chased the thief”)
Object clefts (“it was the artist who the thief chased”) and /or
Wh-questions (“who did the thief chase?”

17. COMPLEXITY IN TREATMENT OF NP- MOVEMENT
Subject raising
Structures (SRS)
SRS PS AS
Passive
Structures (PS)
Active
Structures (AS)
No generalization
to PS and SRS

18. DISCUSSION OF TREATMENT FINDINGS
More pronounced effect of treatment results when complex structures are addressed (simpler structures emerge without direct treatment)
Treatment of complex structures only improves less complex structures when they are linguistically linked to trained structures
(no generalization with wh- and NP-movement constructions)

19. DISCUSSION
Generalization vs. TPH: NP-movement < wh-movement structures
Generalization vs. CATE: cannot be predicted due to underlying linguistic properties which differ across structures (lack of generalization from wh- and NP movement structures because they are fundamentally unrelated)
Generalization due to nonlinguistic accounts of complexity?
more complex forms require greater processing resources
Yet OC and PS had no generalization even though they were similar in form

20. CLINICAL RELEVANCE
Better generalization when working with comprehension and production of complex than simple items
Improvements in:
MLU
Proportion of grammatical sentences used
Proportionate number of verbs vs. nouns
Correct information units (CIUs): Improved access to a variety of language structures which affects the amount and efficiency of information expressed

21. CLINICAL RELEVANCE
2. Number of treatment sessions differ between the use of complex vs simple linguistic material
Need to provide treatment that results in greatest improvement given a short amount of time (especially considering US health care system)

22. CLINICAL RELEVANCE
3. Linguistic material vs. treatment approach itself
Protocols that exploit linguistic and psycholinguistic properties of sentences result in greater treatment and generalization (vs. direct production approaches / surface form of target sentences)

23. MAPPING vs. TUF Wh- movement (object clefts and wh-questions)
Complex NP movement structures (subject raising structures) MP
Comprehension and production of trained forms
No NP-/wh- generalization
No generalization from passive to more complex NP structures
TUF
Generalization to object clefts
and wh-questions when object
relatives were trained

24. APPLICATIONS OF THE COMPLEXITY ACCOUNT
Complexity Hierarchies of Verbs
a. Argument structure
1-argument verbs (run)
2-argument verbs (chase, eat)
3-argument verbs (give: agent+theme+goal)
Thus training complex 3-argument verbs can improve complex 1- or 2-argument verbs

25. APPLICATIONS OF THE COMPLEXITY ACCOUNT
b. Syntactic movement operations
Unaccusative, intransitive (1-argument) verbs involving NP movement which do not have direct mapping of thematic roles onto sentences (fall)
1-argument verb involving no movement (run) which have direct mapping of thematic role onto sentences
Psychological verbs which entail an experience thematic role (admire > amuse)
Admire: Experiencer + theme in subject and object positions; subject experiencer
Amuse: Experiencer occupies the object position, subject is the theme; object experiencer

26. APPLICATIONS OF THE COMPLEXITY ACCOUNT
2. Complexity of Functional Category Members
Complementizer: “He hopes that
you go ahead with
the speech”
No generalization
Tense:
“I am going”, “I will go”
Agreement:
“The dogs are barking,” “she is sick”
C – Complementizers
T- Tense
A - Agreement
2 inflected forms are related to one another but one is not necessarily more complex than the other A T T A

27. CONCLUSIONS
Optimal generalization across sentence structures results when underlying linguistic structures are shared
When underlying properties differ across structures, generalization does not occur
When structural complexity of sentences is controlled, treatment focused on more complex forms results in cascading generalization to simpler forms

28. CONCLUSIONS
Training complex materials results in widespread changes: exploiting lexical and syntactic properties of involved in complex sentences enhances a wide array of structures
Fewer treatment sessions are required for patients who receive treatment on complex forms first