TY - JOUR
T1 - Investigating the origin of nonfluency in aphasia
T2 - A path modeling approach to neuropsychology
AU - Nozari, Nazbanou
AU - Faroqi-Shah, Yasmeen
N1 - Funding Information:
This work was supported by the NSF grant 1631993 to Nazbanou Nozari, and by the NIH grant R01-DC008524 to Brian MacWhinney for the AphasiaBank. We thank all the researchers and individuals with aphasia who support the AphasiaBank by publicly sharing their data, and Brain MacWhinney and his group for supporting and maintaining this valuable database.
Publisher Copyright:
© 2017 Elsevier Ltd
PY - 2017/10
Y1 - 2017/10
N2 - A major challenge in understanding the origin of clinical symptoms in neuropsychological impairments is capturing the complexity of the underlying cognitive structure. This paper presents a practical guide to path modeling, a statistical approach that is well-suited for modeling multivariate outcomes with a multi-factorial origin. We discuss a step-by-step application of such a model to the problem of nonfluency in aphasia. Individuals with aphasia are often classified into fluent and nonfluent groups for both clinical and research purposes, but despite a large body of research on the topic, the origin of nonfluency remains obscure. We propose a model of nonfluency inspired by the psycholinguistic approach to sentence production, review several bodies of work that have independently suggested a relationship between fluency and various elements in this model, and implement it using path modeling on data from 112 individuals with aphasia from the AphasiaBank. The results show that word production, comprehension, and working memory deficits all contribute to nonfluency, in addition to syntactic impairment which has a strong and direct impact on fluency. More generally, we demonstrate that a path model is an excellent tool for exploring complex neuropsychological symptoms such as nonfluency.
AB - A major challenge in understanding the origin of clinical symptoms in neuropsychological impairments is capturing the complexity of the underlying cognitive structure. This paper presents a practical guide to path modeling, a statistical approach that is well-suited for modeling multivariate outcomes with a multi-factorial origin. We discuss a step-by-step application of such a model to the problem of nonfluency in aphasia. Individuals with aphasia are often classified into fluent and nonfluent groups for both clinical and research purposes, but despite a large body of research on the topic, the origin of nonfluency remains obscure. We propose a model of nonfluency inspired by the psycholinguistic approach to sentence production, review several bodies of work that have independently suggested a relationship between fluency and various elements in this model, and implement it using path modeling on data from 112 individuals with aphasia from the AphasiaBank. The results show that word production, comprehension, and working memory deficits all contribute to nonfluency, in addition to syntactic impairment which has a strong and direct impact on fluency. More generally, we demonstrate that a path model is an excellent tool for exploring complex neuropsychological symptoms such as nonfluency.
KW - Agrammatism
KW - AphasiaBank
KW - Nonfluent aphasia
KW - Path model
KW - Speech fluency
KW - Structural equation model
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U2 - 10.1016/j.cortex.2017.08.003
DO - 10.1016/j.cortex.2017.08.003
M3 - Article
C2 - 28866301
AN - SCOPUS:85028572768
SN - 0010-9452
VL - 95
SP - 119
EP - 135
JO - Cortex
JF - Cortex
ER -