Levels of Representation and Units of Access Relevant to Agrammatism

Kegl, Judy

doi:10.1006/brln.1995.1044

Cited by 65 publications

(69 citation statements)

References 0 publications

Supporting

Mentioning

Contrasting

Unclassified

Order By: Relevance

“…These data support those reported by Kegl (1995). Like Kegl's aphasic subject (FOK), the agrammatic patients studied here produced very few unaccusatives.…”

Section: Discussionsupporting

confidence: 92%

“…As the number of syntactic arguments increases, so too does verb selection difficulty. Kegl (1995) also found that the argument structure properties of verbs influence production. Based on linguistic analysis of an agrammatic aphasic patient's (FOK) narrative production, Kegl suggested not only that verb arguments and other lexically related material are part of the lexical representation of verbs, but also that the verb's representation includes d-structure information (Chomsky, 1981, and subsequent work).…”

mentioning

confidence: 93%

“…While recent research focused on determining the nature of verb production deficits has shown that several factors may play a role in this production difficulty, including frequency and familiarity (Kemmerer & Tranel, 2000), imageability (Bird, Howard, & Franklin, 2000), and semantic factors (Breedin, Saffran, & Schwartz, 1998), the number of syntactic arguments associated with the verb and corresponding participant roles has been shown to influence verb production in several studies (Jonkers & Bastiaanse, 1996Kegl, 1995;Kemmerer & Tranel, 2000;Kim & Thompson, 2000;Kiss, 2000 Lange, Schneider, & Shapiro, 1997; Thompson, Shapiro, Li, & Schendel, 1995a). For example, Thompson et al (1995aThompson et al ( , 1997 found that agrammatic aphasic subjects with verb retrieval difficulty in both verb naming and in sentence production showed a pattern of verb production deficit in both tasks related to the number of arguments associated with the verb.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…intransitive, transitive, dative), a striking finding was that, in comparison to three normal control subjects and a patient with anomic aphasia (JMD), FOK produced no unaccusative, intransitive verbs. Kegl's (1995) finding that unaccusative, intransitive type verbs present difficulty for agrammatic aphasic individuals led her to suggest that the lexical entry for verbs includes the d-structure representation of the configuration of verbs.There are two syntactic classes of intransitive verbs: unergatives, such as laugh, and unaccusative verbs, such as melt, each associated with a different underlying syntactic representation (Perlmutter, 1978). 2 Within a Government-binding (GB) framework (Chomsky, 1981), unergative verbs take a d-structure subject and no object, whereas an unaccusative verb takes a d-structure object and no subject.…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

See 4 more Smart Citations

Unaccusative verb production in agrammatic aphasia: the argument structure complexity hypothesis

Thompson

2003

Journal of Neurolinguistics

153

118

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

This study examined patterns of verb production in narrative samples of eight individuals with agrammatic aphasia and seven education-and age-matched normal subjects. Comprehension and constrained production of two types of intransitive verbs-unaccusatives whose argument structure triggers a complex syntactic derivation and unergatives that are considered syntactically simple-was also tested. Results showed that in narrative tasks a hierarchy of verb production difficulty as seen in previous studies [Aphasiology 11 (1997) 473; Brain and Language 74 (2000) 1] emerged for the aphasic participants, with a preference noted for production of verbs with a fewer number of arguments. Both normal and agrammatic subjects also showed fewer productions of unaccusative intransitive verbs in their narrative samples as compared to other verb types (supporting findings reported by Kegl [Brain and Language 50 (1995) 151]. In contrast to relatively spared comprehension of both unaccusative and unergative intransitives, the aphasic participants showed significantly greater difficulty producing unaccusatives as compared to unergatives in the constrained task. These findings suggest that deficits in accessing verbs for production are influenced by the verb's argument structure entry and led to what is referred to as the 'argument structure complexity hypothesis'. When verbs become more complex in terms of the number of associated arguments or when the argument structure entry of the verb does not directly map to its s-structure representation, production difficulty increases. KeywordsVerb production; Unaccusatives; Syntactic deficits; Agrammatism It has been well documented in the literature that some individuals with aphasia, particularly those showing deficit patterns consistent with a diagnosis of Broca's aphasia with agrammatism, evince greater difficulty producing verbs as compared to nouns (Berndt, Mitchum, Haendiges, & Sandson, 1997; Miceli, Silveri, Nocentini, & Caramazza, 1988;Miceli, Silveri, Villa, & Caramazza, 1984; Thompson et al., l995b;Zingeser & Berndt, 1990). While recent research focused on determining the nature of verb production deficits has shown that several factors may play a role in this production difficulty, including frequency and familiarity (Kemmerer & Tranel, 2000), imageability (Bird, Howard, & Franklin, 2000), and semantic factors (Breedin, Saffran, & Schwartz, 1998), the number of syntactic arguments associated with the verb and corresponding participant roles has been shown to influence verb production in several studies (Jonkers & Bastiaanse, 1996Kegl, 1995;Kemmerer & Tranel, 2000;Kim & Thompson, 2000;Kiss, 2000 Lange, Schneider, & Shapiro, 1997; Thompson, Shapiro, Li, & Schendel, 1995a). For example, Thompson et al. (1995aThompson et al. ( , 1997 found that agrammatic aphasic subjects with verb retrieval difficulty in both verb naming and in sentence production showed a pattern of verb production deficit in both tasks related to the number of arguments associated with the verb. That i...

show abstract

“…These data support those reported by Kegl (1995). Like Kegl's aphasic subject (FOK), the agrammatic patients studied here produced very few unaccusatives.…”

Section: Discussionsupporting

confidence: 92%

mentioning

confidence: 93%

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

mentioning

confidence: 99%

See 3 more Smart Citations

Unaccusative verb production in agrammatic aphasia: the argument structure complexity hypothesis

Thompson

2003

Journal of Neurolinguistics

153

118

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

Aphasias and theories of linguistic representation: representing frequency, hierarchy, constructions, and sequential structure

Menn

Duffield

2013

WIRES Cognitive Science

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Error and preservation patterns in aphasic speech show that the brain makes use of the frequencies of words, constructions, and collocations, as well as category membership and hierarchical structure, during language processing. Frequency effects are evident along two quasi-independent axes: syntagmatic (the sequential context, e.g., deploying correct functors, categories, and utterance-level intonation) and paradigmatic (the choice at any given linguistic level, e.g., selecting content words and modifying structures). Frequency along the syntagmatic axis is shown to play a role in errors involving idioms, constructions, and collocations that cross major phrasal boundaries. Along the paradigmatic axis, frequency affects errors involving lexical selection, competing functors and inflected forms (e.g., using plural where singular is required). An account of language representation and processing that encompasses frequency as well as categorization and structure is compatible with what we know about how the brain works: increased experience with a linguistic structure results in increased activation-and strengthening-of the neural networks involved in processing that structure. These claims are supported by the literature on experimental work in normal speakers. Parsimony, plus the unexamined assumption that mental representation is like a written record (entries either present or absent, structure displayable in two dimensions), has been a misleading guide to modeling language representation. The substantial redundancy in representations and processing that is introduced by incorporating both frequency-based and hierarchy-based information is in fact appropriate for the brain as a fast, reliable, massively parallel error-correcting network with very large storage capacity and gradient representation strength. WIREs Cogn Sci 2013, 4:651-663. doi: 10.1002/wcs.1257 CONFLICT OF INTEREST: The authors have declared no conflicts of interest for this article. For further resources related to this article, please visit the WIREs website.

show abstract

The Interaction of Preserved Pragmatics and Impaired Syntax in Japanese and English Aphasic Speech

et al. 1998

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Levels of Representation and Units of Access Relevant to Agrammatism

Cited by 65 publications

References 0 publications

Unaccusative verb production in agrammatic aphasia: the argument structure complexity hypothesis

Unaccusative verb production in agrammatic aphasia: the argument structure complexity hypothesis

Aphasias and theories of linguistic representation: representing frequency, hierarchy, constructions, and sequential structure

The Interaction of Preserved Pragmatics and Impaired Syntax in Japanese and English Aphasic Speech

Contact Info

Product

Resources

About