News

On October 5, 2021 Jennifer Mack and Christine Reggio presented some of the NOLA Lab’s research on integrating eye-tracking with fMRI to better understand word comprehension processes.

Collecting eye-tracking data during MRI studies can be challenging. It can be hard to calibrate research participants and obtain good quality eye-tracking data. At the same time, it can be very worthwhile, providing information about language processes that complements the MRI data.

Our lab studied how the MRI environment affected eye-tracking measures in a linguistic prediction task. Take-home message: Although the MRI environment can cause data quality issues, we still were able to measure linguistic prediction processes robustly in the scanner.

Links can be found below to the publication by LCN and the author manuscript, as well as the full APA citation.

Author manuscript link | Article link

Full APA citation: Mack, J. E., Ward, C., & Stratford, S. (2021). Impact of the fMRI environment on eye-tracking measures in a linguistic prediction task. Language, Cognition and Neuroscience, 1-19.

NOLA Lab PI, Dr. Jennifer Mack, presented a poster, co-authored with students Lauren Hourican and Miriam Muñoz, virtually at the Society for the Neurobiology of Language (SNL) conference in October. SNL is “an NIH-funded non-profit organization whose overarching goal is to foster progress in understanding the neurobiological basis for language via the interdisciplinary exchange of ideas” (https://www.neurolang.org/about). NOLA’s poster was based on previous lab member Lauren Hourican’s undergraduate honors thesis and was titled, “Tracking the Impact of fMRI Acoustic Noise on Spoken Word Recognition.” It is below for viewing.

Colleen Ward, a NOLA graduate research assistant, lab manager, and first-year master’s student in the SLP program, presented her undergraduate honors thesis with a poster at the virtual Academy of Aphasia (AoA) conference in October. AoA‘s annual meeting aims to allow investigators to share their research in various areas relating to aphasia. NOLA’s poster was titled, “Do Aphasia ID Cards Impact how Neurotypical Adults Listen to Unfamiliar Speakers with Aphasia?” and is below for viewing.

The Neuroscience of Language and Aphasia lab at UMass had a productive fall semester despite the restrictions of the Covid-19 pandemic. Undergraduate and graduate lab members presented at two conferences, participated in ASHA programming, and continued to learn about and design experiments relating to our refined research aims.

Two of our graduate research assistants — Miriam Muñoz and Colleen Ward — participated in research that was presented at virtual conferences during the fall semester. Dr. Jennifer Mack presented work, co-authored with Lauren Hourican and Miriam Muñoz, at the Society for the Neurobiology of Language; Ward presented at the Academy of Aphasia (see this post for access to both posters). While presenting in a virtual format was different than we are all used to, it was still a great experience for all involved. Both of our presenters did a wonderful job and we look forward to our members who will be presenting in the spring!

Additionally, Miriam Muñoz participated in ASHA’s Minority Student Leadership Program in the fall semester. This is a highly competitive leadership program, only accepting up to 40 students each year to participate during the annual ASHA Convention. We are so proud of Miriam for achieving this accomplishment!

Below: An image of the Fall 2020 NOLA Lab team ? We are so excited for all that’s in store for the spring semester!

The Neuroscience of Language and Aphasia Lab wants to congratulate its six seniors, Colleen Bridget Ward, Maguatte Mbengue, Lauren Christina Hourican, Celene Koperek, Andrea Marie Jernigan, and Sofia Stratford (left to right) on graduating with the UMass Class of 2020. Congratulations to our seniors, and good luck in your future endeavors! 

The Massachusetts Undergraduate Research Conference (MassURC) is an annual one-day event for undergraduate students to present research and share their knowledge with peers.  Since the 2020 MassURC has been canceled in light of the unfolding Covid-19 situation, we would like to showcase the amazing research that took place in our lab. 

Andrea Marie Jernigan, Celene Koperek, Joan Laramee, Grace Haskell, Sarah Nagamine, Oneda Lalaj & Jennifer Mack

Narrative Planning in Neurotypical Adults: An Eye Movement Study Purpose: The purpose of this study was to look at how eye movements correlated with narrative preparation and production. We wanted to determine how neurotypical individuals planned and produced narratives when given sequenced picture stories. Our goal was to discover how individuals retained story formatting from the listening task and to test whether they used the given format during the production task.

Methods: Our experiment included eye-tracking and a story-telling task. Participants were asked to listen and tell stories. During each task, participants’ eyes were being tracked to follow where their eyes focused and in what sequence. Data was collected using an eye- tracking device and audio recorder.

Planned data analyses: We compared how participants’ data differed based on which task came first, listening to or telling the story. We also incorporated the information from the eye tracker by utilizing interest areas to determine how they coordinated planning and speaking.

Innovation and impact: The results from this study will hopefully tell us more about how our eyes help us to plan and produce narratives. This study can also give insight on how neurotypical individuals retain narrative formats and apply them to similar stories. We hope to use this information in the future to learn more about narrative planning and production in individuals who have aphasia.  

---

Colleen Bridget Ward (senior honors thesis) Co-authors: Sarah Martins & Jennifer Mack

The Effect of Aphasia ID Cards on Neurotypical Comprehension of Aphasic Language There are about 2-4 million people in North America with aphasia (Simmons-Mackie, 2018). Yet, as many as 84% of people have never heard the term (Aphasia Statistics, n.d.). Therefore, many individuals have interacted with people who have aphasia (PWA), without knowledge of their communication difficulties. Luckily, aphasia identification (ID) cards are a free resource for PWA to offer to conversation partners (CPs), informing them about aphasia and letting them know they are communicating with someone who has it. The purpose of this study is to investigate if neurotypical listeners better understand a speaker with aphasia when shown an aphasia ID card. In this eye-tracking experiment, there will be two participant groups: a Card group (those who receive an aphasia ID card at the start of the experiment) and a No Card group (those who do not receive a card). Everyone will listen to a speaker with nonfluent aphasia (some of his speech contains semantic errors) while viewing images on screen. Participants’ task is deciding which image matches what the speaker intended to say. Our planned data analyses will investigate whether the Card group adapts better to the speaker’s semantic errors over time, as compared to the No Card group. This study is important because there has been such limited research on the efficacy of aphasia ID cards and whether they truly assist PWA in conversation with CPs who are otherwise unaware of their communication disorder.

References

Aphasia Statistics. (n.d.). Retrieved from https://www.aphasia.org/aphasia-resources/aphasia-statistics/

Simmons-Mackie, N. (2018). Aphasia in North America. AphasiaAccess.

---

Maguatte Mbengue (senior honors thesis) Co-authors: Sofia Stratford & Jennifer Mack

Working Memory Load and Language Comprehension Errors in Young Adults Cognitively healthy young adults are certainly not immune to occasional failures of the human parsing system, i.e., the cognitive processes that allow the mapping of sentence structures to meaning in real time. Comprehenders occasionally misinterpret sentences with atypical word order i.e., noncanonical sentences such as passives. A restricted working memory resource (Just & Carpenter, 1992) or other factors, i.e., slowed perceptual and cognitive processing (MacDonald & Christiansen, 2002), have been argued to be possible culprits for such comprehension errors. The lack of consensus on this topic inspired our study, which will test whether a concurrent working memory task can influence active and passive sentence comprehension and predictive eye-movements in a sentence picture- matching task. Healthy young adult participants from the University of Massachusetts Amherst (n=30) will memorize a list of 5 abstract nouns, complete a sentence-picture matching task, and then verbally recall the previously memorized words. Participants will also complete the comprehension task without a memory load. We hypothesize that when the participants are under the memory load, they will perform less accurately and have reduced predictive eye-movements at critical sentence regions. In addition, the eye- movement patterns under the working memory load are expected to resemble those from participants with aphasia (language difficulties due to left hemisphere brain damage), who completed a similar task in Mack et al. (2016). The results from this study may shine light onto when and why sentence comprehension failures occur and show us the role of working memory resources on sentence prediction and comprehension.

---

Lauren Christina Hourican (senior honors thesis) Co-authors: Lindsay Hohenberg, Christine Reggio, & Jennifer Mack

The Effects of Competing fMRI Noise on Auditory Language Processing Many researchers use fMRI as a tool to collect data from the brain. However, these machines produce loud, competing background noise that may differentially skew behavioral results (i.e. by causing masking effects, fatigue, and/or increased cognitive effort). This thesis will investigate how scanner background noise (SBN) affects phonological competition during auditory word recognition. Thirteen neurotypical young adult subjects will participate in 90-120-minute-long sessions where competitor and no-competitor stimuli will be presented in both silence and with competing SBN, within an MRI scanner. The stimuli will consist of four blocks, each with 32 onset-competitor (i.e. lemon, letter) trials, 32 rhyme- competitor (i.e. carrot, parrot) trials, and 32 no-competitor trials. Of the four blocks, two will be presented in silence and two will be presented with competing SBN. Visual stimuli will be presented on a screen in an array of four pictures. Auditory stimuli will be presented via circumaural headphones. Eye-tracking data will be collected via an EyeLink 1000 Plus eye-tracking system and analyzed to compare the time course of competitor fixations presented with SBN and in silence. This research is critical to quantify how language processes, such as auditory word recognition, are affected by SBN. More broadly, the goal of the current study is to provide researchers with the necessary background to understand the challenges of auditory neuroscience research.

NOLA Lab members Jennifer Mack, Colleen Ward, and Sofia Stratford, virtually presented at the 33rd Annual CUNY Human Sentence Processing Conference from March 19th-21st 2020. Dr. Mack presented a poster on the lab’s findings regarding eye-tracking measures of language processing in a standard lab versus an MRI scanner setting. You can find the poster linked below. 

https://osf.io/ectvh

Pictured is the NOLA Lab PI, Dr. Jennifer Mack, wrapping up the summer by presenting at the 11th Annual Meeting of the Society for the Neurobiology of Language (SNL), a conference that took place August 20-22 in Helsinki, Finland! Dr. Mack presented a poster on the lab’s findings regarding eye-tracking measures of language processing in a standard lab versus an MRI scanner setting.

Congratulations to our lab director, Dr. Jennifer Mack (below), who won a 2019 Advancing Academic Research Careers Award from the American Speech-Language-Hearing Association. As part of the award, she plans to develop an assessment instrument for aphasia using eye-tracking. She also plans to develop active learning opportunities for her courses in neuroanatomy and language science. She’ll be working with research mentors Dr. Jacquie Kurland and teaching mentors Dr. Gwyneth Rost and Dr. Mary Andrianopoulos.

Congratulations to undergraduate researchers Lauren Hourican (L) and Colleen Ward (R) on their recent awards! Both Lauren and Colleen received Research Assistant Fellowships from the UMass Commonwealth Honors College to further develop their research skills as they work on their Honors Thesis studies. Colleen additionally received a scholarship from the National Student Speech Language and Hearing Association (NSSLHA) and the William Field Alumni Scholars Award from the UMass Alumni Association. Congrats to both of our lab members!