PROCESSING RESOURCES AND SENTENCE COMPREHENSION

处理资源和句子理解

• 批准号: 2050935
• 负责人: David Norman Caplan
• 金额: $ 22.29万
• 依托单位: MASSACHUSETTS GENERAL HOSPITAL
• 依托单位国家: 美国
• 财政年份: 1992
• 资助国家: 美国
• 起止时间: 1992-05-01 至 1997-04-30
• 项目状态: 已结题
• 来源: https://reporter.nih.gov/project-details/2050935
• 关键词: Alzheimer's disease; aging; auditory stimulus; cognition disorders; dementia; human old age (65+); human subject; language disorders; neural information processing; neuropsychological tests; performance; vocabulary; young adult human (21-34)

It is now known that patients with dementia of the Alzheimer's type often show impaired language abilities. Most researchers agree that these patients have difficulty naming objects and comprehending words. However, there is disagreement about whether their sentence comprehension abilities are impaired. The results of our preliminary studies support the view that DAT patients have only minimal difficulty in understanding the literal meaning of a sentence but a substantial impairment in situations requiring them to use the meaning derived from a sentence to perform tasks such as verifying whether a sentence is plausible. In addition, preliminary data from studies in which we have asked patients to understand sentences while performing another task (such as following a sequence of dots or digits on a computer screen) supports the hypothesis that these sentence comprehension impairments result from a reduction in the processing resources available to DAT patients to accomplish these tasks. The proposed research will extend these preliminary studies in three ways. First, we will use a wide range of sentence types and sentence comprehension tasks, to see if the results generalize to other sentences and tasks. Second, we will use a wider range of concurrent tasks, to allow us to study the effects on sentence comprehension of tasks that vary in their processing resource requirements and in the degree to which they overlap cognitively with the sentence comprehension task. Third, we will investigate possible trade-offs in subjects' allocating processing resources to only one task in dual-task situations, by generating Performance Operating Curves in dual-task situations. This will allow us to interpret the effect of dual-task conditions on sentence comprehension more clearly. The proposed studies will provide data that test two hypotheses: (a) the patients with DAT have little difficulty with tasks simply requiring them to obtain the literal meaning of sentences but greater difficulty with tasks that required them to use meaning obtained for other purposes, and (b) that the impairments these patients show on these tasks result from a reduction in the processing resources they can devote to sentence comprehension.

现在已知，患有阿尔茨海默氏症类型的痴呆症的患者 经常表现出语言能力受损。大多数研究人员都同意 这些患者在命名物体和理解单词方面有困难。 但对于是否判刑存在争议 理解能力受到损害。我们初步的结果 研究支持这样的观点：DAT 患者的困难很小 理解句子的字面意思但实质内容 在需要他们使用衍生含义的情况下受损 从一个句子中执行任务，例如验证一个句子是否是 似是而非的。此外，我们还从研究中得到了初步数据 要求患者在执行另一项任务时理解句子 （例如跟随计算机屏幕上的一系列点或数字） 支持这些句子理解障碍的假设 由于 DAT 可用的处理资源减少而导致 患者来完成这些任务。拟议的研究将扩展 这些初步研究分为三个方面。首先，我们将使用广泛的 句子类型和句子理解任务，看看是否 结果可以推广到其他句子和任务。其次，我们将使用一个 更广泛的并发任务，使我们能够研究对 对处理资源不同的任务的句子理解 要求以及它们在认知上重叠的程度 句子理解任务。第三，我们将调查可能的情况 受试者将处理资源仅分配给一项任务的权衡 在双任务情况下，通过生成性能操作曲线 双任务情况。这将使我们能够解释的效果 双任务条件对句子理解的影响更加清晰。这 拟议的研究将提供检验两个假设的数据：(a) DAT 患者在完成仅需要的任务时几乎没有困难 他们获得句子的字面意思但难度较大 任务要求他们使用从他人那里获得的意义 目的，以及（b）这些患者在这些方面表现出的损伤 任务是由于它们可以处理的资源减少而产生的 致力于句子理解。