Syntax Commons^™

Grammatical Parallelism In Aphasia: A Lesion-Symptom Mapping Study, William Matchin, Dirk B. Den Ouden, Alexandra Basilakos, Brielle Caserta Stark, Julius Fridriksson, Gregory Hickok

Communication Sciences and Disorders Faculty Articles and Research

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Sentence structure, or syntax, is potentially a uniquely creative aspect of the human mind. Neuropsychological experiments in the 1970s suggested parallel syntactic production and comprehension deficits in agrammatic Broca’s aphasia, thought to result from damage to syntactic mechanisms in Broca’s area in the left frontal lobe. This hypothesis was sometimes termed overarching agrammatism, converging with developments in linguistic theory concerning central syntactic mechanisms supporting language production and comprehension. However, the evidence supporting an association among receptive syntactic deficits, expressive agrammatism, and damage to frontal cortex is equivocal. In addition, the relationship among a distinct grammatical production deficit in aphasia, …

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Different Neural Mechanisms For Causal Processing In Language And Perception: An Fmri Study, Brett B. Bankson, Dirk B. Den Ouden

Communication Sciences and Disorders Faculty Articles and Research

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Information that is used to establish and evaluate causal relationships between objects and events can be gleaned from many sources, especially those that rely on language and perception. For example, sentences with a verb structure using change of state verbs such as “to break” or “to freeze” imply sequential events that express understood causal relationships. At this time, little research has examined the neural correlates of causal verb processing or has compared them to the more well researched brain activity involved in perceptual causal processing. This study investigated the extent to which the evaluation of causal verbs and causal image …

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Predicate Structures, Gesture, And Simultaneity In The Representation Of Action In British Sign Language: Evidence From Deaf Children And Adults, Kearsy Cormier, Sandra Smith, Zed Sehyr

Communication Sciences and Disorders Faculty Articles and Research

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British Sign Language (BSL) signers use a variety of structures, such as constructed action (CA), depicting constructions (DCs), or lexical verbs, to represent action and other verbal meanings. This study examines the use of these verbal predicate structures and their gestural counterparts, both separately and simultaneously, in narratives by deaf children with various levels of exposure to BSL (ages 5;1 to 7;5) and deaf adult native BSL signers. Results reveal that all groups used the same types of predicative structures, including children with minimal BSL exposure. However, adults used CA, DCs, and/or lexical signs simultaneously more frequently than children. These …

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Training Verb Argument Structure Production In Agrammatic Aphasia: Behavioral And Neural Recovery Patterns, Cynthia K. Thompson, Ellyn A. Riley, Dirk B. Den Ouden, Aya Meltzer-Asscher, Sladjana Lukic

Communication Sciences and Disorders Faculty Articles and Research

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Introduction

Neuroimaging and lesion studies indicate a left hemisphere network for verb and verb argument structure processing, involving both frontal and temporoparietal brain regions. Although their verb comprehension is generally unimpaired, it is well known that individuals with agrammatic aphasia often present with verb production deficits, characterized by an argument structure complexity hierarchy, indicating faulty access to argument structure representations for production and integration into syntactic contexts. Recovery of verb processing in agrammatism, however, has received little attention and no studies have examined the neural mechanisms associated with improved verb and argument structure processing. In the present study we trained …

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The Electrophysiological Manifestation Of Dutch Verb Second Violations, Dirk B. Den Ouden, Roelien Bastiaanse

Communication Sciences and Disorders Faculty Articles and Research

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We investigated the processing of violations of the verb position in Dutch, in a group of healthy subjects, by measuring event-related potentials (ERPs) through electroencephalography (EEG). In Dutch, the base position of the verb is clause final, but in matrix clauses, the finite verb is in second position, a construction known as Verb Second. In embedded clauses, the finite verb remains in its clause-final base position. The results show that ungrammatical placement of finite verbs in second position in embedded clauses yields a P600 response, which suggests that the parser treats this type of violation as a clear syntactic …

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