Patterns of comprehension performance in agrammatic Broca's aphasia: a test of the Trace Deletion Hypothesis.

Agrammatic aphasic subjects' comprehension of subject and object extracted Wh questions.

This study attempted to replicate the unusual wh question comprehension pattern of Hickok and Avrutin's (1996) subjects who showed an expected subject/object extraction asymmetry for which NP questions, but not for who questions. We also examined comprehension of what and which one questions, which are similar to who and which NP questions, respectively, and we examined passivized wh questions ...

Comprehension of the Matrix Clause in Embedded Sentences in Agrammatic Aphasia: A Test of the Trace-Deletion Hypothesis Despite the early belief that persons with agrammatic aphasia have intact language

Levels of Linguistic Representation in Broca's Aphasia: Implicitness and Referentiality of Arguments1

We investigated the interaction between different levels of linguistic representation and the syntactic deficit in Broca’s aphasia. We varied a semantic property of arguments referentiality, and a phonetic property implicitness, and crossed them with the constructions that expose the syntactic deficit in agrammatic Broca’s aphasia. Our results show that referentiality and implicitness of argume...

Agrammatic Broca's aphasia is not associated with a single pattern of comprehension performance.

One influential hypothesis posits that the brain regions implicated in Broca's aphasia are responsible for specific syntactic operations that are necessary for the comprehension and production of sentences (Grodzinsky, 1986, 1990, in press). The empirical basis of this hypothesis is the claim that Broca's aphasics have no difficulty understanding sentences in the active voice (and other "canoni...

Agrammatic comprehension of OVS and OSV structures in Hebrew

This commentary brings further support for the trace deletion hypothesis from a new study of OVS and OSV sentences in Hebrew, which are active constructions that involve object movement but no change in morphology. The results show that the comprehension of these constructions in Broca’s aphasia is impaired, and the performance is at chance level, as predicted by the TDH.