Tense and Syntactic Processes in Agrammatic Speech

Verb inflections in agrammatic aphasia: Encoding of tense features☆

“…This high accuracy of verb morphology in locally constrained contexts is consistent with previous cross-linguistic research on access to well-formedness constraints of verb morphology (Bastiaanse & van Zonneveld, 1998;De Blesser et al, 1996;Kolk & Heeschen, 1992;Lonzi & Luzzatti, 1993) and will be described in the General discussion. The findings of this Experiment are inconsistent with most syntactic accounts which propose that a deficit of the tense node in the syntactic tree representation impairs all syntactic computations of tense (Arabatzi & Edwards, 2002;Burchert et al, 2005;Friedmann & Grodzinsky, 1997;Wenzlaff & Clahsen, 2004). The next step in investigating the psycholinguistic underpinnings of verb inflection deficits in agrammatism is to examine DER and morphological complexity.…”

“…Given that agrammatic aphasic individuals often produce syntactically ill-formed speech, it has been proposed that verb inflection errors in agrammatism occur because syntactic wellformedness constraints are rendered inaccessible (Arabatzi & Edwards, 2002; Tree-Pruning Hypothesis (TPH) : Friedmann & Grodzinsky, 1997). Previous syntactic accounts are based on the observation that agreement morphology seems to be better preserved than tense morphology in agrammatic aphasia, and have suggested that tense nodes are inaccessible to the checking mechanism, while agreement nodes are accessible (Friedmann & Grodzinsky, 1997), or that tense is underspecified (Tense Underspecification Hypothesis (TUH): Wenzlaff & Clahsen, 2004).…”

“…Inflected verbs can be similarly repeated from the preceding sentence. For example, Arabatzi and Edwards (2002) found that Broca's aphasic patients produced responses such as He not shaves following probe sentences such as He shaves. Second, since this task involves a transformation of verb forms, production of regular and irregular inflections may involve different processes: the former require affixation of the default ed or ing affix, whereas in the case of irregular inflections, idiosyncratic transformations such as vowel and/or consonant changes or retrieval of a different stem allomorph are involved.…”

“…Another advantage is that accuracy is less likely to be confounded by auxiliary and verb retrieval deficits when compared to sentence completion that necessitates free recall. For instance, Arabatzi and Edwards (2002) found a large number of auxiliary omission errors, such as Tomorrow she cook a cake for Tomorrow she will bake a cake and omissions of the progressive be. Arabatzi and Edwards categorized these as tense omission errors although auxiliary omission could result from a function word retrieval deficit that is unrelated to encoding of tense (Bird, Franklin, & Howard, 2002;Harris, Stanford, & Campbell, 1989;Yaffee, 1990).…”

New Tests for Language Mapping with Intraoperative Electrical Stimulation of the Brain to Preserve Language in Individuals with Tumors and Epilepsy: A Preliminary Follow-Up Study

“…Grammar-focused language tests for IES of the dominant left hemisphere Considerable research based on lesion studies, electrical stimulation of the brain, as well as numerous non-invasive brain imaging reports show that the Left Hemisphere (LH) is responsible for processing most linguistic information, i.e. phonology, syntax, morphology, semantics, articulation, and a linguistic aspect of prosody (carrying out lexical stress) 1 (Benson 1979;Larsen et al 1978;Van Lancker 1980;Wise et al 1991;Friedmann and Grodzinsky 1997;Chantraine et al 1998;Arabatzi and Edwards 2002;Marcus et al2003;Musso et al 2003;Pouratian et al 2003;Stark et al 2006;Love et. al 2008).…”