Aphasic adults' use of heuristic and structural linguistic cues for sentence analysis

Ansell, Barbara J.; Flowers, Charles R.

doi:10.1016/0093-934x(82)90072-4

Cited by 89 publications

(20 citation statements)

References 11 publications

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“…Much of syntax, then, was intact in comprehension, as became evident through experiments that mostly required interpretation (and, as will be shown below, the production deficit also turned out to be more selective, though in a very different manner). The one clear exception, which had actually stood out since the beginning of the experimental investigations in the late 1960s, was transformational movement in the syntax, as indicated by marked comprehension deficiencies with structures derived by such operations (see Ansell & Flowers 1982, for early results; also see Goodglass 1968;. These basic findings have since been fortified by massive evidence, coming from different laboratories using diverse experimental techniques.…”

Section: Contradictory Results From Aphasiamentioning

confidence: 92%

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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Section: Contradictory Results From Aphasiamentioning

confidence: 92%

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

Kempen¹

2000

Behav. Brain Sci.

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“…The finding that aphasics have more processing difficulties with reversible passive sentences than with their active counterparts has not only been reported by Schwartz et al and Kolk and van Grunsven, but also by others (Ansell & Flowers, 1982;Brookshire & Nicholas, 1980;Caplan & Futter, 1986;Caplan & Hildebrandt, 1988;Friederici & Graetz, 1987;Laskey, Weidner, & Johnson, 1976;Moore, 1986). We are aware of only one deviant result.…”

Section: Empirical Studiesmentioning

confidence: 72%

“…Of the studies employing a sentence-picture-matching task, some have shown subjects to perform near chance level (Blumstein, Goodglass, Stadlender, & Biber, 1983;Caramazza & Zurif, 1976;Heilman & Scholes, 1976) and others above chance level (Ansell & Flowers, 1982;Caplan, Matthei, & Gigley, 1981;Goodglass et al, 1979;Kolk & Friederici, 1985). Kolk and van Grunsven (1985) repeated a study of Schwartz et al (1980) in which agrammatic aphasics had to perform two tasks, a sentence-picture-matching task and a sentence-order (anagram) task.…”

Section: Degree Of Severitymentioning

confidence: 99%

“…The first step towards our conceptualization of degrees of severity is the observation that, on a particular sentence type, patients do not always perform at chance level (Blumstein et al, 1983;Caramazza & Zurif, 1976;Heilman & Scholes, 1976), but also above chance level (Ansell & Flowers, 1982;Caplan et al, 1981;Goodglass et al, 1979;Kolk & Friederici, 1985;Kolk and van Grunsven, 1985;Martin, Wetzel, Blossom-Stach, & Feher, 1989). One could try to explain above-chance performance by assuming that patients use heuristic strategies to compensate for a lost ability to derive thematic roles from phrase structure.…”

Section: Degrees Of Severitymentioning

confidence: 99%

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A computer model of the temporal course of agrammatic sentence understanding: The effects of variation in severity and sentence complexity

Haarmann

Kolk

1991

Cognitive Science

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“…Successful interpretation rests on sensitivity to syntactic structures in order to identify thematic relations and determine "who did what to whom". Agrammatic performance on sentence-picture matching tasks can be at or below chance when sentences are semantically reversible (Ansell & Flowers, 1982;Berndt, Mitchum, & Haendiges, 1996;Caramazza & Zurif, 1976;Schwartz, Saffran, & Marin, 1980). Syntactic comprehension impairment can be present in people with different neurological profiles, including patients with vascular aphasia and those with primary progressive aphasia (PPA) due to frontotemporal degeneration (Gorno-Tempini, Hillis, Weintraub, Kertesz, Mendez, Cappa, ... Grossman, 2011;Hanne, Sekerina, Vasishth, Burchert, & De Bleser, 2011;Martin, 2006;Thompson, Meltzer-Asscher, Cho, Lee, Wieneke, Weintraub, & Mesulam, 2013;Wilson, Galantucci, Tartaglia, & Gorno-Tempini, 2012).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Preservation of passive constructions in a patient with primary progressive aphasia

Zimmerer¹,

Dąbrowska²,

Romanowski³

et al. 2014

Cortex

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Research into agrammatic comprehension in English has described a pattern of impaired understanding of passives and retained ability on active constructions. Some accounts of this dissociation predict that patients who are unable to comprehend actives will also be impaired in the comprehension of passives. We report the case of a man with primary progressive aphasia (WR), whose comprehension was at chance on active sentences, but at ceiling on passives. In a series of reversible sentence comprehension tests WR displayed difficulties with active transitives and truncated actives with an auxilliary. In passive sentences, he displayed sensitivity to the agent marker by, as well as the passive morphology of the verb. This pattern of dissociation challenges current theories of agrammatic comprehension. We explore 3 explanations based on the distinction between morphological and configurational cues, as well as on the semantic and discourse related differences between active and passive constructions.

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Aphasic adults' use of heuristic and structural linguistic cues for sentence analysis

Cited by 89 publications

References 11 publications

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

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

A computer model of the temporal course of agrammatic sentence understanding: The effects of variation in severity and sentence complexity

Preservation of passive constructions in a patient with primary progressive aphasia

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