Agrammatism in sentence production without comprehension deficits: Reduced availability of syntactic structures and/or of grammatical morphemes? A case study

Nespoulous, Jean–Luc; Dordain, M; Perron, Cécile; Ska, Bernadette; Bub, Daniel N.; Caplan, David; Mehler, Jacques; Lecours, André

doi:10.1016/0093-934x(88)90069-7

Cited by 167 publications

(60 citation statements)

References 15 publications

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“…Nespoulous et al (1984Nespoulous et al ( , 1988Nespoulous et al ( , 1990. This is a case study of a Frenchspeaking agrammatic aphasic, who bears a striking resemblance to RS.…”

Section: Independent Evidence-a Selective Review Of the Literaturementioning

confidence: 99%

Tense and Agreement in Agrammatic Production: Pruning the Syntactic Tree

1997

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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.

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“…Nespoulous et al (1984Nespoulous et al ( , 1988Nespoulous et al ( , 1990. This is a case study of a Frenchspeaking agrammatic aphasic, who bears a striking resemblance to RS.…”

Section: Independent Evidence-a Selective Review Of the Literaturementioning

confidence: 99%

Tense and Agreement in Agrammatic Production: Pruning the Syntactic Tree

1997

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“…This finding runs contrary to common belief, according to which agrammatic aphasics have equal problems with all functional categories. A retrospective literature review found other cross-linguistic evidence tending in the same direction: A significant group of patients reported in the literature also showed impairment in tense but not agreement (Miceli et al 1989;Nespoulous et al 1988;Saffran et al 1980), yet the opposite (impaired agreement but not tense) is never found: (22) Seeking to obtain a detailed error analysis, Friedmann then created a series of tests to track the exact nature of the impairment in tense versus agreement in speech production of Broca's aphasics. The distinction made by the patients was especially important in light of recent developments in linguistic theory.…”

Section: Language Production Without Broca's Areamentioning

confidence: 99%

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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“…1985;Miceli et al 1983;Nespoulous et al 1992) can be taken as an argument against a single processor account. Rare as these cases might be, the fact that impairments in grammatical encoding can be dissociated from impairments in parsing, suggests that there is no necessary connection between syntactic processing in production and comprehension,…”

Section: Issues In Syntactic Processingmentioning

confidence: 99%