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In his short paper of 1886, the neogrammarian linguist Delbruck sketches his views on normal language processing and their relevance for the interpretation of some of the symptoms of progressive anomic aphasia. In particular, he discusses proper name impairments, verb and abstract noun superiority and the predominance of semantically related errors. Furthermore, he suggests that part of speech, morphology and word order may be preserved in this condition. This historical document has been lost in oblivion but the original ideas and their relevance for contemporary discussions merit a revival.
Tense and Agreement dissociations in German agrammatic speakers : Underspecification vs. hierarchy
(2005)
The aim of the present paper was to investigate whether German agrammatic production data are compatible with the Tree-Pruning-Hypothesis (TPH; Friedmann & Grodzinsky, 1997). The theory predicts unidirectional patterns of dissociation in agrammatic production data with respect to Tense and Agreement. However, there was evidence of a double dissociation between Tense and Agreement in our data. The presence of a bidirectional dissociation is incompatible with any theory which assumes a hierarchical order between these categories such as the TPH or other versions thereof (such as Lee's, 2003 top-down hypothesis). It will be argued that the data can better be accounted for by relying on newer linguistic theories such as the Minimalist Program (MP, Chomsky, 2000), which does not assume a hierarchical order between independent syntactic Tense and Agreement nodes but treats them as different features (semantically interpretable vs. uninterpretable) under a single node. (c) 2005 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved
Recently, neurolinguistic explanations informed by linguistic theory have been proposed to account for spontaneous and elicited agrammatic speech production. These are either formulated in terms of impaired representations or they refer to impaired processing. Both have in common that they assume severe disorders of question production due to vulnerability of the left periphery of sentence structures in the representational account, of verb movement in the processing account. We report the results of question elicitation and spontaneous speech analysis in eight chronic German agrammatic speakers. The results indicate that there is not one homogeneous agrammatic pattern, but that the data reveal double dissociations which cannot be accounted for by the unitary explanations of agrammatism which are presently available. An alternative explanation will be provided which-in contrast to the representational account not only refers to global hierarchically organized nodes but relies on linguistic differences within these nodes. The assumption that they can be differentially affected in agrammatism can account for the observed patterns. (c) 2005 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved