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

53. Syntax and Language Disorders

“…According to the Tree-Pruning Hypothesis (Friedmann and Grodzinsky 1997) individuals suffering from agrammatic Broca's aphasia should no longer succeed in producing grammatical wh-questions since the CP layer is pruned from syntactic representations (see section 2.2.2.). In an experiment eliciting wh-questions, the seven tested aphasic subjects succeeded in 66.1% of the contexts in producing a correct wh-question that unambiguously involved the projection of the CP layer, a score that was significantly lower than the 97.5% obtained by unimpaired control subjects (Neuhaus and Penke 2008). The significant difference between aphasic subjects and unimpaired control subjects indicates that the aphasic subjects suffer from an impairment in producing wh-questions.…”

“…In the investigation of whquestion production abilities in German Broca's aphasics mentioned above (Neuhaus and Penke 2008), individual correctness scores of the seven tested aphasic subjects ranged from 27.8% to 96.3%. Note in addition that the scores for the unimpaired control subjects in this task ranged between 88.3% and 100%.…”

“…That is, when is the correctness score low enough to conclude that a syntactic representation is defective and when is it high enough to conclude that syntactic representations are basically unimpaired? Consider as an example, data that come from an investigation on the production of wh-questions in German agrammatic Broca's aphasics (Neuhaus and Penke 2008). According to the Tree-Pruning Hypothesis (Friedmann and Grodzinsky 1997) individuals suffering from agrammatic Broca's aphasia should no longer succeed in producing grammatical wh-questions since the CP layer is pruned from syntactic representations (see section 2.2.2.).…”

“…Performance deficit accounts help us in predicting when such a deficit is likely to appear, namely when processing load increases, for example because more syntactic operations have to be computed or the task is more taxing and exceeds the processing capacities of the individual subject. For an illustration of this point, consider again the data on wh-question production in German Broca's aphasics (Neuhaus and Penke 2008). Production of wh-questions was tested by an elicitation task, where subjects had to transform a given main clause into a wh-question, and a sentence repetition task, where subjects were asked to repeat wh-questions as accurately as possible.…”

Effects of regiolects on the perception of developmental foreign accent syndrome

“…Hanne, Burchert, & Vasishth, 2015;Hickok & Avrutin, 1996;Kljajevic & Murasugi, 2010;Martínez-Ferreiro, 2010;Nerantzini, Varlokosta, Papadopoulou, & Bastiaanse, 2014;Neuhaus & Penke, 2008;Salis & Edwards, 2008;Thompson & Choy, 2009;Thompson, Tait, Ballard, & Fix, 1999;van der Meulen, Bastiaanse, & Rooryck, 2005). According to some accounts, impaired comprehension of extracted object wh-questions in aphasia is due to the presence of overt wh-movement.…”