Electrophysiological responses to argument structure violations in healthy adults and individuals with nonfluent aphasia

Agrammatic individuals show impaired production of verbs with complex argument structure. Whether these participants show argument structure deficits during comprehension, however, is unclear. The present study investigated this issue by examining electrophysiological responses to argument structure violations in agrammatic individuals and healthy adults. Results showed that unlike control participants, who evinced a negative effect followed by a positive shift (N400-P600) in response to argument structure violations, individuals with agrammatic aphasia showed a P600 response only. This suggests impaired real time processing of the thematic requirements of verbs

Word-finding pauses in primary progressive aphasia (PPA): Effects of lexical category

Word-finding pauses are common in logopenic primary progressive aphasia (PPA-L). However, no previous research investigated the distribution of word-finding pauses in PPA or their specificity to PPA-L. We coded pauses preceding nouns and verbs in narrative speech samples from participants with PPA-L, agrammatic (PPA-G) and semantic PPA (PPA-S), and controls, hypothesizing that frequent word-finding pauses, if present, should match previously-observed lexical category deficits (noun deficits in PPA-L and PPA-S; verb deficits in PPA-G).The PPA-L group paused more frequently before nouns than verbs, whereas no other group exhibited lexical category effects, suggesting that frequent word-finding pauses are specific to PPA-L

The effects of syntactic pressures and pragmatic considerations on predictive dependency formation

During sentence processing, comprehenders form predictions regarding the unfolding of the sentence. The current study is designed to tease apart the role of syntactic motivations, pragmatic considerations and contextual prediction in active dependency formation. Using both production and comprehension measures, we observe prediction for the resolution of a long-distance dependency, even in the absence of syntactic-licensing pressures. However, we find that predictive dependency formation is observed earlier when it is motivated by syntactic pressures. This suggests that the syntax plays a crucial role in this predictive process, even after controlling for pragmatic motivations. We propose that active dependency formation is faster or more binding in syntactically-motivated predictions (i.e. filler-gap dependencies) relative to pragmatically-motivated ones

Noisy is better than rare: Comprehenders compromise subject-verb agreement to form more probable linguistic structures

Production and perception errors are common in everyday language use. Recent studies suggest that in order to overcome the flawed speech signal, comprehenders engage in rational noisy-channel processing, which can pull their interpretation towards more probable “near-neighbor” analyses, based on the assumption that an error may have occurred in the transmission of the sentence. We investigate this type of processing using subject/object relative clause ambiguity in Hebrew. In four self-paced reading experiments and a sentence completion experiment, we find that during online processing, readers apply elaborate knowledge regarding the distribution of structures in the language, and that they are willing to compromise subject-verb agreement to refrain from (grammatical but) highly improbable structures. The results suggest that the prior probability of alternative analyses modulates the interpretation of agreement

The forgotten grammatical category: Adjective use in agrammatic aphasia

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