Double-Agents and Trace-Deletion in Agrammatism

Beretta, Alan; Munn, Alan

doi:10.1006/brln.1998.1997

Cited by 36 publications

(13 citation statements)

References 13 publications

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“…Results of lesion studies and experimental data suggest that the traces are represented in Broca's area [for review see Grodzinsky, 2000]. Furthermore, Grodzinsky hypothesized that Broca's region plays a specific role in processing non-canonical sentences [Grodzinsky, 2000]; however, Grodzinsky's TDH has been highly criticized and rejected by others [e.g., Beretta and Munn, 1998;Berndt et al, 1996;Berndt and Caramazza, 1999;Caplan, 2001;Caramazza et al, 2001;Mauner et al, 1993; for review see peer commentaries on Grodzinsky, 2000].…”

Section: It Seems That Mary I Is Likely (T I To Win)mentioning

confidence: 99%

Neural correlates of syntactic transformations

Wartenburger

Heekeren

Burchert

et al. 2004

Human Brain Mapping

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Many agrammatic aphasics have a specific syntactic comprehension deficit involving processing syntactic transformations. It has been proposed that this deficit is due to a dysfunction of Broca's area, an area that is thought to be critical for comprehension of complex transformed sentences. The goal of this study was to investigate the role of Broca's area in processing canonical and non-canonical sentences in healthy subjects. The sentences were presented auditorily and were controlled for task difficulty. Subjects were asked to judge the grammaticality of the sentences while their brain activity was monitored using event-related functional magnetic resonance imaging. Processing both kinds of sentences resulted in activation of language-related brain regions. Comparison of non-canonical and canonical sentences showed greater activation in bilateral temporal regions; a greater activation of Broca's area in processing antecedent-gap relations was not found. Moreover, the posterior part of Broca's area was conjointly activated by both sentence conditions. Broca's area is thus involved in general syntactic processing as required by grammaticality judgments and does not seem to have a specific role in processing syntactic transformations.

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Section: It Seems That Mary I Is Likely (T I To Win)mentioning

confidence: 99%

Neural correlates of syntactic transformations

Wartenburger

Heekeren

Burchert

et al. 2004

Human Brain Mapping

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“…So let us now see why the TDH is clearly and demonstrably wrong. Beretta and Munn (1998) sought to isolate and test the TDH default strategy, using a sentence-picture matching task in which one of the pictures matches the meaning arrived at by the default strategy. Recall that the default strategy claims that Broca's aphasics have a representation that involves two Agents in passive sentences.…”

Section: Why the Tdh Fails To Contribute To A Neurology Of Syntaxmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…For example, Figure 1 of the target article, which is used to demonstrate the frequency of occurrence of the predicted distributions of performance for actives and passives, includes data from 19 patients who were preselected to show the target active/passive pattern! Although we are rarely told how many Broca's aphasics were screened during this preselection process, Beretta and Munn (1998) report that 6 of 15 Broca's aphasics they tested showed the desired pattern. This number is not far from the estimate generated by Berndt et al (1996) that about one-third of Broca's aphasics will show the predicted pattern on active and passive voice sentences.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Could grammatical encoding and grammatical decoding be subserved by the same processing module?

Kempen¹

2000

Behav. Brain Sci.

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Advances in neuroimaging technology have increased our knowledge of the neuroanatomy of higher functions of the central nervous system: It is now possible to get a glimpse of the brain while it is in action. However, this progress would not have been possible without improved understanding of the knowledge base and operations that underlie complex behavior. Parallel to the greater precision of the technology, some progress has been made in our understanding of the cognitive architecture that underlies certain behavioral domains. In the study of brain-language relations, theoretical developments in linguistics have gone hand in hand with imaging, making a joint contribution to behavioral neurology. After several decades of the study of language and the brain from a linguistic angle, there is now a relatively dense body of facts that can be seriously evaluated. This target article will review central results and use them to motivate some novel conclusions about the representation of language in the human cerebral cortex. The discussion will revolve around the choice of unit of behavioral analysis and its theoretical import. An outlook on language derived from current linguistic theory can lead to a new and more precise picture of language and the brain.The old Connectionist school -led by Broca, Wernicke, and Lichtheim (see Lichtheim 1885, for a comprehensive exposition) and revived in our time by the late Norman Geschwind (e.g., 1970;1979) -fortified belief in the existence of cerebral language centers. As clinicians, these authors mostly emphasized the patients' communicative skills, viewing language as a collection of activities, practiced in the service of communication: speaking, listening, reading, writ- Abstract: A new view of the functional role of the left anterior cortex in language use is proposed. The experimental record indicates that most human linguistic abilities are not localized in this region. In particular, most of syntax (long thought to be there) is not located in Broca's area and its vicinity (operculum, insula, and subjacent white matter). This cerebral region, implicated in Broca's aphasia, does have a role in syntactic processing, but a highly specific one: It is the neural home to receptive mechanisms involved in the computation of the relation between transformationally moved phrasal constituents and their extraction sites (in line with the Trace-Deletion Hypothesis). It is also involved in the construction of higher parts of the syntactic tree in speech production. By contrast, basic combinatorial capacities necessary for language processing -for example, structure-building operations, lexical insertion -are not supported by the neural tissue of this cerebral region, nor is lexical or combinatorial semantics. The dense body of empirical evidence supporting this restrictive view comes mainly from several angles on lesion studies of syntax in agrammatic Broca's aphasia. Five empirical arguments are presented: experiments in sentence comprehension, cross-linguistic considerations (where a...

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“…Subsequent revisions of the TDH include the Revised TDH (Hickok, 1992;Hickok, Zurif, & Canseco-Gonzales, 1993), the Double-Dependency Hypothesis (Mauner, Fromkin, & Cornell, 1993), and the Differential Chain Deficit Hypothesis (Hickok & Avrutin, 1995). Both types of accounts have encountered criticisms (e.g., Beretta & Munn, 1998;Friederici & Gorrel, 1998;Linebarger, 1995). The weakness of linear order strategies lies in the probabilistic use of the heuristics.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%