Time reference in Indo-European languages is marked on the verb. With tensed verb forms, the speaker can refer to the past (wrote, has written), present (writes, is writing) or future (will write). Reference to the past through verb morphology has been shown to be particularly vulnerable in agrammatic aphasia and both agrammatic and…

Retrieving a word in a sentence requires speakers to overcome syntagmatic, as well as paradigmatic interference. When accessing "cat" in "The cat chased the string", not only are similar competitors such as "dog" and "cap" activated, but also other words in the planned sentence, such as "chase" and "string". We hypothesise that both types of…

In 1906, Pierre Marie triggered a heated controversy and an exchange of articles with Jules Dejerine over the localization of language functions in the human brain. The debate spread internationally. One of the timeliest responses, that appeared in print 1 month after Marie's paper, came from Christofredo Jakob, a Bavarian-born neuropathologist…

In a series of experiments, the effect of white noise distortion and talker variation on lexical access in normal and Broca's aphasic participants was examined using an auditory lexical decision paradigm. Masking the prime stimulus in white noise resulted in reduced semantic priming for both groups, indicating that lexical access is degraded by…

B. Rapp and M. Goldrick (2000) claimed that the lexical and mixed error biases in picture naming by aphasic and nonaphasic speakers argue against models that assume a feedforward-only relationship between lexical items and their sounds in spoken word production. The author contests this claim by showing that a feedforward-only model like WEAVER++…

The aim of this study is to develop a partial theory of phonological paraphasias which has some cross-syndrome and cross-linguistic validity. It is based on the distinction between content and structural units and emphasizes the role of the latter. The notion of structure holds the key to an understanding of the differences among the following…

Processing abilities in aphasia, and the nature of processing breakdowns, were the focuses of this investigation. Individuals with either fluent or nonfluent aphasia, plus a control group, participated in a cross-modal lexical priming task designed to elicit priming effects when activation of inference interpretations occurred. Comprehension of…

This paper offers evidence for the Isomorphic Mapping Hypothesis, which holds that individuals with agrammatic aphasia tend to have difficulty comprehending sentences in which the order of NPs is not aligned with the structure of the corresponding event. We begin by identifying a set of constructions in English and Korean for which the IMH makes…

The Wernicke-Lichtheim-Geschwind (WLG) theory of the neurobiological basis of language is of great historical importance, and it continues to exert a substantial influence on most contemporary theories of language in spite of its widely recognized limitations. Here, we suggest that neurobiologically grounded computational models based on the WLG…

An aphasic patient is described as one whose poor repetition of sentences and of lists of words contrasts with his or her surprisingly good performance on immediate problem recognition tasks. This result is interpreted as suggesting a distinction between phonological input and output buffers. (41 references) (Author/LB)

This book examines how the brain enables people to speak creatively and build up an understanding of language. The discussion looks at the linguistic and neuro-anatomical underpinnings of language and considers how language skills can systematically break down in individuals with different types of brain damage. By studying children with language…