This commentary brings further support for the trace deletion hypothesis from a new study of OVS and OSV sentences in Hebrew, which are active constructions that involve object movement but no change in morphology. The results show that the comprehension of these constructions in Broca’s aphasia is impaired, and the performance is at chance level, as predicted by the TDH.

We studied 26 patients in a randomized, placebo-controlled, double-blind parallel trial to evaluate the efficacy and safety of donepezil in chronic poststroke aphasia. Donepezil (10 mg/day) improved aphasia severity at endpoint (week 16) relative to placebo (p = 0.037).

In an analysis of the assumptions behind the use of patient groupings in neurolinguistic and cognitive neuropsychological research (Badecker & Caramazza, 1985), we have argued that clinical categories in general, and agrammatism in particular, allow no valid means for reasoning from patterns of impaired performance to an understanding of the processing mechanisms underlying normal linguistic pe...

This study tested the production of tensed finite verbs and participles referring to the past and future in agrammatic speakers of Turkish. The agrammatic speakers did not make more time reference errors in tensed verbs than in participles. This is interesting because tense in general cannot therefore be the main problem, since time reference for participles lacking tense inflection is as diffi...

This study focuses on the production of sentences in which objects have been moved without a change in the order of the thematic roles. In Dutch, the basic word order is subject-adverb-object-verb. The object can be moved over the adverb; this is called object scrambling. The difference between the two word orders is pragmatic in nature: in the basic word order the focus is on the object, in th...

Sentence comprehension requires processing of argument structure information associated with verbs, i.e. the number and type of arguments that they select. Many individuals with agrammatic aphasia show impaired production of verbs with greater argument structure density. The extent to which these participants also show argument structure deficits during comprehension, however, is unclear. Some ...

Broca’s agrammatic aphasia entails a syntactic deficit both in sentence comprehension and in sentence production. This chapter describes the intriguing pattern of deficits in speech production, and shows that this type of inquiry interacts with linguistic theory as well as with knowledge about brain-language relations. The syntactic tree, a syntactic construct that has originally been suggested...

PURPOSE The typicality treatment approach on improving naming was investigated within 2 inanimate categories (furniture and clothing) using a single-subject experimental design across participants and behaviors in 5 patients with aphasia. METHOD Participants received a semantic feature treatment to improve naming of either typical or atypical items within semantic categories, whereas generali...

We investigated the hypothesis that inhibition is impaired in a group of Broca’s aphasics relative to a group of language-unimpaired controls. We focused on distractor interference and spatial negative priming (NP) effects, which involve the ability to inhibit (i) distracting information and (ii) irrelevant information that exerts its effect from one trial to the next, respectively. The results...

Word-retrieval treatment studies in aphasia have reported the greatest influences on picture naming for trained words. To increase treatment effects to untrained words and sentence contexts, we investigated a sentence-reading treatment hierarchy that moves from errorless to generative production of sentences incorporating target nouns and verbs. In an individual with nonfluent aphasia, treatmen...