Neuropsychological reasons for a transformational analysis of verbal passive

Grodzinsky, Yosef; Pierce, Amy E.; Marakovitz, S.

doi:10.1007/bf00135354

Cited by 33 publications

(33 citation statements)

References 12 publications

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“…When we discover a pattern of grammatical impairment and sparing, it may reveal something about the internal structure of the grammar. Such arguments have been made in several domains (see, e.g., Grodzinsky et al 1991;Hickok & Avrutin 1995). One hopes that more work will lead to further discoveries.…”

Section: Coda: Broca's Legacy and The Role Of The Language Areasmentioning

confidence: 98%

“…This finding correlates perfectly with trace deletion; passive morphology does not necessarily imply a syntactic movement transformation. Certain passives -known as "lexical" (1e) -are base-generated, whereas others, "verbal" (2a,e), are derived by a transformation; hence, their representations contain a trace (see Grodzinsky et al 1991). Trace deletion partitions these data correctly (movementBcomprehension problem), yet this discussion glosses over important particulars.…”

Section: The Trace-deletion Hypothesismentioning

confidence: 99%

“…This result has already been obtained for English. Specifically, it has been shown that Broca's aphasics easily comprehend English sentences with passive morphology that are not derived by transformations (Grodzinsky et al 1991). These are sentences such as (1e) above (the man is interested in the woman), for which a transformational analysis does not apply for various reasons.…”

Section: Comprehension Across Languagesmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…We return to this issue later. At any rate, the contrast (1e)/(2e) was obtained in one study of five Broca's aphasic patients (Grodzinsky et al 1991; see the end of sect. 2.3.1 below).…”

Section: Construction Typementioning

confidence: 99%

“…Thus, an old debate has been revived in recent years, in which the coherence of the clinical categorization as well as the validity of the TDH has been challenged (see Badecker &Miceli et al 1989, for attacks on the syndrome-based conception; see also Berndt et al 1997, Hickok et al 1993, and Lukatela et al 1995, for critiques of the TDH on the basis of new data). Many (if not most) objections have been explained away; in some cases patient selection was the cause of the inconsistency (patients that were not Broca's aphasics were included in the experimental group) and in others there were problems with experimental procedures or design; in still others, the results may have been misanalyzed or misinterpreted Grodzinsky 1991;Zurif 1996;Zurif et al 1989).…”

Section: Generality and Counterevidencementioning

confidence: 99%

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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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Section: Coda: Broca's Legacy and The Role Of The Language Areasmentioning

confidence: 98%

Section: The Trace-deletion Hypothesismentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Comprehension Across Languagesmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…We return to this issue later. At any rate, the contrast (1e)/(2e) was obtained in one study of five Broca's aphasic patients (Grodzinsky et al 1991; see the end of sect. 2.3.1 below).…”

Section: Construction Typementioning

confidence: 99%