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Background and Purpose: The factors associated with recovery of language domains after stroke remain uncertain. We described recovery of overall-language-ability, auditory comprehension, naming, and functional-communication across participants’ age, sex, and aphasia chronicity in a large, multilingual, international aphasia dataset. Methods: Individual participant data meta-analysis of systematically sourced aphasia datasets described overall-language ability using the Western Aphasia Battery Aphasia-Quotient; auditory comprehension by Aachen Aphasia Test (AAT) Token Test; naming by Boston Naming Test and functional-communication by AAT Spontaneous-Speech Communication subscale. Multivariable analyses regressed absolute score-changes from baseline across language domains onto covariates identified a priori in randomized controlled trials and all study types. Change-from-baseline scores were presented as estimates of means and 95% CIs. Heterogeneity was described using relative variance. Risk of bias was considered at dataset and meta-analysis level. Results: Assessments at baseline (median=43.6 weeks poststroke; interquartile range [4–165.1]) and first-follow-up (median=10 weeks from baseline; interquartile range [3–26]) were available for n=943 on overall-language ability, n=1056 on auditory comprehension, n=791 on naming and n=974 on functional-communication. Younger age ( Conclusions: Earlier intervention for poststroke aphasia was crucial to maximize language recovery across a range of language domains, although recovery continued to be observed to a lesser extent beyond 6 months poststroke.

Stroke 53(3), 956-967 (2022). doi:10.1161/STROKEAHA.121.035216, Published by Lippincott Williams & Wilkins, Philadelphia, Pa.

This study investigated whether we can find reliable comprehension-to-production syntactic priming effects in children aged 2;0 to 2;11 and how phonological working memory and sentence production skills relate to the syntactic priming process. A finding of reliable syntactic priming effects would provide strong evidence that children’s syntactic representations are abstracted over individual lexical items. To test children at this young age, they were primed with simple and early-acquired transitive (e.g., tickling (a) baby) and unergative intransitive (e.g., running) syntactic structures. Children aged 2;7 to 2;11, primed with alternating prime structures, revealed a reliable syntactic priming effect. In addition, phonological working memory (moderated by age) and sentence production skills positively affected transitive productions. Children aged 2;0 to 2;6, primed either with alternating or cumulative prime structures, showed no priming effect. Together, the data indicate that children have robust abstract syntactic representations for the tested structures before age three and that both phonological working memory and production skills relate to children’s syntactic priming behavior, albeit in different ways.

Background: People with aphasia present with different of demographic, language, stroke, and impairment profiles. A Cochrane review found that two-thirds of included trials had comparison data on p...

Speech as well as co-speech gestures are an integral part of human communicative behaviour. Furthermore, the way how these modalities influence each other and finally, reflect a speaker’s dispositional state is an important aspect of research in Human-Machine-Interaction. So far, just little is known, however, about the simultaneous investigation of both modalities. The EmoGest corpus is a novel data set addressing how emotions or dispositions manifest themselves in co-speech gestures. Participants were primed to be happy, neutral, or sad and afterwards, explain tangram figures to an experimenter. We employed this corpus to conduct disposition recognition from speech data as an evaluation of emotion priming. For the analysis, we based the classification on meaningful features already successfully applied in emotion recognition. In disposition recognition from speech, we achieved remarkable classification accuracy. These results provide the basis for a detailed disposition-related analyses of gestural behaviour, also in combination with speech. In general, the necessity of multimodal investigations of disposition is indicated which then will be heading towards an improvement of overall performance.

Social robots are often applied in recreational contexts to improve the experience of using technical systems, but they are also increasingly used for therapeutic purposes. In this study, we compared how patients with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) interact with a social robot and a human actor. We examined the gaze behavior of nine ASD patients and 15 matched controls using a mobile eye-tracker. Participants performed a task in which they were required to follow the gaze of a robot or human actor. Our results show that ASD patients preferentially maintain eye contact during interaction with the social robot as compared to the human actor.

Background: It is well known that about 20% of patients with anomic aphasia still show residual aphasic symptoms 1 year post onset. As we do not have any tests to reliably diagnose residual aphasia it is difficult to decide whether these persisting problems are signs of residual aphasia that have to be treated, or are indications of a normal variability in language use, which also may occur in elderly people. Aims: The main aim of this research is to find out whether there are variables in spontaneous communication of persons with residual aphasia (P-RA) that enable us to distinguish them from persons without aphasia (P-NA). Methods & Procedures: Following a detailed linguistic analysis of spontaneous speech we employed binary logistic regression analysis to find the most relevant variables for differentiation between P-RA (N = 41) and P-NA (N = 25). Outcomes & Results: Significant group differences at different processing levels could be observed. Lexically varied, informative, and cohesively tied phrase...