Research to-date has not successfully demonstrated consistent neural distinctions for different types of ambiguity or explored the effect of grammatical class on semantic selection. We conducted a relatedness judgment task using event-related functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to further explore these topics. Participants judged…

While grammatical aspects of language are preserved, executive deficits are prominent in Lewy body spectrum disorder (LBSD), including Parkinson's disease (PD), Parkinson's dementia (PDD) and dementia with Lewy bodies (DLB). We examined executive control during sentence processing in LBSD by assessing temporary structural ambiguities. Using an…

This study investigates brain potentials to derived word forms in Spanish. Two experiments were performed on derived nominals that differ in terms of their productivity and semantic properties but are otherwise similar, an acceptability judgment task and a reading experiment using event-related brain potentials (ERPs) in which correctly and…

In two experiments using the action-sentence-compatibility paradigm we investigated the simulation processes that readers undertake when processing state descriptions with adjectives (e.g., "Die Schublade ist offen/zu". ["The drawer is open/shut"]) or adjectival passives (e.g., "Die Schublade ist…

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…

There is a long standing debate between aphasiologists on the essential factor that constitutes the behavioral patterns of loss and preservation in agrammatic Broca's aphasia. It has been suggested that linguistic complexity plays a crucial role: linguistically complex structures are more difficult to produce than linguistically simple ones.…

It has been claimed that verb processing (as opposed to noun processing) is subserved by specific neural circuits in the left prefrontal cortex. In this study, we took advantage of the unusual grammatical characteristics of clitic pronouns in Italian (e.g., "lo" and "la" in "portalo" and "portala" "bring it [masculine]/[feminine]",…

In this paper, we investigate the ability of Dutch agrammatic Broca's and Wernicke's aphasics to assign reference to possessive pronouns in elided VP constructions. The assumption is that the comprehension problems in these two populations have different sources that are revealed in distinct patterns of responses. The focus is primarily on the…

Children with Syntactic Specific Language Impairment (S-SLI) have difficulties understanding object relative clauses, which have been ascribed to a deficit in syntactic movement. The current study explores the nature of the deficit in movement, and specifically whether it is related to a deficit in the construction of syntactic structure and…

In this paper, we investigate the performance of a Greek-English bilingual patient with Broca's aphasia and mild agrammatism on the placement of CP, MoodP, AspectP, and NegP-related adverbs, labeled specifier-type adverbs, and VP-related adverbs, labeled complement-type adverbs, by means of a constituent ordering task and a grammaticality judgment…

English-speaking children typically avoid using regular plurals in novel grammatical deverbal compounds as in "rat eater" but allow irregular plurals as in "mice eater" (Gordon, 1985). To explain these data, it has been argued that Kiparsky's (1983) level-ordering model constrains the production of morphologically complex…

We report results of an experimental study with Dutch agrammatic aphasics that investigated their ability to interpret pronominal elements in transitive clauses and Exceptional Case Marking constructions (ECM). Using the obtained experimental results as a tool, we distinguish between three competing linguistic theories that aim at determining…

This study aims at verifying whether Portuguese gender-inflected nouns and adjectives are represented as full forms as suggested by Spanish data (Dominguez, Cuetos, & Segui, 1999). A series of lexical decision experiments is reported. Grammatical gender, frequency dominance, and grammatical category are manipulated and cumulative frequency is…

Previous studies have shown that an aphasic patient (AB) with a semantic short-term memory deficit (STM) had difficulties comprehending and producing sentences with structures that demanded the simultaneous retention of several individual word meanings (Martin & Freedman, 2001a, 2001b; Martin & Romani, 1994; Martin, Shelton, & Yaffee, 1994). The…