Aligning sentence structures in dialogue: evidence from aphasia

ABSTRACT

Syntactic alignment in dialogue is pervasive and enduring in unimpaired speakers, facilitating language processing and learning. Recent work suggests that syntactic alignment extends to the level of event-semantic properties (syntactic entrainment). Two experiments examined whether syntactic entrainment can ameliorate impaired message-structure mapping in persons with aphasia (PWA). In Experiment 1, participants first heard twelve picture descriptions, each using one of two suitable syntactic structures, prior to describing the same twelve pictures themselves. In Experiment 2, participants also repeated the heard picture descriptions, thereby increasing the depth of encoding for prime sentences. PWA showed a robust tendency to re-use previously encountered syntactic structures in their own production only in Experiment 2. They produced fewer “mapping” errors (e.g. thematic role reversals) in Experiment 2 than in Experiment 1. Syntactic entrainment remains resilient in aphasia, strengthening their event-semantic-to-syntax mappings, at least when active encoding of prior message-syntax associations is ensured.

KEYWORDS:

• syntactic alignment
• aphasia
• structural priming
• grammatical encoding

Acknowledgements

The authors thank the participants for their time and Dr. Cynthia K. Thompson at Northwestern University and Dr. James Malec at Rehabilitation Hospital of Indiana for their assistance with participant recruitment. We also thank Jessica Dick and Sonal Kumar for their assistance with data collection and coding.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. Because some of our participants also participated in Experiment 1 (6–14 months prior), we ran an additional model to confirm that prior participation in Experiment 1 did not influence the magnitude of syntactic entrainment effect in Experiment 2. We included Completion of Experiment 1 (completed or not) and Prime type and their interaction as fixed factors and by-participant and by-item intercepts as random effects. The entrainment effect did not vary as an effect of participants’ having completed Experiment 1 (χ² (1) = 0.002, p = .968).

Additional information

Funding

This study was in part supported by National Institutes of Health [grant numbers R21DC015868 (J. Lee) and R01HD051030 (V. Ferreira)]. The content is solely the responsibility of the authors and does not necessarily represent the official views of the National Institutes of Health.