Human cognitive neuroscience seminar

Speaker: Junhua Ding

Title: Impairment of correct information unit in stroke aphasia and its neural basis

Abstract: Stroke impaired patients’ multiple cognitive abilities. Among them, effective communications are especially crucial for daily life but often extremely break down. There have been many measures designated for connected speech production. But appropriate and fast clinical measure and biomarker for its informativeness still need to be established.

In this study, we recruited 80 aphasia participants with stroke. They all performed connected speech production tasks elicited by three different genres. Correct information unit (CIU) and its derived measures, CIU/min and CIU% were generated to reflect the informativeness of speech samples. To seek the neural associates of speech informativeness, a series of lesion-symptom mappings (LSM) was conducted.

We found different genres or trials of speech materials elicit similar CIU pattern. All the three CIU measures highly correlated with each other and total lesion size of patients. However, the effect of CIU% might be not so stable, especially when patients produced limited CIU. More importantly, all the LSM analysis convergently found that CIU and CIU/min were associated with dorsal white matter pathway damage.