Is it necessary to posit separate, explicit distinctions between representations in order to account for dissociations between consonant and vowel processing? We argue that a cognitive model of speech production based on cumulative lower-level properties is not only sufficient but more parsimonious in accounting for aphasic and dysgraphic patient…

We reanalyzed the data in Drai and Grodzinksy (2005), considering individual patients' responses to different sentence types to be non-independent events. The analyses revealed effects of two of the three factors identified by Drai and Grodzinsky-constituent movement and passive mood. The result is inconsistent with the trace deletion hypothesis;…

Patients with conduction aphasia have been characterized as having a short-term memory deficit that leads to relative difficulty on span and repetition tasks. It has also been observed that these same patients often get the gist of what is said to them, even if they are unable to repeat the information verbatim. To study this phenomenon…

Investigations of language processing in aphasia have increasingly implicated performance factors such as slowed activation and/or rapid decay of linguistic information. This approach is supported by studies utilizing a communication system ("SentenceShaper"[TM]) which functions as a "processing prosthesis." The system may reduce the impact of…

This paper investigates stress assignment in Dutch aphasic patients in non-word repetition, as well as in real-word and non-word reading. Performance on the non-word reading task was similar for the aphasic patients and the control group, as mainly regular stress was assigned to the targets. However, there were group differences on the real-word…

Bilateral vascular thalamic lesions are rare. Although a variety of neurobehavioral manifestations have been described, the literature is less documented with regard to accompanying linguistic disturbances. This article presents an in-depth neurolinguistic analysis of the language symptoms of a patient who incurred bilateral paramedian ischemic…

In this paper, we investigate the ability of Dutch agrammatic Broca's and Wernicke's aphasics to assign reference to possessive pronouns in elided VP constructions. The assumption is that the comprehension problems in these two populations have different sources that are revealed in distinct patterns of responses. The focus is primarily on the…

Behavioral variation in Broca's aphasia has been characterized as boundless, calling into question the validity of the syndrome-based schema and related diagnostic methods of acquired language disorders. More generally, this putative variability has cast serious doubts on the feasibility of localizing linguistic operations in cortex. We present a…

This study examines the comprehension patterns of various sentence types by Mandarin-speaking aphasic patients and evaluates the validity of the predictions from the Trace-Deletion Hypothesis (TDH) and the Double Dependency Hypothesis (DDH). Like English, the canonical word order in Mandarin is SVO, but the two languages differ in that the head…

The processing of words and pictures representing actions and objects was tested in 21 aphasic patients and 20 healthy controls across three word production tasks: picture-naming (PN), single word reading (WR) and word repetition (WRP). Analysis (1) targeted task and lexical category (noun-verb), revealing worse performance on PN and verb items…

Aphasic patients with reading impairments frequently substitute incorrect real words for target words when reading aloud. Many of these word substitutions have substantial orthographic overlap with their targets and are classified as ''visual errors'' (i.e., sharing 50% of targets' letters in the same relative position). Fifteen chronic aphasic…

Functional imaging studies with nonfluent aphasia patients have observed ''over-activation'' in right (R) language homologues. This may represent a maladaptive strategy; suppression may result in language improvement. We applied slow, 1 Hz repetitive transcranial magnetic stimulation (rTMS) to an anterior portion of R Broca's homologue daily, for…

Individuals with agrammatic aphasia may have difficulty with verb production in comparison to nouns. Additionally, they may have greater difficulty producing verbs that have fewer semantic components (i.e., are semantically "light") compared to verbs that have greater semantic weight. A connectionist verb-production model proposed by Gordon and…

Neurolinguistic research has been engaged in evaluating models of language using measures from brain structure and function, and/or in investigating brain structure and function with respect to language representation using proposed models of language. While the aphasiological strategy, which classifies aphasias based on performance modality and a…

Hierarchical models of agrammatism propose that sentence production deficits can be accounted for in terms of clausal syntactic structure [Friedmann, N., & Grodzinsky, Y. (1997). "Tense and agreement in agrammatic production: Pruning the syntactic tree." "Brain and Language, 56", 397-425; Hagiwara, H. (1995). "The breakdown of functional…