Biomedical subjects

L Lonzi

Publications and source records attributed to L Lonzi.

3 recordsLinked to original sources

PubMed1994

Semantic vs. syntactic subject: a comprehension test based on control constructions.

The test presented here is made of 32 + 32 complex sentences that are submitted with two different tasks: one to prove comprehension of the event denoted by their embedded clause and the other to prove the corret interpretation of this clause, whose null subject is syntactically controlled. The tasks have been administered to four stabilized aphasic patients of medium severity to see whether their comprehension could be considered asyntactic with respect to the specific Control module of Universal Grammar (Chomsky, 1981).

Adult↗

PubMed1993

Relevance of adverb distribution for the analysis of sentence representation in agrammatic patients.

In this study, it is shown that functional categories are present in agrammatic grammar. Specifically, the verb-adverb order is investigated in three agrammatic patients by means of a constituent ordering task. It is shown that when the verb is in a nonfinite form, it either precedes or follows the specifier-like adverb (both positions are correct), but when the verb is finite, the adverb always follows it (which is the only possible order). The conclusions are that (i) a functional category (namely Inflection), which is responsible for the relative order verb-adverb (of the relevant class), must exist in agrammatic grammar, and (ii) agrammatic aphasia cannot be described as a syntactic impairment involving basic sentence structure.

Adolescent↗

PubMed1983

Syntactic component in language responsible cognitive structure: neurological evidence.

From the results of a broad ranging comprehension test, a hierarchy of difficulty emerged that is shared by the two groups of aphasics (Broca's and Wernicke's aphasics) and by the control group of normal subjects. The parallelism has been interpreted as a confirmation of the hypothesis that syntactic competence is not inaccessible either in Wernicke's or in Broca's aphasia. The Minimal Distance Principle, as a relevant recognition principle, has been studied, and although not confirmed by the scores has been brought to the fore both by the correlations between the variables under study and by the correlations with the concomitant variables of age and level of education.

Adult↗