Does morphology make the difference? Agrammatic sentence comprehension in German

The left periphery in agrammatic clausal representations: evidence from German

“…As long as the CP is accessible in the tree as a structural layer, there may be specific problems with either Op-movement (OMH) or empty elements (ECDH) which in the case of OMH leads to a specific impairment of wh-questions, in the case of ECDH to a selective vulnerability of y/n-questions. That this explanation is not ad hoc follows from our published data on the syntactic comprehension patterns of two of the subjects in this study (Burchert, De Bleser, & Sonntag, 2003). WR, whose production pattern is captured by OMH, i.e.…”

Production and comprehension of wh-questions in German Broca's aphasia

“…A canonicity effect was also reported by Bastiaanse and van Zonneveld (2002) who found that subjects with Broca's aphasia were significantly better at producing transitive sentences than ergative intransitives and explain this finding by claiming that in the latter the canonical linear order does not match the order of semantic roles in the verb's lexical entry. Burchert, De Bleser, and Sonntag (2003) also found some canonicity effects in a comprehension study using a binary sentence-picture-matching task. Minimal pairs of canonical SVO and non-canonical OVS sentences were presented to seven German agrammatic aphasic subjects.…”

Canonicity effects as grammatical phenomena

“…Discussion has focused on two principal issues. The first one, often called the variability debate (on which see Burchert et al, 2003;Caplan, 2001;Caramazza et al, 2001;Drai et al, 2001) is connected to the existence (or not) of a uniform pattern among different subjects. The extent to which variation is actually observed when the data are subject to sophisticated statistical analysis is at the center of an ongoing debate (see Drai & Grodzinsky, 2006a,b and related work for discussion of this central point).…”