ArticlePDF Available

Agentive versus Non-agentive Passives in Catalan Agrammatism

December 2010
Procedia - Social and Behavioral Sciences 6:200–201

DOI:10.1016/j.sbspro.2010.08.100

License
CC BY-NC-ND 3.0

Authors:

Anna Gavarró

Autonomous University of Barcelona

Content uploaded by Anna Gavarró

Content may be subject to copyright.

Available via license: CC BY-NC-ND 3.0

Content may be subject to copyright.

doi:10.1016/j.sbspro.2010.08.100

Procedia Social and Behavioral Sciences 6 (2010) 200–201

vailable online at www.sciencedirect.com

 

!"#!$!

%&'(') *"+



 





   

,,- . %/011'"+2"0"+3

    "           4      ,  +" "+ 

!"!'  !           115  "   ,-.        "     "

2"         ! 0        

 6  " '%/0   - " ! 7  !    

+  , -.- "!  $'    "0!

"!8 !!

 

7  "! 0  '! !9:;'   !8<' !'  !

 4      "! 

=+4 '  !        

 >?     

,+ ++ 

>"+31'9'+ "  0 "

"       !     @   +     '  "! 

       +       +3   " +3' 2"+

- "!'

A>B?ABAB,-.

+A>B?AB

%>#,%>#, "!

#!"+3'+"+- " !"++

'9"!0  ""+"!

9A>B?AB,-.

+A>B? "!

* Corresponding author.

E-mail address: anna.gavarro@uab.cat .

Anna Gavarró and Josep Romeu / Procedia Social and Behavioral Sciences 6 (2010) 200–201 201

%>#,



,", + ++ !

0 .' "'     " 8 ! 

         @    ,  -       +      

! ' $2"" C9'D  ' +"     + - "  ! +

           "     2"   !  !     

!  +

,"  ,-.' +"   "+   - "!E"' 

 ' +"       !" "   - "  !

0"

  

' '  $ . ') 'F G!115=,   +"+38 

!4 :';<;:H

%/0' I11FJ,'$+!

%/0'I =,"!  @K!"!"" 44    

9';

A Computational Evaluation of Sentence Processing Deficits in Aphasia

Article

Full-text available

May 2015
COGNITIVE SCI

Individuals with agrammatic Broca's aphasia experience difficulty when processing reversible non-canonical sentences. Different accounts have been proposed to explain this phenomenon. The Trace Deletion account (Grodzinsky, 1995, 2000, 2006) attributes this deficit to an impairment in syntactic representations, whereas others (e.g., Caplan, Waters, Dede, Michaud, & Reddy, 2007; Haarmann, Just, & Carpenter, 1997) propose that the underlying structural representations are unimpaired, but sentence comprehension is affected by processing deficits, such as slow lexical activation, reduction in memory resources, slowed processing and/or intermittent deficiency, among others. We test the claims of two processing accounts, slowed processing and intermittent deficiency, and two versions of the Trace Deletion Hypothesis (TDH), in a computational framework for sentence processing (Lewis & Vasishth, 2005) implemented in ACT-R (Anderson, Byrne, Douglass, Lebiere, & Qin, 2004). The assumption of slowed processing is operationalized as slow procedural memory, so that each processing action is performed slower than normal, and intermittent deficiency as extra noise in the procedural memory, so that the parsing steps are more noisy than normal. We operationalize the TDH as an absence of trace information in the parse tree. To test the predictions of the models implementing these theories, we use the data from a German sentence-picture matching study reported in Hanne, Sekerina, Vasishth, Burchert, and De Bleser (2011). The data consist of offline (sentence-picture matching accuracies and response times) and online (eye fixation proportions) measures. From among the models considered, the model assuming that both slowed processing and intermittent deficiency are present emerges as the best model of sentence processing difficulty in aphasia. The modeling of individual differences suggests that, if we assume that patients have both slowed processing and intermittent deficiency, they have them in differing degrees. © 2015 Cognitive Science Society, Inc.

Non-fluent aphasia in Ibero-Romance: A review of morphosyntactic deficits

Article

Full-text available

Sep 2014

Background: Castilian-Spanish, Catalan, Galician, and European Portuguese are the most widely spoken languages of the Ibero-Romance group. An increasing number of authors have addressed the impact of aphasia on the morphosyntax of these varieties. However, accurate linguistic characterisations are scarce and the different sources of data have not been yet compiled.Aims: To stimulate state-of-the-art research, we provided a comprehensive summary of morphosyntactic aspects of Ibero-Romance and a review of how these are affected in non-fluent aphasia. The topics we dealt with are the use of verb argument structure and morphology, sentential negation and word order, definite articles, personal and reflexive pronouns, passives, topicalised constructions, questions, and relative clauses.Methods & Procedures: An exhaustive fieldwork and search of PubMed, Web of Science, and Medline records were performed to retrieve studies focused on morphosyntactic issues concerning the Ibero-Romance varieties. A total of 27 studies produced by 46 authors of varying background emerged. We did not review studies of category-specific deficits and aspects related to bilingual aphasia, although we assume that most speakers of Galician and Catalan are bilingual. Studies of spontaneous speech were included when no controlled experimental tasks were available.Outcomes & Results: The morphosyntactic commonalities of Ibero-Romance have been tackled from different theoretical perspectives. There exist asymmetries in findings which we explain with the use of different tasks (and task complexity) and individual differences between participants.Conclusions: Discourse-linking factors as well as deviations from the canonical pattern are recurrent answers to these asymmetries. A comprehensive theory of impairments in non-fluent aphasia integrating relevant aspects of both structural and processing accounts seems necessary.

A computational evaluation of representational and processing accounts of aphasia

Article

Full-text available

Jan 2015

Individuals with agrammatic Broca's aphasia perform at chance level when processing reversible non-canonical sentences. Representational accounts (e.g., Grodzinsky, 1995, 2000, 2006) attribute this deficit to an impairment in syntactic representations. Processing accounts (e.g., Haarmann, Just, & Carpenter, 1997; Caplan, Waters, Dede, Michaud, & Reddy, 2007), on the other hand, propose that the underlying structural representations are unim-paired, but sentence comprehension is affected by processing deficits such as slow lexical activation, reduction in memory resources, slowed processing and intermittent deficiency among others. We test the claims of two pro-cessing accounts, slowed processing and intermittent deficiency, and a repre-sentational account, the Trace Deletion Hypothesis (Grodzinsky, 2000), in a computational framework for sentence processing (Lewis & Vasishth, 2005) implemented in ACT-R (Anderson, Byrne, Douglass, Lebiere, & Qin, 2004). We operationalize the assumption of slowed processing as slow procedural memory, so that each processing action is performed slower than normal, and intermittent deficiency as extra noise in the procedural memory, so that the parsing process is more noisy than normal. We operationalize the Trace Deletion Hypothesis as an absence of trace information in the parse tree. To test the predictions of the models implementing these theories, we use the data from a German sentence-picture matching study reported in Hanne, Sekerina, Vasishth, Burchert, and De Bleser (2011). The data consists of offline (sentence-picture matching accuracies and response times) and online (eye fixation proportions) measures. The model that assumes both process-ing deficits emerges as the best model of offline and online sentence process-ing in aphasia. This model also suggests that individual patients may have the two processing deficits in differing degrees. The models implementing the representational deficit fail to capture crucial patterns in the data.

Evaluating the Trace Deletion Hypothesis and Processing Deficit Accounts: A Computational Modeling Approach

Article

Full-text available

Oct 2013

Long and short passives in Catalan and Spanish

Article

Full-text available

Oct 2013

Background: Poor comprehension of verbal passives in agrammatism is well attested; however, short passives have been seldom investigated, only for some Germanic languages.Aims: Here we investigate long and short passives in two Romance languages, Catalan and Spanish and, consider the implications of our results for our understanding of comprehension deficits in Broca's aphasia and for the theoretical construal of passive sentences. We test the hypothesis that long and short passives are equally misunderstood because their underlying structures are more similar than their surface form may indicate.Methods: To that effect, we designed a truth-value judgement task and tested fourteen patients with Broca's aphasia, seven speakers per language.Results: We show that long and short passives are equally miscomprehended, consistently across the two languages and speakers: patients performed at chance with both types of passives, while they performed above chance with active sentences.Conclusion: The results for Romance are in line with those previously found for English (the only formerly investigated Germanic language with the same word order as Spanish and Catalan). The indistinguishable performance with long and short passives provides an argument to be added to those in the linguistic literature for the analysis of short passives as involving a covert external argument. It also provides an argument for structural accounts over processing accounts of the comprehension deficit of Broca's aphasia.

The Derivation of Postverbal Subjects: Evidence from Agrammatic Aphasia

Article

Jan 1996

The study reported in this paper appeals to data from agrammatic aphasia to confront two competing analyses of the derivation of postverbal subjects in languages which permit free inversion. In one of the analyses, postverbal subjects are derived by movement, while in the other, they are base-generated in situ. According to a prominent hypothesis which attempts to explain the pattern of sparing and loss in agrammatism in terms of current linguistic theory, the only syntactic deficit is the loss of trace. This movement-derived ‘trace-deletion’ hypothesis has been successful in predicting what agrammatics can and cannot comprehend. In the present study, these predictions are first of all confirmed for Spanish-speaking agrammatics on a range of structures for which predictions are identical under both movement and non-movement analyses. These structures serve as a control, establishing that the claims of the trace-deletion hypothesis are valid. They pave the way for the critical test of the VS passive, the only structure for which the competing analyses yield different predictions. Agrammatic data on the VS passive are used to adjudicate between the competing analyses. Since agrammatic subjects perform randomly on VS passives, it is concluded that the postverbal subject is derived by movement.

The neurology of syntax: Language use without Broca's area

Article

Mar 2000

Yosef Grodzinsky

A new view of the functional role of the left anterior cortex in language use is proposed. The experimental record indicates that most human linguistic abilities are not localized in this region. In particular, most of syntax (long thought to be there) is not located in Broca's area and its vicinity (operculum, insula, and subjacent white matter). This cerebral region, implicated in Broca's aphasia, does have a role in syntactic processing, but a highly specific one: It is the neural home to receptive mechanisms involved in the computation of the relation between transformationally moved phrasal constituents and their extraction sites (in line with the Trace-Deletion Hypothesis). It is also involved in the construction of higher parts of the syntactic tree in speech production. By contrast, basic combinatorial capacities necessary for language processing--for example, structure-building operations, lexical insertion--are not supported by the neural tissue of this cerebral region, nor is lexical or combinatorial semantics. The dense body of empirical evidence supporting this restrictive view comes mainly from several angles on lesion studies of syntax in agrammatic Broca's aphasia. Five empirical arguments are presented: experiments in sentence comprehension, cross-linguistic considerations (where aphasia findings from several language types are pooled and scrutinized comparatively), grammaticality and plausibility judgments, real-time processing of complex sentences, and rehabilitation. Also discussed are recent results from functional neuroimaging and from structured observations on speech production of Broca's aphasics. Syntactic abilities are nonetheless distinct from other cognitive skills and are represented entirely and exclusively in the left cerebral hemisphere. Although more widespread in the left hemisphere than previously thought, they are clearly distinct from other human combinatorial and intellectual abilities. The neurological record (based on functional imaging, split-brain and right-hemisphere-damaged patients, as well as patients suffering from a breakdown of mathematical skills) indicates that language is a distinct, modularly organized neurological entity. Combinatorial aspects of the language faculty reside in the human left cerebral hemisphere, but only the transformational component (or algorithms that implement it in use) is located in and around Broca's area.

The neurology of syntax

Y. Grodzinsky
Y. Grodzinsky

Agentive versus Non-agentive Passives in Catalan Agrammatism

Recommended publications

Single OTRA Based Immittance Simulator and its Application

Photoluminescence study on the effects of the surface of CdTe by surface passivation

The Nature of the Passive Film on Iron III . The Chemi‐Conductor Model and Further Supporting Eviden...

Regulierung im Verkehrssektor: am Wichtigsten ist es, Vertrauen zu schaffen (La régulation dans le s...