Pronominal and anaphoric reference in agrammatism

Subjects with Broca's aphasia have been shown to display difficulties in on-line and off-line tasks involving personal pronouns and reflexives. Off-line tasks have indicated more errors with pronouns than with reflexives while the reverse has been found in on-line studies. In the present off-line study, the comprehension of sentences containing personal pronouns and reflexives is examined in a group of 10 agrammatic participants. Results indicate that subjects had difficulties with both pronouns and reflexives, particularly with reflexives in sentences that contained a quantificational antecedent, as well as with pronouns in exceptional case marking constructions. It is argued that the low performance that subjects exhibited as a group in pronouns and reflexives indicates two distinct impairments, one that concerns coreference and one that concerns A-dependencies, the latter being a manifestation of a general processing failure to link positions. Poor performance on exceptional case marking constructions compared to simple transitive sentences is claimed to be interpreted within theories for reference assignment that distinguish between the two sentence types. (c) 2007 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

The on-line processing of unaccusativity in Greek agrammatism

We investigated the on-line processing of unaccusative and unergative sentences in a group of eight Greek-speaking individuals diagnosed with Broca aphasia and a group of language-unimpaired subjects used as the baseline. The processing of unaccusativity refers to the reactivation of the postverbal trace by retrieving the mnemonic representation of the verb’s syntactically defined antecedent provided in the early part of the sentence. Our results demonstrate that the Broca group showed selective reactivation of the antecedent for the unaccusatives. We consider several interpretations for our data, including explanations focusing on the transitivization properties of nonactive and active voice-alternating unaccusatives, the costly procedure claimed to underlie the parsing of active nonvoice-alternating unaccusatives, and the animacy of the antecedent modulating the syntactic choices of the patients.

Agrammatisme : effet potentiel d'un entraînement musical sur le traitement syntaxique

Le présent mémoire vise à unifier les résultats d’études comportementales, neuropsychologiques et électrophysiologiques disponibles quant à la possibilité d’un partage des ressources neuronales dédiées au traitement du langage et de la musique. Pour ce faire, une analyse théorique précise des aspects traités lors de l’intégration structurale et temporelle d’éléments langagiers ou musicaux en processus de traitement en temps réel est essentielle. Le but visé est de se questionner sur l’effet potentiel d’un entraînement musical et linguistique sur les capacités syntaxiques touchées dans l’agrammatisme chez la population aphasique (Broca).

Comprehension of wh-questions and declarative sentences in agrammatic aphasia: the set partition hypothesis

Problematic trace-antecedent relations between deep and surface structure have been a dominant theme in sentence comprehension in agrammatism. We challenge this view and propose that the comprehension in agrammatism in declarative sentences and wh-questions stems from impaired processing in logical form. We present new data from wh-questions and declarative sentences and advance a new hypothesis which we call the set partition hypothesis. We argue that elements that signal set partition operations influence sentence comprehension while trace-antecedent relations remain intact. (C) 2007 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.