Pronoun Comprehension In Agrammatic Aphasia

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 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.

This book asserts that language is a signaling system rather than a code, based in part on such research as the finding that 5-year-old English and Dutch children use pronouns correctly in their own utterances, but often fail to interpret these forms correctly when used by someone else. Emphasizing the unique and sometimes competing demands of listener and speaker, the author examines resulting asymmetries between production and comprehension. The text offers examples of the interpretation of word order and pronouns by listeners, and word order freezing and referential choice by speakers. It is explored why the usual symmetry breaks down in children but also sometimes in adults. Gathering contemporary insights from theoretical linguistic research, psycholinguistic studies and computational modeling, Asymmetries between Language Production and Comprehension presents a unified explanation of this phenomenon. “Through a lucid, comprehensive review of acquisition studies on reference-related phenomena, Petra Hendriks builds a striking case for the pervasiveness of asymmetries in comprehension/production. In her view, listeners systematically misunderstand what they hear, and speakers systematically fail to prevent such misunderstandings. She argues that linguistic theory should take stock of current psycholinguistic and developmental evidence on optionality and ambiguity, and recognize language as a signaling system. The arguments are compelling yet controversial: grammar does not specify a one-to-one correspondence between form and meaning; and the demands of the mapping task differ for listeners and speakers. Her proposal is formalized within optimality theory, but researchers working outside this framework will still find it of great interest. In the language-as-code vs. language-as-signal debate, Hendriks puts the ball firmly in the other court.” Ana Pérez-Leroux, University of Toronto, Canada

The workshop Production-Comprehension Asymmetries in Child Language held in Osnabrück in 2009 is the starting point for this book. The workshop developed from the observation that children's production skills appear to precede their comprehension skills in a number of phenomena, e.g. pronouns or negation. The volume provides cross-linguistic evidence for such asymmetric development and investigates grammatical and methodical explanations of the observed asymmetries.

This original volume provides the first state-of-the-art overview of research on pronouns in the 21st century. With its dedicated sections on grammar, history, and change, language learning/acquisition, cognition and comprehension, power, politics, and identity, The Routledge Handbook of Pronouns shows that contemporary interest in pronouns and gender represents just the tip of the iceberg. Led by Laura Paterson, a transdisciplinary collection of experts discuss the global history of different pronoun systems, synthesize the literature, and contextualize the salient issues and current debates shaping research on pronouns across different spheres and via different theoretical-methodological traditions. The Handbook is designed to encourage readers to engage with a range of perspectives from within and beyond their immediate areas of interest, with the ultimate aim of shaping the future trajectory of interdisciplinary, multiingual research on pronouns. Using data from multiple languages and engaging deeply with the social, cultural, political, technological, and psychological factors that can influence pronoun use, this innovative book will be an indispensable resource to scholars and advanced students of theoretical and applied linguistics, education, and the social and behavioural sciences.

Experiments at the Interfaces, edited by Jeffrey T. Runner from the University of Rochester, brings together recent experimental research examining a variety of issues within syntax and semantics, and their interfaces with each other and with other domains of language.

A study on anaphoric dependencies that derives the conditions on anaphora in natural language from the design properties of the language system. Pronouns and anaphors (including reflexives such as himself and herself) may or must depend on antecedents for their interpretation. These dependencies are subject to conditions that prima facie show substantial crosslinguistic variation. In this monograph, Eric Reuland presents a theory of how these anaphoric dependencies are represented in natural language in a way that does justice to the the variation one finds across languages. He explains the conditions on these dependencies in terms of elementary properties of the computational system of natural language. He shows that the encoding of anaphoric dependencies makes use of components of the language system that all reflect different cognitive capacities; thus the empirical research he reports on offers insights into the design of the language system. Reuland’s account reduces the conditions on binding to independent properties of the grammar, none of which is specific to binding. He offers a principled account of the roles of the lexicon, syntax, semantics, and the discourse component in the encoding of anaphoric dependencies; a window into the overall organization of the grammar and the roles of linguistic and extralinguistic factors; a new typology of anaphoric expressions; a view of crosslinguistic variation (examining facts in a range of languages, from English, Dutch, Frisian, German, and Scandinavian languages to Fijian, Georgian, and Malayalam) that shows unity in diversity.