The syntax of single words: Evidence from a patient with a selective function word reading deficit

Abstract

We describe the reading performance of a patient who has selective deficits for reading nonwords, function words, and morphologically complex words in isolation. His reading of highly abstract nouns and verbs, however, is relatively well preserved. He can recognise and comprehend the meaning of written function words, of derivational morphology, and of most inflectional morphology. We suggest that his deficit in reading grammatical morphemes is unrelated to his problems in reading nonwords and cannot be explained by their low semanticity and imageability. The patient's speech is ungrammatical but is not devoid of grammatical morphemes and his reading of functional elements improves when these are presented within the context of sentences. We argue that syntactic information relevant to individual lexical items including information about how the word may potentially be used within a phrase must be accessed during single word reading tasks (e.g., Levelt, 1989). This is particularly difficult for function words due to their linguistic specification, which is different from that of lexical categories (Chomsky, 1995). Both linguistic theory and Garrett's (e.g., 1982) model of sentence processing account for the patient's improved reading of function words in the context of sentences.

Closed-class words in sentence production: Evidence from a modality-specific dissociation

“…Note, however, that the interpretation proposed here for CB's impairment contrasts with the cases described by Druks and Froud (2002) and by Berndt and Haendiges (2000) in at least two respects. First of all, in CB's case the impairment would be due to a deficient activation of closedclass items by an appropriately retrieved sentence structure.…”

Unaccusativity as lexical argument reduction: Evidence from aphasia

“…The aphasic subject MC provided such a testing opportunity, in the single-word reading modality, because he was totally unable to read any functional items (including determiners, complementisers, quantifiers, inflectional elements, wh-words, pronouns, negation and conjunctions) in sharp contrast with his relatively intact reading of substantives (Druks and Froud, 2002;Froud, 2001a,b). MC has already provided opportunities to investigate the lexical/functional status of various categories, including adverbials (Froud, 2001a) and prepositions (Froud, 2001b).…”

“…His high error rate overall on this task was largely due to his tendency to add an indefinite article to the bare nouns, rather than to errors on the target words themselves). Additionally, we have demonstrated that MC's comprehension of written function words in isolation was intact (so far as this is possible to test); so that he recognized functional items, and knew what they meant, even when he was completely unable to read them (Druks and Froud, 2002). MC's ability to produce these same categories in connected speech was hypothesized to be supported by the availability of lexical information for substantives, presumably including their extended projections, so that production of functional categories in connected speech, or in a sentential context, or in reading of connected text, is bolstered by the availability of the syntactic frame.…”

“…MC did not only have difficulties in reading; in fact he had multiple aphasic deficits, and his problems with morphological representations and function word realization had complex effects on his language performance in all modalities. His profile on the Boston Diagnostic Aphasia Examination (Goodglass and Kaplan, 1972) was most similar to that of a Broca's aphasic, but he had access to a wider range of grammatical structures than a typical Broca's aphasic, and his articulatory agility was less impaired (MC's BDAE profile, and details of many aspects of MC's language abilities which I only touch on here, are provided in Druks and Froud, 2002). Testing showed that MC's naming ability was moderately impaired (Boston Naming Test Kaplan et al, 1983: 48/60 (80%) correct; Object and Action Naming Battery (Druks and Masterson, 2000: 108/ 140 (77%) actions and 129/140 (92%) objects named correctly).…”

“…Howard, 1985;Marshall, 1986;Grodzinsky, 1990 and many others). In the next section, I describe the unusually robust lexical/functional distinction which has been demonstrated in a particular aphasic subject, MC (Druks and Froud, 2002;Froud, 2001a,b), and present an experimental investigation of his representation of unaccusative verbs.…”