It is often assumed that language is supported by domain-specific neural mechanisms, in part based on neuropsychological data from aphasia. If, however, language relies on domain-general mechanisms, it would be expected that deficits in non-linguistic cognitive processing should co-occur with aphasia. In this paper, we report a study of sequential learning by agrammatic aphasic patients and con...

In this paper we present a detailed computational model of agrammatic aphasia that is consistent with the Slow Syntax Hypothesis. In particular, our model postulates that the cause of the slowing of syntax processing is a deficit in overcoming irrelevant active lexical cues. This causes interference in retrieval of lexical and semantic information, which in turn causes a misrepresentation of se...

Many types of variation can be found in agrammatic aphasia. Drai and Grodzinsky (in press) presented a convincing account for variations between syntactic structures, between individuals and across languages. However, there is one source of variation that is not accounted for by their approach: the variation that exists within individuals with agrammatism between different structures that are d...

This study presents results from sentence-completion and grammaticality-judgment tasks with 7 German-speaking agrammatic aphasics and 7 age-matched control subjects examining tense and subject-verb agreement marking. For both experimental tasks, we found that the aphasics achieved high correctness scores for agreement, while tense marking was severely impaired. To account for the observed tense...

This study presents results from sentence-completion and grammaticality-judgement tasks with seven German-speaking agrammatic aphasics and seven age-matched control subjects examining verb finiteness marking and verb-second (V2) placement. The patients were found to be selectively impaired in tense marking in the face of preserved mood and agreement marking. Moreover, our results revealed that ...

Individuals with agrammatic aphasia and children with syntactic SLI (Specific Language Impairment) have difficulties understanding object relative clauses, difficulties that have been ascribed to a deficit in phrasal movement. The aim of the current study was to explore the nature of this deficit in movement in the two populations, and to examine whether the underlying deficit in the two popula...