Poster A5, Tuesday, August 20, 2019, 10:15 am – 12:00 pm, Restaurant Hall
Single word, sentence and discourse comprehension in patients with temporal lobe epilepsy
Anna Yurchenko1,2, Vardan Arutiunian1, Alexander Golovteev2, Olga Dragoy1,3;1National Research University Higher School of Economics, Russia, 2Epilepsy Center, Russia, 3Federal Center for Cerebrovascular Pathology and Stroke, Russia
Introduction: Investigations on language comprehension in patients with temporal lobe epilepsy (TLE) are very limited and show contradictory results. Whereas Kho and colleagues (2008) did not show impairment in single word comprehension, other studies indicate that patients with left TLE can have difficulties in noun (Giovagnoli et al., 2005) and verb (Yurchenko et al., 2017) comprehension. According to Kho et al. (2008), sentence comprehension is spared in patients with TLE. However, patients with TLE may show impaired comprehension of questions and instructions of different syntactic structures (Lomlomdjian et al., 2017; Wang et al., 2011). In addition, difficulties in comprehension of short stories and mischievous behavior described in them were found in patients with both left and right TLE (Lomlomdjian et al., 2017; Giovagnoli et al., 2011). The goal of the present study was to systematically analyze single word, sentence and discourse comprehension in patients with left and right TLE. Methods: Twenty two patients with left TLE (14 females, mean age = 29 years), 22 patients with right TLE (10 females, mean age = 30 years) and 22 healthy controls (12 females, mean age = 28 years) participated in the study. During the word comprehension tests, participants listened to nouns and verbs and chose the corresponding pictures out of four pictures presented for each trial (target, phonologically related, semantically related, and unrelated distractor). Sentence comprehension test included questions of different syntactic structures presented auditorilly together with the corresponding picture and a semantically close distractor. During the test for discourse comprehension, participants listened to a narrative and answered 16 questions related to the story. Results: Statistical analysis did not show difference among the three groups of participants for noun and verb comprehension tests. In contrast, the three groups of participants significantly differed in sentence (p = 0.041) and discourse (p = 0.002) comprehension. As compared to healthy individuals, the percentage of correct answers was significantly lower in patients with left (94.7% vs. 98.2%, p = 0.047) and right (94.5% vs. 98.2%, p = 0.023) TLE for sentence comprehension. Similarly, patients with both left (85.8% vs. 97.5%, p = 0.004) and right (88.9% vs. 97.5%, p = 0.005) TLE gave less correct answers in the discourse comprehension test. The two groups of patients did not differ for any of the tests. Discussion: Our results show that language comprehension may be spared at the level of single word and impaired at the sentence and discourse levels in patients with left and right TLE. In addition, no difference was observed between the two groups of patients. It means that language comprehension at the level of sentence and discourse may be impaired in patients with TLE even when epileptogenic focus is localized in the non-dominant for language hemisphere. Difficulties in sentence comprehension and processing of discourse content in patients with left and right TLE may be related to impairments in other cognitive functions (e.g., memory), which is a subject for further research. The reported study was funded by RFBR according to the research project № 18-312-00091.
Themes: Disorders: Acquired, Speech Perception
Method: Behavioral