Tense and Agreement in Agrammatic Production: Pruning the Syntactic Tree

Abstract

This paper discusses the description of agrammatic production focusing on the verbal inflectional morphology. Agrammatism in Hebrew is investigated through an experiment with a patient who displays a highly selective impairment: agreement inflection is completely intact, but tense inflection, use of copula, and embedded structures are severely impaired. A retrospective examination of the literature shows that our findings are corroborated by others. A selective account of the agrammatic production deficiency is proposed, according to which only a subclass of the functional syntactic categories is impaired in this syndrome. The consequence of this deficit is the pruning of the syntactic phrase marker of agrammatic patients, which impairs performance from the impaired node and higher. These findings also bear upon central issues in linguistic theories, particularly that of Pollock (1989), regarding split inflection.

Lexical, Morphological, and Syntactic Aspects of Verb Production in Agrammatic Aphasics

“…This implied, according to the authors, that the basic problem was a syntactic one, not a morphological or lexical one. These findings are compatible with theories on functional projection in aphasia, like the ones from Hagiwara (1995) and Friedmann and Grodzinsky (1997); Positions high in the syntactic tree are difficult to realize for agrammatic speakers.…”

“…Most studies on the grammatical aspects of verb production in Broca's aphasia have been done in English, which is not the most suitable language for such research because the inflectional paradigm is very limited and there is little variation in the position of the verb. When one looks at verb production in sentence context in other languages such as Hebrew (Friedmann, 2000;Friedmann & Grodzinsky, 1997) or Hungarian (Kiss, 2000), interesting patterns emerge. Friedmann and Grodzinsky (1997) and Friedmann (2000) showed that Hebrew agrammatics make more errors with inflection for tense than with inflection for agreement, and Kiss (2000) showed that in Hungarian the amount of grammatical information that the verb contains influences the ability to produce it in sentence context; the more grammatical roles belong to the verb and the more morphological information, the more difficult it is to retrieve the verb in sentence context.…”

Verb inflections in agrammatic aphasia: Encoding of tense features☆

“…Given that agrammatic aphasic individuals often produce syntactically ill-formed speech, it has been proposed that verb inflection errors in agrammatism occur because syntactic wellformedness constraints are rendered inaccessible (Arabatzi & Edwards, 2002; Tree-Pruning Hypothesis (TPH) : Friedmann & Grodzinsky, 1997). Previous syntactic accounts are based on the observation that agreement morphology seems to be better preserved than tense morphology in agrammatic aphasia, and have suggested that tense nodes are inaccessible to the checking mechanism, while agreement nodes are accessible (Friedmann & Grodzinsky, 1997), or that tense is underspecified (Tense Underspecification Hypothesis (TUH): Wenzlaff & Clahsen, 2004).…”

Verb Inflection and Verb Diversity in Three Populations: Agrammatic Speakers, Normally Developing Children, and Children with Specific Language Impairment (SLI)

“…It has been shown that agrammatic aphasic speakers use a reduced proportion of finite verbs (see, e.g., Bastiaanse, Rispens, & Van Zonneveld, 1999;Friedmann & Grodzinsky, 1997;Hagiwara, 1995). The same has been observed in normally developing children and children with specific language impairment (SLI), in that they produce a relatively larger number of so-called optional infinitives than finite verbs (e.g., Wexler, Schaeffer, & Bol, 1998).…”

“…In the literature it has often been suggested that both populations suffer from a grammatical deficit (for agrammatism, see, for example, Hagiwara, 1995;Friedmann & Grodzinsky, 1997;Bastiaanse & Van Zonneveld, 1998; for SLI, see Rice & Wexler, 1996). At the same time we know that agrammatic aphasics have problems accessing verbs (see, for example, Thompson, Lange, Schneider, & Shapiro, 1997;Bastiaanse & Jonkers, 1998).…”