Thursday, April 10, 2025
4/10/2025
Reliability and validity of temporal response function modeling in aphasia - PROJECT SUMMARY In stroke-induced aphasia, deficits in auditory comprehension are prevalent, which has negative consequences for everyday communication and quality of life, as well as speech-language assessment and treatment. Auditory comprehension is not a monolithic process, but rather relies on processing multidimensional acoustic and linguistic cues contained in spoken language. There are few clinical tools available for identifying level(s) of auditory comprehension deficit(s) in aphasia, with typical assessments limited to single words and sentences. While such assessments may allow for precise identification of where deficits exist, they lack ecological validity. Moreover, these tasks require overt responses which utilize cognitive resources beyond those required for auditory comprehension, impeding precise characterization of deficits. Recent computational advances allow for objective examination of neural correlates of auditory comprehension across levels of processing (e.g., spectrotemporal, lexical) using an ecologically valid task wherein individuals listen to continuous speech while electroencephalography (EEG) responses are collected, with no overt responses required. This approach, temporal response function (TRF) modeling, involves fitting a linear function to map multivariate features of the continuous speech stimulus (e.g., spectrogram, lexical frequency) onto the EEG data. The resulting TRF is used to derive a predicted EEG, and the relation between the TRF-predicted EEG and observed EEG provides a measure of the fidelity of neural processing of that feature. TRF modeling has shown promise for use in clinical populations. However, researchers have yet to assess validity and test-retest reliability of TRF-derived measures of auditory comprehension in individuals with language disorders, severely limiting their clinical utility. The proposed study thus has two specific aims: to examine the validity (Aim 1) and test-retest reliability (Aim 2) of TRF-derived measures of auditory comprehension from the level of spectrotemporal processing through semantic and syntactic processing. To this end, 40 individuals with stroke- induced aphasia and 40 older adult control participants will complete a comprehensive cognitive-linguistic battery comprising tightly controlled tasks and standardized assessments designed to measure different levels of cognitive-linguistic processing. They will also listen to a continuous narrative while EEG responses are recorded at two timepoints. TRF modeling will be used to derive measures reflecting neural correlates of auditory comprehension which will be compared to performance on the cognitive-linguistic battery (Aim 1) and across the two timepoints (Aim 2). The proposed study has the potential to improve characterization of auditory comprehension in aphasia. Moreover, knowledge of normal variability across sessions for TRF-derived measures will help researchers to make informed inferences about treatment-related outcomes or spontaneous recovery so that test-retest variability is not mistakenly attributed to meaningful change.
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