Verb and auxiliary movement in agrammatic Broca’s aphasia

Abstract

Verb production in agrammatic BrocaÕs aphasia has repeatedly been shown to be impaired by a number of investigators. Not only is the number of verbs produced often significantly reduced, but verb inflections and auxiliaries are often omitted as well (e.g., Bastiaanse, Jonkers, & Moltmaker-Osinga, 1996;Saffran, Berndt, & Schwartz, 1989;Thompson, Shapiro, Li, & Schendel, 1994. It has been suggested that these problems are, in part, caused by the fact that finite verbs need to be moved from their base-generated position to inflectional nodes in the syntactic tree (e.g., Bastiaanse & Van Zonneveld, 1998). Others have suggested that production deficits in agrammatism can be predicted based on the position that certain structures take in the syntactic tree (Friedmann & Grodzinsky, 1997;Hagiwara, 1995). If the former theory is correct, several predictions can be made. First of all, the discrepancy between production of finite verbs in the matrix and embedded clause that has been found for Dutch (Bastiaanse & Van Zonneveld, 1998) should not be observed in English, since the word order of the matrix and embedded clause are the same in the latter language. Second, if verb movement (including movement of auxiliaries) is problematic for speakers with agrammatic aphasia, then a hierarchy in the production of auxiliaries in yes/no questions, auxiliaries, and finite verbs in declarative sentences in English would be expected, since the former has been moved and the two latter are in base-generated position. In the present paper, these hypotheses were tested in a cross-linguistic study of Dutch and English. Results showed the position in the syntactic tree does not predict deficit patterns; rather the critical factor appears to relate to whether or not verb or auxiliary movement is required.

Neural correlates of Dutch Verb Second in speech production

“…The agrammatic speakers showed more problems completing the (more frequent) main clause than the subordinate clause. In exactly the same study carried out in English, no difference was found between the two conditions (Bastiaanse & Thompson, 2003). In English, there is no difference between the surface structure position of the verb in main and subordinate clauses.…”

“…This performance may have two reasons: (1) the patients have morphological problems and, therefore, prefer the infinitive over a finite verb; (2) the patients have syntactic problems, i.e., they have problems placing the verb in second position in the main clause and therefore they prefer the infinitive at the end of the sentence. This topic has been addressed in several experiments (Bastiaanse et al, 2002;Bastiaanse & Thompson, 2003;Bastiaanse & Zonneveld, 1998). For example, Dutch agrammatic speakers were asked to complete main (4) and subordinate clauses (5) in which the subject was given.…”

“…In their spontaneous speech, they prefer ellipses with the infinitive in sentencefinal position, instead of finite verbs in second position (Bastiaanse, Hugen, Kos, & Zonneveld, 2002). Also, they are better at producing object-finite verb sequences in subordinate sentence clauses than finite verb-object sequences in main clauses (Bastiaanse & Thompson, 2003), despite the fact that the latter sequence is far more frequent in Dutch.…”

Linguistic complexity and frequency in agrammatic speech production

“…If, consequently, one assumes that linguistic complexity influences the performance of agrammatic speakers, then production of [finite verb-object] in the matrix clause is more difficult than [object-finite verb] in the embedded clause. This has been investigated by Bastiaanse and Thompson (2003 The results demonstrated that the matrix clause condition (43% correct) was more difficult than the embedded clause condition (73% correct) for the agrammatic speakers.…”

“…During the last decade, we published several studies on the influence of linguistic complexity on the performance on Dutch agrammatic speakers. The following linguistic topics were involved: verb movement (Bastiaanse & van Zonneveld, 1998;Bastiaanse & Thompson, 2003), object scrambling (Bastiaanse, Koekkoek, & van Zonneveld, 2003) and verbs with alternating transitivity (Bastiaanse & van Zonneveld, 2005). The results of these studies were interpreted as if the production of agrammatic speakers were influenced by linguistic complexity.…”