Study Illuminates Trade-Off Between Complex Words and Complex Sentences:
Widespread public attention was brought to the neurological condition aphasia by Bruce Willis’s recent announcement that he was retiring from acting. While just about everyone struggles occasionally with finding the right word or tripping over their sentences, aphasia patients can lose the ability to comprehend language entirely.
Though Willis hasn’t confirmed it, some doctors suspect that he may have an especially brutal and degenerative form called primary progressive aphasia (PPA).
Scientists have long understood that there are several subtypes of PPA. While some versions come with lexical deficits, affecting a person’s ability to access words, others cause syntactic deficits, making it difficult to construct sentences.
Cognitive scientists and doctors from MIT and Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH), working as a collaborative team, have now developed a quantitative way to identify these different deficits. In the process, they illuminated a fundamental trade-off the brain makes when speaking between grammar and vocabulary. Their findings show that PPA patients with grammar deficits use richer, more complex vocabulary to compensate for their syntax struggles and vice versa.
[...] Based on prior research into those suffering from stroke-induced aphasia, the scientists hypothesized that the speech patterns of PPA patients would reflect this trade-off between complex words and sentences. For example, if one can’t recall the word sailboat, they might construct a more roundabout phrase — “the thing that moves in water with wind,” for example — to get their meaning across.
[...] “It’s pretty cognitively demanding for the brain to use both complex syntax and complex words in one sentence,” says Rezaii, explaining that even those without aphasia seem to be making this trade-off between vocabulary and syntax. The difference, she says, is that healthy speakers can make a different trade-off sentence-to-sentence. Aphasia patients, though, have no choice and must constantly compensate depending on their deficit.
Reference: “A syntax–lexicon trade-off in language production” by Neguine Rezaii, Kyle Mahowald, Rachel Ryskin, Bradford Dickerson and Edward Gibson, 16 June 2022, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
DOI: 10.1073/pnas.2120203119
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday August 22 2022, @03:11AM
Practice vocabulary?
https://xkcd.com/1133/ [xkcd.com]
(Score: 2) by Username on Monday August 22 2022, @12:49PM (1 child)
So Biden kind of does this, but it seems more like a complete shift to a random thought mid sentence. Or something happens, like some kind of intermittent palsy that derails him.
(Score: 1, Troll) by Freeman on Monday August 22 2022, @01:54PM
#BEGIN SARCASM# That's the worm in his ear, telling him what to say. Sometimes it wiggles too much and #END SARCASM# he loses his train of thought.
Joshua 1:9 "Be strong and of a good courage; be not afraid, neither be thou dismayed: for the Lord thy God is with thee"