Syntactic trees, or phrase markers, have originally been suggested as a representation of syntax in the mind based on purely linguistic grounds. In this paper, the psychological reality of syntactic trees and hierarchical ordering is explored from another perspective--that of the neuropsychology of language breakdown. The study reported here examined several syntactic domains that rely on diffe...

The present study applies single-subject experimental design to examine (a) the acquisition and generalization of complex sentence production in agrammatism using Linguistic Specific Treatment (LST) and (b) the utility of syntactic theory in guiding hypotheses of treatment effects. LST trains construction and production of complex sentence structures. Four sentence types were selected for study...

BACKGROUND: Classical aphasiology, based on the study of stroke sequelae, fuses speech fluency and grammatical ability. Nonfluent (Broca's) aphasia often is accompanied by agrammatism; whereas in the fluent aphasias grammatical deficits are not typical. The assumption that a similar relationship exists in primary progressive aphasia (PPA) has led to the dichotomization of this syndrome into flu...

Unlike comprehension of declarative sentences, comprehension of wh-questions in agrammatic aphasia is a neglected research topic. Not all whquestions are understood equally well yet the nature of this difficulty has received sparse attention in the literature. According to one view (Avrutin 2000), which follows Pesetsky's (1987) well-known distinction of whquestions, questions beginning with wh...

The ability of an agrammatic patient to construct structural syntactic and interpretative representations on-line was tested in two experiments. The first focused on global representations spanning an entire utterance, while the second examined lexical syntactic and semantic constraints on verb-argument relations. An off-line version of the second experiment was also carried out. There were two...