Syntactic transparency and sentence interpretation in aphasia

Schwartz, Myrna F.; Linebarger, Marcia C.; Saffran, Eleanor M.; Pate, Debra Sue

doi:10.1080/01690968708406352

Cited by 167 publications

(87 citation statements)

References 21 publications

Supporting

Mentioning

Contrasting

Unclassified

Order By: Relevance

“…The data even appear contradictory at times: Wernicke's aphasics have some disturbances in syntactic comprehension (Grodzinsky & Finkel 1998;Schwartz et al 1987;Shapiro et al 1993;, whereas Broca's aphasia patients, though failing certain tasks that probe receptive syntactic abilities Goodglass 1968), have shown success in others (Linebarger et al 1983). Taken at face value, these findings cast serious doubts on the model, in which Broca's area (but not Wernicke's area) supports receptive syntactic mechanisms.…”

Section: Contradictory Results From Aphasiamentioning

confidence: 99%

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

Kempen¹

2000

Behav. Brain Sci.

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

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...

show abstract

Section: Contradictory Results From Aphasiamentioning

confidence: 99%

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

Kempen¹

2000

Behav. Brain Sci.

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…One possible explanation suggested by Linebarger et al for the discrepancy between performance on comprehension and grammaticality judgment tasks is that these patients can compute syntactic structures, but they cannot map them onto a semantic interpretation. In any case, the finding that Broca's aphasics perform quite well on grammaticality judgment tasks has been replicated in a number of studies involving a wide variety of constructions (e.g., Wulfeck & Bates, 1990;Wulfeck, Bates, & Capasso, 1991;Schwartz, Linebarger, Saffran, & Pate, 1987) and in a range of languages, such as Serbo-Croatian (Lukatela, Crain, & Shankweiler, 1988), Italian , and Mandarin Chinese (Lu et al, 2000).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 90%

Grammaticality Judgment in Aphasia: Deficits Are Not Specific to Syntactic Structures, Aphasic Syndromes, or Lesion Sites

Wilson

Saygın

2004

Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Abstract& We examined the abilities of aphasic patients to make grammaticality judgments on English sentences instantiating a variety of syntactic structures. Previous studies employing this metalinguistic task have suggested that aphasic patients typically perform better on grammaticality judgment tasks than they do on sentence comprehension tasks, a finding that has informed the current view that grammatical knowledge is relatively preserved in agrammatic aphasia. However, not all syntactic structures are judged equally accurately, and several researchers have attempted to provide explanatory principles to predict which structures will pose problems to agrammatic patients. One such proposal is Grodzinsky and Finkel's (1998) claim that agrammatic aphasics are selectively impaired in their ability to process structures involving traces of maximal projections. In this study, we tested this claim by presenting patients with sentences with or without such traces, but also varying the level of difficulty of both kinds of structures, assessed with reference to the performance of age-matched and young controls. We found no evidence that agrammatic aphasics, or any other subgroup, are selectively impaired on structures involving traces: Some judgments involving traces were made quite accurately, whereas other judgments not involving traces were made very poorly. Subgroup analyses revealed that patient groups and agematched controls had remarkably similar profiles of performance across sentence types, regardless of whether the patients were grouped based on Western Aphasia Battery classification, an independent screening test for agrammatic comprehension, or lesion site. This implies that the pattern of performance across sentence types does not result from any particular component of the grammar, or any particular brain region, being selectively compromised. Lesion analysis revealed that posterior temporal areas were more reliably implicated in poor grammaticality judgment performance than anterior areas, but poor performance was also observed with some anterior lesions, suggesting that areas important for syntactic processing are distributed throughout the left peri-sylvian region. &

show abstract

“…Another way to manipulate the availability of working memory resources is to add extra verbal material to be processed as part of the stimulus sentence in the comprehension task, that is, by a ''padding'' manipulation. Several studies have shown aphasic sentence comprehension to be negatively affected by padding, for example, by padding with adjectives in the context of the well-known Token Test (e.g., DeRenzi & Vignolo, 1962;McNeil & Prescott, 1978;Orgass, 1976) and by padding with extra verb phrases (Kolk & Weijts, in press; but see Schwartz, Linebarger, Saffran, & Pate, 1987). However, the interaction between a padding manipulation and other ways of manipulating sentence complexity has yet to be explored empirically in aphasics.…”

Section: Simulation Studymentioning

confidence: 99%