Agrammatism and the Psychological Reality of the Syntactic Tree (2001)
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@MISC{Friedmann01agrammatismand,
author = {Na'ama Friedmann},
title = {Agrammatism and the Psychological Reality of the Syntactic Tree},
year = {2001}
}
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Abstract
... 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 different nodes in the tree---tense and agreement verb inflection, subordinations, interrogatives, and verb movement, through a study of 14 Hebrew- and Palestinian Arabic-speaking agrammatic aphasics and perusal of the cross-linguistic literature. The results show that the impairment in agrammatic production is highly selective and lends itself to characterization in terms of a deficit in the syntactic tree. The complex pattern of dissociations follows from one underlying deficit---the inaccessibility of high nodes of the syntactic tree to agrammatic speakers. Structures that relate to high nodes of the tree are impaired, while "lower" structures are spared.
