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

Abstract

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. &

The neuropsychology of sentence processing: Where do we stand?

“…Thus, many patients do not show a complete deficit in syntactic processing (and some actually do quite well even on comprehension tests). Although Wilson and Saygun's (2004) study did find difficulties with grammaticality judgments for their patients, their results suggested that a posterior temporal region was critical for such judgments; however, a similar area has been implicated in lexical and semantic processing (Hillis et al, 2001). Thus, patients who performed poorly in the Wilson and Saygun study on sentence comprehension and grammaticality judgments may have also performed poorly on tests of lexical or semantic knowledge.…”

“…Recently, Wilson and Saygun (2004) followed up on the Grodzinsky and Finkel study. They argued that the sentences with trace in Grodzinsky and Finkel seemed intuitively to be quite difficult compared to those without traces.…”

“…When relating patient performance on the grammaticality judgments to lesion site, Wilson and Saygun (2004) found that damage to a posterior temporal region was most highly associated with impaired performance on grammaticality judgments, whether scored in terms of overall accuracy or performance on sentences with trace. These authors suggest that the brain areas involved in syntactic processing are distributed widely across the left perisylvian region.…”

Semantic priming in anomic aphasia: a focused investigation using cross-modal methodology

“…However, experimental data regarding the use of online methods (i.e., tasks that allow investigation of the temporal effects of specific processes as they occur such as priming, eye-tracking) (Shapiro et al, 1998) in this population are relatively scarce and biased towards sentence-level processing. For example, it has been demonstrated that people with anomic aphasia have some qualitative similarities in their syntactic comprehension abilities and well-formedness judgement performances to that of people with Broca's aphasia, but with fewer errors present (Cardell, 2006;Chen, West, Waters, & Caplan, 2006;Dick et al, 2001;Wilson & Saygin, 2004). Hence, whilst online sentence-level enquiry has been undertaken, little research has been conducted into lexical-semantic processing in people with anomic aphasia, despite the apparent difficulties at the word level.…”

Effects of regiolects on the perception of developmental foreign accent syndrome

“…The source of noun-verb differences, however, is unclear (Vigliocco et al, 2011). Our current knowledge on language processing in people with aphasia largely comes from studies which use offline tasks such as the sentence-picture matching (Kay, Lesser & Coltheart, 1996;Thothathiri, Kimberg, & Schwartz, 2012;Varkanitsa et al, 2016) or grammaticality judgment (Wilson & Saygin, 2004). These tasks require participants to make explicit, strategic and reflective judgments (Inglis, 2003).…”