Ewha Womans University · Neuroscience
Professor Jee Eun Sung's research lab focuses on the intersection of language processing, cognitive aging, and neurocognitive disorders, particularly in older adults and individuals with aphasia or mild cognitive impairment. The lab investigates how working memory capacity and syntactic complexity—especially in structures like passive sentences—affect sentence comprehension and production across the lifespan. A central theme is understanding how cognitive resources serve as a buffer against age-related and pathology-related language decline.
Figures are computed from collected data and may differ slightly.
Background: Working memory (WM) has gained recent attention as a cognitive construct that may account for language comprehension deficits in persons with aphasia (PWA) (Caspari, Parkinson, LaPointe, & Katz, 1998 Caspari, I., Parkinson, S. R., LaPointe, L. L. and Katz, R. C. 1998. Working memory and aphasia.. Brain and Cognition, 37: 205–223. [Crossref], [PubMed], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar]; Martin, Kohen, & Kalinyak‐Fliszar, 2008 Martin, N., Kohen, F. and Kalinyak‐Fliszar, M. 2008. A
Purpose In this study, we sought to identify critical linguistic markers that can differentiate sentence processing of individuals with mild cognitive impairment (MCI) from the sentence processing of normal-aging populations by manipulating sentences' linguistic complexity. We investigated whether passive sentences, as linguistically complex structures, can serve as linguistic markers that can contribute to diagnoses that distinguish MCI from normal aging. Method In total, 52 participants, inclu
Sentence-production abilities were vulnerable to aging, and these effects manifested most clearly when the task demands were high enough to tax individuals' cognitive capacity. Working-memory capacity partially accounted for age-related changes in sentence-production abilities.
The purpose of the current study was to investigate the effects of syntactic structure as a function of the canonicity of word-order on sentence comprehension ability and to explore the relationship between working memory capacity and sentence comprehension ability for Korean-speaking normal elderly adults. Methods: A total of 51 normal elderly individuals participated in the study. The sentence comprehension task (SCT) consisted of three syntactic structures (active sentences with 2-place verbs
The results indicate that people with AD rely on executive functioning (information updating and monitoring) and language (phonological output lexicon, not necessarily semantics) to produce words on animal fluency.
WM capacity effects on passive-sentence comprehension increased dramatically as people aged, suggesting that those who have larger WM capacity are less vulnerable to age-related changes in sentence-comprehension abilities. WM capacity may serve as a cognitive reserve associated with sentence-comprehension abilities for elderly adults.
Aphasia symptoms vary as a function of linguistic features of languages that individuals with aphasia used premorbidly. Furthermore, the linguistic characteristics of the individual's language influenced aphasia symptoms more strongly than the type of aphasia. It is theoretically and clinically important that this cross-linguistic study provides different perspectives, and that noun-verb deficits may vary depending on linguistic features.
The canonicity of word order and passive construction were critical factors related to decline in abilities in a case-marker assignment. The combination of age, education, and sentence type factors accounted for overall performance on case-marker processing. Results indicated the crucial necessity to find a cognitively and linguistically demanding condition that elicits aging effects most efficiently, considering language-specific syntactic features.
The current study investigated whether persons with aphasia (PWA) exhibit longer processing times than normal adult individuals (NAI) in conditions that require more complex linguistic integration, using a self-paced word-by-word sentence reading method. The word-category comparison revealed that PWA show significantly longer reading times for nouns with high integration cost than for determiners with least linguistic integration cost compared to NAI. These results are consistent with the findin
This cross-linguistic assessment framework contributes to a better understanding of linguistic impairments and communication difficulties experienced by BWAs. This framework can be utilized in current clinical practice to facilitate culturally and linguistically appropriate assessment and treatment approaches for BWAs.
Objectives: This study seeks to provide normative data on the production frequency and semantic typicality and familiarity of noun exemplars by semantic category for elderly individuals. Methods: A total of 198 individuals participated in the study. In Experiment 1, participants were categorized into two groups: professionals involved in dementia care and primary care-givers of patients with dementia. They ranked 17 semantic categories based on the priority of the stimuli required for naming tre
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