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Y Grodzinsky

Publications and source records attributed to Y Grodzinsky.

9 recordsLinked to original sources
PubMed1995

A restrictive theory of agrammatic comprehension.

In this paper I propose a new, restrictive theory of Trace-Deletion in agrammatism. This theory subsumes the Trace-Deletion Hypothesis (TDH; Grodzinsky, 1984a,b, 1986, 1990), which maintains that traces are deleted from agrammatic representations and that a cognitive strategy augments the patients' performance. This claim accounts for the pattern of loss and sparing observed in these patients' comprehension of a wide variety of syntactic constructions and is thus important for our understanding of the neural representation of syntax. Yet there are reasons for revising the account and making it more precise, stemming from both recent empirical findings and new developments in the theory of syntax. The original TDH was based on observations of agrammatic comprehension of structures containing traces resulting from either NP- or Wh-movement. Nevertheless, heads (as opposed to phrasal projections) also move and leave traces behind. Head movement (of verbs, for instance) has come to play a central role in linguistic theory (which currently postulates a wider variety of empty categories than any previous theoretical framework). Recent findings suggest that verb movement is retained in agrammatism, indicating that a sweeping claim regarding the deletion of all empty categories is too strong. This motivates the first restrictive move, resulting in a theory that picks out a restricted set of traces--only those for which deficient performance is indeed observed. All other empty categories are left intact. Trace-Deletion is tied to theta-positions. The second restrictive move is motivated by two types of surprising asymmetries that have recently been discovered for agrammatic comprehenders: First, agrammatic comprehension on passives of psychological predicates provides an error pattern that distinguishes this construction from agentive passive, indicating that the deficit is tied to the thematic properties of the predicate: Second, asymmetries have been observed in agrammatic comprehension of questions and quantifiers. These findings motivate a modification of the augmentative strategy, whose domain of application is restricted to referential NPs. Thus, the new account amounts to the claim that only traces in theta-positions are deleted, and that the strategy applies to referential NPs alone. This, I argue, not only derives all the data precisely but is also conceptually superior to any previous account of agrammatism. Finally, I discuss the consequences of this account to linguistic theory, and to theories of brain/language relations.

Brain↗
PubMed1991

There is an entity called agrammatic aphasia.

Agrammatism as a phenomenon of neuropsychological relevance has been recently attacked--from conceptual and empirical angles. This article examines the facts, as they emerge from three recent experimental studies that have concluded that agrammatism does not exist (Miceli et al., 1989; Martin et al., 1989, Badecker et al., in press), and draws the opposite conclusion: that agrammatism is of interest to students of language and that patients belonging in this clinical category also reveal uniform patterns of aberrant behavior that are of great linguistic and psycholinguistic relevance.

Aphasia↗
PubMed1989

Agrammatic comprehension of relative clauses.

Four hypotheses that attempt to account for the comprehension deficit in agrammatism are put to an empirical test. The interest in them is in that they all view the deficit as highly selective. The first, proposed by D. Caplan and C. Futter (1986, Brain and Language, 27, 117-134), argues that agrammatic patients cannot carry out normal syntactic analysis beyond the category label of each incoming lexical item and are reduced to the use of a cognitive strategy that commends assignment of thematic roles to noun phrases merely by their linear position in the string. A second, less radical hypothesis (Y. Grodzinsky, 1986a, Brain and Language, 27, 135-159), accounts for the deficit differently, by deleting a particular kind of syntactic object (trace) from the otherwise normal representation, and augmenting the resulting, underspecified representation by a strategy, whose use is quite restricted. A third account that is tested contends that agrammatic aphasics fail to comprehend perceptually complex constructions, where the metric for complexity is determined by results obtained from comprehension tests of normal listeners. The fourth account (M. F. Schwartz, M. C. Linebarger, E. M. Saffran, and D. S. Pate, 1987, Language and Cognitive Processes, 2, 85-113) argues that the thematic transparency of a construction (whether or not thematic roles are assigned directly to positions) is the best predictor of the manner by which agrammatics can handle it. An empirical test is thus constructed, both to extend the evidential basis concerning the comprehension skills of these patients and to distinguish between the accounts. Four types of relative clauses are presented to the patients, where embedding type (center vs. right) is one variable, and location of gap (subject vs. object position) is the other. The patients are tested in a sentence-picture matching paradigm. The finding, that is rather robust, is that gap location is the best predictor of agrammatic performance: the patients perform well above chance on both types of subject gap relatives, and at chance levels on object gaps. It is then shown that the Trace-Deletion Hypothesis (Grodzinsky, 1986a) is the only one among the accounts considered that is compatible with these data.

Aphasia↗
PubMed1986

Language deficits and the theory of syntax.

A new structural account of agrammatism is proposed, which analyzes the deficit in terms of one current theory of syntax. First, the motivation for accounts of this kind is given. Then, a variety of experimental findings from sentence comprehension in agrammatism are examined and accounted for in a unified way. It is shown that a minimal change in the syntactic model (achieved by imposing a special condition on a construct called trace), results in a model which accounts for all the data at hand. A number of possible objections to this proposal is then examined, and reasons are given to dismiss these objections. Also, it is shown that this proposal is preferable to other structural accounts which have been recently proposed. Finally, the empirical consequences of this account are discussed, with a special emphasis on the implications for models of language processing.

Aphasia↗
PubMedDate not supplied

Syntactic representations in agrammatic aphasia: the case of prepositions.

The focus of this paper is the syntactic deficit in agrammatic aphasia. The specific issue is the extent to which prepositions are impaired in this syndrome. This category is of particular interest because of the unique role its members play in the grammar. This is the organization of the paper: First, several descriptive generalizations are examined critically, and arguments against them are advanced. Then, a new hypothesis is formulated, stated in terms of current linguistic theory. This hypothesis views the deficit as being partial from a syntactic point of view. The relevant notion to account for the data (i.e., partitioning the impaired from preserved prepositions) is Government, a structural relation that must hold between the preposition at issue and the verb. The consequences of this hypothesis are derived, and an experiment that was conducted to test them is reported. The findings of this experiment not only support the hypothesis, but also suggest that the impairment is unique to agrammatic aphasic patients, since the performance of a control group of fluent aphasics was different. Finally, several theoretical issues are discussed in light of the findings and of the proposed description of the agrammatic deficit.

Aged↗