Intervention effects in the relative clauses of agrammatics: The role of gender and case

Abstract

Individuals with agrammatic aphasia are known to have difficulties interpreting Object Relative Clauses (ORCs), but not Subject Relative Clauses (SRCs). This asymmetry is recently understood by resorting to locality principles, captured by a featural version of Relativized Minimality (RM). The same principles are held responsible for intervention effects of phi-features with the same value in child language, when these are syntactically active. There are no studies on the intervention effects of phi-features in agrammatism.This work investigates comprehension of headed Relative Clauses (RCs) by Greek-speaking non-fluent Broca's aphasics (agrammatics), focusing on gender and structural case, which the language marks on both the determiner and the noun. Two RC tasks were administered, differing on whether the case of the first (relativized) DP was nominative or accusative, depending on the preceding instruction. The findings established the expected SRC vs. ORC asymmetry, shedding light to earlier misleading results due to side effects of case morphology. Moreover, a strong similarity effect of gender was found in ORCs, although it is not a syntactically active feature in the relevant sense in Greek. We claim that the similarity effects of gender in the ORCs of Greekspeaking agrammatics are not intervention effects anchored to some specific principle of syntactic locality. Support for this claim is also provided by their presence even in the SRCs of the same individuals.As for structural case, neither intervention nor general similarity effects of it were detected. There were, however, additional difficulties for SRCs whose relativized subject had accusative, not patterned by ORCs with nominative relativized objects. We suggest that one has to ensure that relativized subjects end up with nominative case in the RCs tasks of languages with rich case morphology, and conjecture that phi-features are not involved in the computation of locality in agrammatism.

Short-term memory and sentence comprehension in Catalan aphasia

“…These findings suggest that the problems to understand the sentences arose when their interpretation relied on particular syntactic operations. There is actually extensive crosslinguistic evidence that PWA present impairments in comprehension that affect specific syntactic structures like passives, object relatives or clitic left dislocations (among others, Caramazza and Zurif, 1976 ; Hickok et al, 1993 ; Grodzinsky, 2000 ; Luzzatti et al, 2001 ; Friedmann, 2008 ; Salmons and Gavarró, 2013 ; Varlokosta et al, 2014 ; Adelt et al, 2017 ; Terzi and Nanousi, 2018 ; Garraffa and Fyndanis, 2020 ). Moreover, the fact that the comprehension task of the CAT, despite being a general comprehension task, is sensitive to the specific linguistic deficits suggests that it is an efficient diagnostic tool for aphasia.…”

Comprensión de oraciones relativas con predicados psicológicos en español

“…Como hemos mencionado, los argumentos dativos en español poseen la marca de caso dativo a. Siguiendo la propuesta de Carreiras et al (2010), las relativas de objeto siempre deberían ser más difíciles en español, tanto en el caso de los psi como de los act; sin embargo, nuestros resultados muestran que esto no es así. No obstante, estudios recientes desde el marco de la fRM se han propuesto investigar si otros rasgos del dominio nominal, además del rasgo [+N], como por ejemplo el número, el género o el caso, pueden generar mayores o menores efectos de intervención (Adani, van der Lely, Forgiarini & Guasti, 2010;Belletti, Friedmann, Brunato & Rizzi, 2012;Adani, Forgiarini, Guasti & van der Lely, 2014;Manetti, Moscati, Rizzi & Belletti, 2016;Adani, Stegenwallner-Schütz & Niesel, 2017;Adelt, Stadie, Lassotta, Adani & Burchert, 2017;Friedmann, Rizzi & Belletti, 2017;Terzi & Nanousi, 2018;Corrêa, Rodrigues & Forster, 2019, entre otros). En lo que respecta al caso, Friedmann et al (2017) sostienen que este rasgo morfosintáctico nunca está activo durante el establecimiento de este tipo de dependencias y, por ende, no podría facilitar la correcta interpretación de la oración en casos de intervención.…”

Intervention effects in Catalan agrammatism

“…On the other hand, the research on feature representation in agrammatism and how it may interact with the comprehension deficit focuses mostly on the role of case on other types of syntactic construction, namely relative clauses and wh-questions (Varlokosta et al 2014;Sheppard et al 2015;Adelt et al 2017;Terzi & Nanousi 2018;Adelt et al 2020). Friedmann et al (2016) investigated the role of case in the interpretation of Hebrew object focalisations by seven agrammatic subjects who performed at chance in a sentence-picture matching task.…”

“…The comprehension deficit observed in agrammatism has been explained as an instance of generalised minimality effects due to feature impoverishment by Grillo (2009). The few studies that have investigated feature representation in agrammatism focus mainly on the comprehension of relative clauses and wh-questions (Varlokosta et al 2014;Sheppard et al 2015;Friedmann et al 2016;Adelt et al 2017;Terzi & Nanousi 2018;Adelt et al 2020); whereas the comprehension of other structures remain mostly unexplored. Furthermore, previous research on intervention effects in agrammatism has focused on case features whereas the studies on the role of other features are very scarce (Terzi & Nanousi 2018 for gender and Adelt et al 2017;2020 for number).…”