Agrammatism

Agrammatism provides an overview of the state of knowledge on agrammatism, typically defined as a disorder of sentence production involving the selective omission of function words and some grammatical endings on words. The book opens with discussions of the diversity of the disorder. This is followed by separate chapters that address primarily questions of syntactic structure in agrammatism, from both linguistic and psycholinguistic perspectives. Within these two gross sections there is no consensus among the conclusions reached by the various authors. However, the position is taken that agrammatism is a disorder distinct from other aphasie disorders of sentence structure. This position is reconsidered in the final two chapters. Because of the intrinsically interdisciplinary character of research on agrammatism, it is hoped that the work presented in this volume will be of interest to linguists and psycholinguists working in areas outside the domain of aphasia, as well as to neurolinguists and neuropsychologists who are already involved in the study of language deficits.

Agrammatic aphasia (agrammatism), resulting from brain damage to regions of the brain involved in language processing, affects grammatical aspects of language. Therefore, research examining language breakdown (and recovery) patterns in agrammatism is of great interest and importance to linguists, neurolinguists, neuropsychologists, neurologists, psycholinguists and speech and language pathologists from all over the world. Research in agrammatism, studied across languages and from different perspectives, provides information about the grammatical structures that are affected by brain damage, their nature, and how language (and the brain) recovers from brain damage. The chapters in this book focus on the symptoms that arise in agrammatic aphasia at the lexical, morphological and sentence level and address these impairments from neurolinguistic, neuropsychological and neurological perspectives. Special attention is given to methods for assessment and treatment of agrammatism and to the neurobiological changes that can result from the treatments. Perspectives on Agrammatism provides an up-to-date overview of research that has been done over the past two decades. With contributions from the most influential aphasiologists from Europe and the United States, it provides an indispensable reference for students and academics in the field of language disorders.

Contemporary and Emergent Theories of Agrammatism provides an in-depth review of the previous five decades of research on agrammatism focusing specifically on work which has been informed by linguistic theory. The final chapters reflect the recent turning point in the conceptualization of the underlying causes of the impairments agrammatic individuals present with. The book includes chapters on impairments to grammatical morphemes the tree pruning and trace deletion hypotheses verb deficits in sentences, and as single words generalized minimality adaptation theory and slow syntax the involvement of discourse To facilitate student reading the writing is clear and accessible, and the book includes a glossary of unfamiliar terms. Contemporary and Emergent Theories of Agrammatism will be of great interest to advanced students and researchers in areas such as psychology of language, linguistics, neurolinguistics, aphasiology and speech and language therapy.

This book is a contribution to the ongoing debate in agrammatism, an acquired language disorder resulting from left hemisphere brain damage. The aim of the book is (1) to give a comprehensive account of agrammatism and outlines and critically examines the different accounts of agrammatic production and asyntactic comprehension, (2) to address morphological and structural properties of Moroccan Arabic agrammatic speech and (3) to put under scrutiny Friedmann and Grodzinsky’s (1997) syntactic account of tense and agreement in production and across modalities. The book attempts to answer two important research questions: Are tense and agreement dissociated as predicted by the Tree-Pruning Hypothesis (Friedmann and Grodzinsky, 1997)? Is the tense/agreement dissociation “production-specific”, or does it extend to comprehension and grammaticality judgment? A third objective of the book is to examine the comprehension abilities of four Moroccan Arabic-speaking agrammatic subjects in the light of the Trace Deletion Hypothesis (Grodzinsky, 1995 a, b). A major research question is whether or not active sentences and subject relative sentences are understood better than object relative sentences. The book takes the view the tense/agreement dissociation reported for Hebrew (Friedmann and Grodzinsky, 1997) and German (Wenzlaff and Clahsen, 2003) can be replicated in Moroccan Arabic. However, the syntactic account as outlined in Friedmann and Grodzinsky (1997) cannot account for the tense/agreement dissociation as Moroccan Arabic has the agreement node above the tense node. In addition, the Trace Deletion Hypothesis cannot account for the comprehension difficulties experienced by the four Moroccan Arabic-speaking agrammatic subjects; the case is so because both subject relatives and object relatives are understood below chance level. Based on data collected through different experimental methods, it is argued that the deficit in agrammatism cannot be explained in terms of a structural account, but rather in terms of a processing account. Access to syntactic knowledge tends to be blocked; grammatical knowledge, however, is entirely intact.

Essay from the year 2015 in the subject English Language and Literature Studies - Linguistics, grade: 2,0, University College Dublin, course: Seminar: Language Impairment, language: English, abstract: In this Essay the Trace Deletion Hypothesis by Grodzinsky as well as the Tree Pruning Hypothesis by Friedmann and Grodzinsky will be explained, the first of which focuses on the impaired comprehension while the latter concerns itself with the impaired production in agrammatism. A result of Broca's aphasia, agrammatism is a disorder which involves a lack of grammaticality in language production and a reduced understanding of grammatical markers. Agrammatic patients speak in telegraphic style, often omitting grammatical morphemes and function words while content words can still be used accurately. Language comprehension is also limited to content words whereas grammatical markers are not processed. This disorder hence affects both production and comprehension, which is why linguistic theories concerning agramatism differ in focus.

This major reference work fills a need long recognized in neurolinguistics: a source for analyzable speech transcripts from agrammatic aphasic patients that provides detailed grammatical descriptions and distributional analyses. This 3-volume set is unique in that it presents narrative speech from carefully selected clinically comparable patients, speakers of 14 languages, and parallel narratives by normal speakers. For each of the 14 languages there is a case presentation chapter analyzing and discussing the language of agrammatic patients, followed by primary data, which are organized as follows: running text of speech by two patients; interlinear morphemic translations of those texts; running text of speech elicited from two normal control subjects (plus interlinear translations); tables and figures analyzing distributional properties of the patients' speech; results of comprehension tests of the patients; transcriptions of patients' oral reading and writing samples. Neurological information is included with the case presentations, and a short grammatical sketch of each language is added to make the work on all languages accessible even to those who only read English. Language findings are presented for English, Dutch, German, Icelandic, Swedish, French, Italian, Polish, Serbo-Croatian, Hindi, Finnish, Hebrew, Chinese and Japanese.The book is an indispensable reference work for all linguists, psycholinguists and neurolinguists who wish to test their theories against a massive body of data.

Agrammatic aphasia (agrammatism), resulting from brain damage to regions of the brain involved in language processing, affects grammatical aspects of language. Therefore, research examining language breakdown (and recovery) patterns in agrammatism is of great interest and importance to linguists, neurolinguists, neuropsychologists, neurologists, psycholinguists and speech and language pathologists from all over the world. Research in agrammatism, studied across languages and from different perspectives, provides information about the grammatical structures that are affected by brain damage, their nature, and how language (and the brain) recovers from brain damage. The chapters in this book focus on the symptoms that arise in agrammatic aphasia at the lexical, morphological and sentence level and address these impairments from neurolinguistic, neuropsychological and neurological perspectives. Special attention is given to methods for assessment and treatment of agrammatism and to the neurobiological changes that can result from the treatments. Perspectives on Agrammatism provides an up-to-date overview of research that has been done over the past two decades. With contributions from the most influential aphasiologists from Europe and the United States, it provides an indispensable reference for students and academics in the field of language disorders.

This volume is the translated and updated version of the second edition of Manuale di Neuropsicologia (Zanichelli, 1996), by the same authors, and it reflects the current status of the art.