Background— Although one of the main characteristics of psychopaths is a deficit in emotion, it is unknown whether they show a fundamental impairment in appropriately recognizing their own body sensations during an emotion-inducing task. Method— Skin conductance and heart rate were recorded in 138 males during a social stressor together with subjective reports of body sensations. Psychopathic traits were assessed using the Psychopathy Checklist – Revised (PCL-R) 2nd edition (Hare, 2003). Results— Nonpsychopathic controls who reported higher body sensations showed higher (...) heart rate reactivity, but this verbal-autonomic consistency was not found in psychopathic individuals. This mind-body disconnection is particularly associated with the interpersonal-affective factor of psychopathy. Conclusions— Findings are the first to document this body sensations– autonomic mismatch in psychopaths, and suggest that somatic aphasia the inaccurate identification and recognition of one‘s own somatic states may partly underlie the interpersonal-affective features of psychopaths. (shrink)

Despite the ubiquity of inner speech in our mental lives, methods for objectively assessing inner speech capacities remain underdeveloped. The most common means of assessing inner speech is to present participants with tasks requiring them to silently judge whether two words rhyme. We developed a version of this task to assess the inner speech of a population of patients with aphasia and corresponding language production deficits. As expected, patients’ performance on the silent rhyming task was severely impaired relative to (...) controls. More surprisingly, however, patients’ performance on this task did not correlate with their performance on a variety of other standard tests of overt language abilities. In particular, patients who were generally unimpaired in their abilities to overtly name objects during confrontation naming tasks, and who could reliably judge when two words spoken to them rhymed, were still severely impaired (relative to controls) at completing the silent rhyme task. This seems to suggest that inner speech was more severely impaired in these patients than outer speech. However, these results should also cause us to critically reflect on the relation between inner speech and silent rhyme judgments more generally. (shrink)

n the philosophy of language, there are many ongoing controversies that stem from relying too heavily on an utterance-based framework. The traditional approach of rigidly partitioning the utterance’s meaning into what is grammatically determined from what is not may not fully capture the complexity of human language in real-world communicative contexts. To address this issue, we suggest shifting focus toward a broader analysis level encompassing conversations and discourses. From this broader perspective, it is possible to obtain a more integrated view (...) of how linguistic and extra-linguistic aspects dynamically interact and thus reconsider semantics/pragmatics dichotomy as complementary dimensions. Meaning is not confined to linguistic structures alone but emerges from the dynamic interplay of words, sociocultural knowledge, discursive situations, and psychological dispositions of speakers. Substantiating this perspective calls for embracing an interdisciplinary approach that synthesizes research from various domains, including linguistics, cognitive psychology, and philosophy of language. This paper focuses on a particularly compelling case study: aphasia. Speeches produced by individuals with aphasia represent complex scenarios where the balance between linguistic and extra-linguistic aspects is notably compromised, often to the former’s detriment. Aphasics’ productions represent a vivid example of how the interpretation of speeches can be far from involving fixed and static operations. Instead, it entails continuously reallocating cognitive resources toward the most readily available and accessible sources for the speakers. This case study ultimately demonstrates that the influence of semantic and pragmatic processes in shaping and conveying meanings displays remarkable adaptability, continuously adjusting to the ever changing demands placed upon speakers. -/- . (shrink)

In recent years, language has been shown to play a number of important cognitive roles over and above the communication of thoughts. One hypothesis gaining support is that language facilitates thought about abstract categories, such as democracy or prediction. To test this proposal, a novel set of semantic memory task trials, designed for assessing abstract thought non-linguistically, were normed for levels of abstractness. The trials were rated as more or less abstract to the degree that answering them required the participant (...) to abstract away from both perceptual features and common setting associations corresponding to the target image. The normed materials were then used with a population of people with aphasia to assess the relationship of abstract thought to language. While the language-impaired group with aphasia showed lower overall accuracy and longer response times than controls in general, of special note is that their response times were significantly longer as a function of a trial’s degree of abstractness. Further, the aphasia group’s response times in reporting their degree of confidence (a separate, metacognitive measure) were negatively correlated with their language production abilities, with lower language scores predicting longer metacognitive response times. These results provide some support for the hypothesis that language is an important aid to abstract thought and to metacognition about abstract thought. (shrink)

Persons with aphasia suffer from a loss of communication ability as a consequence of a brain injury. A small strand of research indicates effec- tiveness of dialogic interventions for communication development for persons with aphasia, but a vast amount of research studies shows its effectiveness for other target groups. In this paper, we describe the main parts of the hitherto technological development of an application named Dialogica that is (i) aimed at facilitating increased communicative participation in dialogic settings (...) for persons with aphasia and other communication disorders, (ii) based on comput- er game technology as well as on theory in dialogic education and argumenta- tion theory, and (iii) designed for mobile devices with larger screens. (shrink)

Background: Many people with aphasia and people without brain injury talk to themselves in their heads, i.e., have “inner speech.” Inner speech may be more preserved compared with spoken speech for some people with aphasia and may serve a variety of functions (e.g., emotion regulation), which motivates us to provide a high-fidelity characterization of it. Researchers have used multiple methods to measure this internal phenomenon in the past, which we combine here for the first time in a single (...) study. -/- Aims: We compare performance between individuals with and without aphasia on inner speech tasks that assess inner speech “inthe- moment” to general subjective impressions of inner speech to tease apart the relationship of aphasia severity to inner speech. Methods and Procedures: Twenty people with mild-moderate aphasia and twenty neurotypical controls completed several inner speech tasks, including objective silent rhyme judgements (picture, written, and auditory), subjective reports of inner speech during naming, and subjective rating scales about inner speech experience more generally. -/- Outcomes and Results: In-the-moment inner speech during silent rhyming tasks was associated with aphasia severity only for picture and written rhyming but not auditory rhyming. In-the-moment inner speech reports during silent naming were not associated with aphasia severity, nor were the subjective ratings about general inner speech experience. Individuals with and without aphasia demonstrated a variety of subjective general inner speech experiences, demonstrating heterogeneity of this phenomenon more broadly. -/- Conclusions: Methods of measuring inner speech complement each other and speak to different facets of the inner speech phenomenon, and clinicians and researchers must carefully choose the method(s) that will provide the information about inner speech that they desire. (shrink)

In this paper, we describe technological advances for supporting persons with aphasia in philosophical dialogues about personally relevant and contestable questions. A computer game-based application for iPads is developed and researched through Living Lab inspired workshops in order to promote the target group’s communicative participation during group argumentation. We outline some central parts of the background theory of the application and some of its main features, which are related to needs of the target group. Methodological issues connected to the (...) design and use of Living Labs with persons with aphasia are discussed. We describe a few problems with researching development of communicative participation during group argumentation using an app assisted intervention for the target group and suggest some possible solutions. (shrink)

Background Analysis of aphasic narratives can be a challenge for clinicians. Previous studies have mainly employed measures that categorized speech samples at the word level. They included quantification of the use and misuse of different word classes, presence and absence of narrative contents and errors, paraphasias, and perseverations, as well as morphological structures and errors within a narrative. In other words, a great amount of research has been conducted in the aphasiology literature focusing on micro-linguistic structures of oral narratives. Aspects (...) of macro- linguistic structures, such as the analysis of content information by a speaker, consistency of using cohesive devices to present information within a narrative, and order of presenting information necessary to form a coherent discourse, have not been extensively investigated. The current investigation proposes a clinical analytic system to target three aspects of macro-linguistic structures in narratives among speakers with aphasia. Specifically, (1) the presence of search events (i.e., the mentioning of key events that allow the listener to understand; Capilouto, Wright, &Wagovich, 2006) within a narrative, (2) the sequence of the mentioned events, and (3) the informativeness (i.e., the fulfillment of lexical items that allow the user to understand what the event is detailing) of the event contents, were focused in the proposed framework. Method Ten controls transcripts from were selected from the AphasiaBank (MacWhinney, Fromm, Forbes, & Holland, 2011). Three narrative tasks, including sequential picture description of ‘Refused Umbrella’, procedural narrative of making a ‘Peanut Butter and Jelly Sandwich’, and telling of ‘Cinderella’ story, were used to establish normative data for the basis of analysis. Specifically, the Search Events (e) and Informative Words (i) used by at least 70% of the speakers were listed for each genre. The sequential order of mentioning the Search Events, i.e., common order of events in 90% of the speakers, (s.total) was determined. Twelve speakers with aphasia (nine fluent and three non-fluent) were recruited and administered the Western Aphasia Battery and Object and Action Naming Battery. Their performance in the above three discourse tasks were orthographically transcribed and analyzed using the following measures: e.total, e.matched with norm, e.missed, e.irrlevant, e.extra, s.total, i.pb&j, i.umbr, i.cind, and i.total. Three samples were randomly chosen to be re-analyzed for inter- and intra-rater reliability. Results Results of an independent t-test suggested significant differences between the fluent and non-fluent subjects in sequential order of Search Events for all genres (s.total) and i.total, suggesting sensitivity of this framework to differentiate between the two fluency groups. Results of Pearson product-moment correlations revealed significant relation between Informative Words and WAB spontaneous speech scores, AQ, as well as OAB scores, for both aphasic groups. The mean value of coefficients for intra-rater reliability (0.992), with significant correlations on e.match, e.miss, and e.extra, was higher than that of inter-rater reliability (0.897). Discussion Based on our preliminary results, this objective framework allowed clinical evaluation of impairment in macro-linguistic structures present in aphasic discourse. Further extension should involve more subjects encompassing a wider range of severity with different types of aphasia. (shrink)

Many philosophers and psychologists have sought to explain experiences of auditory verbal hallucinations and “inserted thoughts” in schizophrenia in terms of a failure on the part of patients to appropriately monitor their own inner speech. These self-monitoring accounts have recently been challenged by some who argue that AVHs are better explained in terms of the spontaneous activation of auditory-verbal representations. This paper defends two kinds of self-monitoring approach against the spontaneous activation account. The defense requires first making some important clarifications (...) concerning what is at issue in the dispute between the two forms of theory. A popular but problematic self-monitoring theory is then contrasted with two more plausible conceptions of what the relevant self-monitoring deficits involve. The first appeals to deficits in the neural mechanisms that normally filter or attenuate sensory signals that are the result of one’s own actions. The second, less familiar, form of self-monitoring approach draws an important analogy between Wernicke’s aphasia and AVHs in schizophrenia. This style of self-monitoring theory pursues possible connections among AVHs, inserted thoughts, and the disorganized speech characteristic formal thought disorder. (shrink)

This study examines the relation of language use to a person’s ability to perform categorization tasks and to assess their own abilities in those categorization tasks. A silent rhyming task was used to confirm that a group of people with post-stroke aphasia (PWA) had corresponding covert language production (or “inner speech”) impairments. The performance of the PWA was then compared to that of age- and education-matched healthy controls on three kinds of categorization tasks and on metacognitive self-assessments of their (...) performance on those tasks. The PWA showed no deficits in their ability to categorize objects for any of the three trial types (visual, thematic, and categorial). However, on the categorial trials, their metacognitive assessments of whether they had categorized correctly were less reliable than those of the control group. The categorial trials were distinguished from the others by the fact that the categorization could not be based on some immediately perceptible feature or on the objects’ being found together in a type of scenario or setting. This result offers preliminary evidence for a link between covert language use and a specific form of metacognition. (shrink)

One of the more striking aspects of Maurice Merleau-Ponty's Phenomenology of Perception (1945) is his use of psychological case studies in pathology. For Merleau-Ponty, a philosophical interpretation of phenomena like aphasia and psychic blindness promises to shed light not just on the nature of pathology, but on the nature of human existence more generally. In this paper, I show that although Merleau-Ponty is surely a pioneer in this use of pathology, his work is deeply indebted to an earlier philosophical (...) study of pathology offered by the German Neo-Kantian Ernst Cassirer in the third volume of the Philosophy of Symbolic Forms (1929). More specifically, I argue that Merleau-Ponty, in fact, follows Cassirer in placing Kant's notion of the productive imagination at the centre of his account of pathology and the features of existence it illuminates. Recognizing the debt Merleau-Ponty's account of pathology has to the Kantian tradition not only acts as a corrective to more recent interpretation of Merleau-Ponty's views of pathology (Dreyfus, Romdenh-Romluc), but also recommends we resist the prevailing tendency to treat Merleau-Ponty's philosophy as anti-Kantian. Instead, my interpretation seeks to restore Merleau-Ponty's place within the Kantian tradition. (shrink)

This chapter provides a brief overview of the history of behavioral neurology, dividing it roughly into six eras. In the ancient and classical eras, emphasis is placed on two transitions: firstly, from descriptions of head trauma and attempted neurosurgical treatments to the exploratory dissections during the Hellenistic period and the replacement of cardiocentrism; and secondly, to the more systematic investigations of Galenus and the rise of pneumatic ventricular theory. In the medieval through post-Renaissance eras, the scholastic consolidation of knowledge and (...) the role of compendia are emphasized, along with the use of new methods from within a mechanistic framework. With the discovery of electrical conductance and the rise of experimentalism, we frame the modern era as period of intense debate over localization, decomposition, and other mechanistic principles, and marked by rapid discovery about the brain. The chapter ends with a discussion of the contemporary era, focusing on the establishment of behavioral neurology research on aphasia, apraxia, and neuropsychiatric conditions. (shrink)

It is unfashionable to suggest that enactive processes - including some that involve the mirror neuron system - might contribute to the comprehension of sign language. The present essay formulates and defends a version of that unfashionable suggestion, as it applies to certain forms of syntactic processing. There is evidence that has been thought to weigh against any such suggestion, coming from neuroimaging experiments and from the study of Deaf aphasics. In both cases it is shown to be unpersuasive.