Reorganization of language networks in aphasia takes advantage of the facts that (a) the brain is an organ of plasticity, with neuronal changes occurring throughout the life span, including following brain damage; (b) plasticity is highly experience dependent; and (c) as with any learning system, language reorganization involves a synergistic…

The association between a word and typical location (e.g., cloud-up) appears to modulate healthy individuals' response times and visual attention. This study examined whether similar effects can be observed in a clinical population characterized by difficulties in both spatial representation and lexical processing. In an eye-tracking experiment,…

Background: Alzheimer's disease is characterized by macrolinguistic changes. This decline is often analyzed with quantitative scales. Aims: To analyze discourse production in early Alzheimer's disease (AD) and to identify qualitative markers of macrolinguistic decline. Methods & Procedures: We analyzed macrolinguistic features of a clinical…

Individuals with agrammatic Broca's aphasia experience difficulty when processing reversible non-canonical sentences. Different accounts have been proposed to explain this phenomenon. The Trace Deletion account (Grodzinsky, 1995, 2000, 2006) attributes this deficit to an impairment in syntactic representations, whereas others (e.g., Caplan,…

A theoretical framework which considers the verbal functions of the brain under a multivariate and comprehensive cognitive model was statistically analyzed. A confirmatory factor analysis was performed to verify whether some recognized aphasia constructs can be hierarchically integrated as latent factors from a homogenously verbal test. The Brief…

The most important information conveyed by language is often contained not in the utterance itself, but in the interaction between the utterance and the comprehender's knowledge of the world and the current situation. This dissertation uses psycholinguistic methods to explore the effects of a common type of inference--causal inference--on language…

Psycholinguistic studies dealing with Alzheimer's disease (AD) commonly consider verbal aspects of language. In this article, we investigated both verbal and non-verbal aspects of speech production in AD. We used pauses and hesitations as markers of planning difficulties and hypothesized that AD patients show different patterns in the process of…

We investigate the on-line processing of verb-phrase ellipsis (VPE) constructions in two brain injured populations: Broca's and Anomic aphasics. VPE constructions are built from two simple clauses; the first is the antecedent clause and the second is the ellipsis clause. The ellipsis clause is missing its verb and object (i.e., its verb phrase…

This paper reports the results of three studies examining comprehension and real-time processing of pronominal (Experiment 1) and Wh-movement (Experiments 2 and 3) structures in agrammatic and unimpaired speakers using eyetracking. We asked the following questions: (a) Is off-line comprehension of these constructions impaired in agrammatic…

This paper presents the results of a study of syntactically based comprehension in aphasic patients. We studied 42 patients with aphasia secondary to left hemisphere strokes and 25 control participants. We measured off-line, end-of-sentence, performance (accuracy and reaction time) in two tasks that require comprehension--enactment and…

Hierarchical models of agrammatism propose that sentence production deficits can be accounted for in terms of clausal syntactic structure [Friedmann, N., & Grodzinsky, Y. (1997). "Tense and agreement in agrammatic production: Pruning the syntactic tree." "Brain and Language, 56", 397-425; Hagiwara, H. (1995). "The breakdown of functional…