Wh-questions and relative clauses in Greek agrammatism: Evidence from comprehension and production

Intervention effects in the relative clauses of agrammatics: The role of gender and case

“…12 This effect is conjectured to also be present in the study of Varlokosta et al (2014) explaining why their agrammatic participants performed similarly in subject and object free RCs. Recall that the same effect was considered to be present in the headed RCs of Nerantzini et al (2014), yet, the same task was administered in Varlokosta et al (2014). In this paper, we show that this conjecture is on the right track, and, in addition, we offer ways of testing RCs in a reliable manner in a language in which rich case morphology creates such side effects.…”

“…It is not entirely clear how crucial this negative effect is, however, since, a) the difference between the SRCs of the two studies, although to the predicted direction, was not found statistically significant, and b) there is still a significant difference between SRCs and ORCs in our Study II. Yet, we believe Nerantzini et al (2014) have a point evoking lack of correspondence between value of case feature and thematic roles, in the manner described. Such an effect may not always be present, however, as it was the case with our Study II.…”

“…Let us start with the factual ones: as mentioned in the Introduction, in a recent study of the language abilities of Greek-speaking Broca's aphasics, Nerantzini et al (2014) found that the six agrammatics they assessed performed slightly better on the comprehension of SRCs compared to ORCs, (73% vs. 67%), but the difference was not significant. The authors attribute the lack of a more pronounced difference between SRCs and ORCs to a flaw of the protocol 8 Notice that the SRCs of Study II, (11a) repeated below as (i), are string identical to pseudo-relatives, (ii):…”

“…Let us remind that one of the main aims of this study was to assess comprehension of SRCs and ORCs by Greek-speaking non-fluent Broca's aphasics, given the somehow inconclusive results of Nerantzini et al (2014). In order to finalize our findings, we believe we should compare the results on those sentences that are not associated with any of the factors that may pose additional complications, along the lines laid out in the previous sections, regardless of whether the findings are to the expected direction or not.…”

“…One of two recent studies on the RCs of Greek-speaking agrammatics did not find a clear difference between SRCs and ORCs, Nerantzini et al (2014). Nerantzini et al found that, although the performance of the agrammatics they tested was better on SRCs than on ORCs, the difference between the two types of RCs was not statistically significant.…”