PURPOSE Grammatical encoding (GE) is impaired in agrammatic aphasia; however, the nature of such deficits remains unclear. We examined grammatical planning units during real-time sentence production in speakers with agrammatic aphasia and control speakers, testing two competing models of GE. We queried whether speakers with agrammatic aphasia produce sentences word by word without advanced plan...

In a majority of languages, the time of an event is expressed by marking tense on the verb. There is substantial evidence that the production of verb tense in sentences is more severely impaired than other functional categories in persons with agrammatic aphasia. The underlying source of this verb tense impairment is less clear, particularly in terms of the relative contribution of conceptual-s...

Since Pollock’s 1989 paper, much linguistic argumentation has been mounted in favor of the split inflection hypothesis. This paper presents evidence from a neuropsychological angle in support of this hypothesis. Given that agrammatic aphasic patients demonstrate a selective deficit in the syntactic domain, it is tempting to look for impairment patterns that pertain to issues debated in current ...

This review summarizes clinical and imaging features associated with primary progressive aphasia (PPA). We investigate the hypothesis that these patients can be divided into subgroups of progressive non-fluent aphasia (PNFA) and semantic dementia (SD), based on their linguistic profiles and related imaging studies, and examine whether each of these major subgroups can be further subdivided. We ...

Individuals with agrammatic aphasia fail to interpret reversible movement-derived sentences. According to the Trace Deletion Hypothesis, this impairment in comprehension results from the deletion of traces of phrasal movement. In order to test this hypothesis, we compared object relatives with a trace to identical object relatives that are not derived by syntactic movement and do not include a ...

The present study presents results from picture description, sentence completion and grammaticality judgment tasks with four MA-speaking Broca’s aphasic subjects and four age, sex, and education matched control subjects investigating tense and agreement markers. Specifically, the study explores tense and agreement disassociation in agrammatic speakers of Moroccan Arabic as predicted by the Tree...

Although previous studies of Gillespie syndrome have systematically reported a generalized delay of cognitive development (mental retardation or oligophrenia), psychometric data to substantiate this view are strikingly absent. In the present study two first degree relatives (mother and daughter) with Gillespie syndrome were neuropsychologically investigated. Aside from a marked asymmetry in the...

The left posterior inferior frontal cortex (IFC) is important for syntactic processing, and has been shown in many functional imaging studies to be differentially recruited for the processing of syntactically complex sentences relative to simpler ones. In the nonfluent variant of primary progressive aphasia (PPA), degeneration of the posterior IFC is associated with expressive and receptive agr...

Anatomical, physiological and functional neuroimaging studies suggest that the cerebellum participates in the organization of higher order function, but there are very few descriptions of clinically relevant cases that address this possibility. We performed neurological examinations, bedside mental state tests, neuropsychological studies and anatomical neuroimaging on 20 patients with diseases ...

In an fMRI experiment, subjects saw a written noun and made three distinct decisions in separate sessions: Is its grammatical gender masculine or feminine (grammatical feature task)? Is it an animal or an artifact (semantic task)? Does it contain a /tch/ or a /k/ sound (phonological task)? Relative to the other experimental conditions, the grammatical feature task activated areas of the left mi...