Going off the rails: Impaired coherence in the speech of patients with semantic control deficits.

ABSTRACT: The ability to speak coherently, maintaining focus on the topic at hand, is critical for effective communication and is commonly impaired following brain damage. Recent data suggests that executive processes that regulate access to semantic knowledge (i.e., semantic control) are critical for maintaining coherence during speech. To test this hypothesis, we assessed speech coherence in a case-series of stroke patients who exhibited deficits in semantic control. Patients were asked to speak about a series of topics and their responses were analysed using computational linguistic methods to derive measures of their global coherence (the degree to which they spoke about the topic given) and local coherence (the degree to which they maintained a topic from one utterance to the next). Compared wi

SUBMITTER: Hoffman P 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC7534040 | biostudies-literature | 2020 Sep

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature