ProResA · The time course of pronoun resolution in post-stroke and progressive aphasia

European populations are aging, and aging individuals are more vulnerable to neurological diseases which often result inlanguage impairments (i.e. aphasia). These impairments render the skilled communication needed for successful everydayliving impossible, with impact on mental health, quality of life and career burden. Although language impairments in aphasiahave been studied, aphasic individuals' sentence interpretation in time-sensitive measurements including the time courseand source of their brain responses have only scarcely been examined. This action seeks to generate scientific knowledgeon primary progressive aphasia (PPA, a form of aphasia resulting from progressive brain degeneration) and post-strokeaphasia by investigating the time course of how people with aphasia precisely work out to whom a pronoun (e.g. her/herself)refers during moment-by-moment on-line sentence processing. This action aims to fill this important gap by answering thefollowing research questions: (i) Does pronoun processing become impaired in PPA as the disease progresses, and if sohow? (ii) How is pronoun processing modulated in the brain with respect to its moment-by-moment time course and locationsof brain responses in aphasia and unimpaired individuals? (iii) Is pronoun processing impaired in aphasia in typologicallydifferent languages (i.e. Dutch, French and Turkish)? (iv) What are the factors influencing pronoun processing difficulty in aphasia?Findings of this interdisciplinary action will inform both the theories of language breakdown in aphasia and clinicalassessment of sentence-level processing in the aphasia types with direct implications for treatment of these debilitatingdisorders. Importantly, when this action is complete, an eye-movement / machine learning database of aphasic processing,which can potentially be used to determine early sensitive markers of (primary progressive) aphasia, will be made publiclyavailable for future research re-use.