@article{BurchertDeBleserSonntag2003,
  author    = {Burchert, Frank and De Bleser, Ria and Sonntag, Katharina},
  title     = {Does morphology make the difference? : Agrammatic sentence comprehension in German},
  year      = {2003},
  language  = {en}
}
@article{WartenburgerBurchertHeekerenetal.2003,
  author    = {Wartenburger, Isabell and Burchert, Frank and Heekeren, Hauke R. and De Bleser, Ria and Villringer, Arno},
  title     = {Grammaticality judgments on sentences with and without movement of phrasal constituents : an event-related fMRI study},
  issn      = {0911-6044},
  year      = {2003},
  language  = {en}
}
@article{BurchertDeBleser2004,
  author    = {Burchert, Frank and De Bleser, Ria},
  title     = {Passives in agrammatic sentence comprehension : a German Study},
  year      = {2004},
  abstract  = {Background: A large number of studies examining agrammatic comprehension of canonical and non-canonical sentences in Broca's aphasia have focused on passives and results have been interpreted in theoretical frameworks such as the trace deletion hypothesis (TDH: Grodzinsky, 1995a). However, there are a number of unresolved issues associated with passives. The linguistic analysis of passive structures in different languages has remained controversial as well as the empirical neurolinguistic basis of agrammatic passive comprehension. In addition, a variety of morphological and semantic questions have been raised with respect to the implicit argument in short passives and the ordering of thematic roles reflected by different positions of the by-phrase in long passives. Aims: The major aims of the present study were to re-examine the analyses of passives with and without traces, the role of an implicit argument in short passives, and the influence of the position of the by-phrase on agrammatic sentence comprehension. Methods \& Procedures: A binary picture-sentence matching task was administered to six non-fluent German agrammatic speakers. Various types of passives including long, short, and topicalised passives were tested. Additionally, comprehension of active SVO sentences was assessed in a separate but similar session. Only those patients whose comprehension on active sentences was above chance were included. Outcomes \& Results: As a group, the six subjects performed above chance over all passive types. If only long canonical passives are considered, as is done in most studies, five subjects showed a pattern compatible with the TDH. However, the picture was modified if other passive constructions were taken into account, in which case only three of the six subjects showed TDH conformity. Conclusions: There is no unique pattern of agrammatic passive comprehension and only half of the agrammatic subjects conformed to the trace deletion hypothesis. Given the results on long canonical and topicalised passives, our data support linguistic analyses that assume a trace- based derivation of passives. Furthermore, the results are in line with linguistic analyses adopting an implicit argument in short passives. Since comprehension of topicalised passives with a canonical order of theta-roles was not better than that of long passives without a canonical order, the agrammatic problem with passives does not seem to hinge on semantics},
  language  = {en}
}
@article{BurchertSwobodaMollDeBleser2004,
  author    = {Burchert, Frank and Swoboda-Moll, Maria and De Bleser, Ria},
  title     = {Tense and agreement in clausal representations : Evidence from German agrammatic aphasia},
  year      = {2004},
  language  = {en}
}
@article{WartenburgerHeekerenBurchertetal.2004,
  author    = {Wartenburger, Isabell and Heekeren, Hauke R. and Burchert, Frank and Heinemann, Steffi and De Bleser, Ria and Villringer, Arno},
  title     = {Neural correlates of syntactic transformations},
  issn      = {1065-9471},
  year      = {2004},
  abstract  = {Many agrammatic aphasics have a specific syntactic comprehension deficit involving processing syntactic transformations. It has been proposed that this deficit is due to a dysfunction of Broca's area, an area that is thought to be critical for comprehension of complex transformed sentences. The goal of this study was to investigate the role of Broca's area in processing canonical and non-canonical sentences in healthy subjects. The sentences were presented auditorily and were controlled for task difficulty. Subjects were asked to judge the grammaticality of the sentences while their brain activity was monitored using event-related functional magnetic resonance imaging. Processing both kinds of sentences resulted in activation of language-related brain regions. Comparison of non-canonical and canonical sentences showed greater activation in bilateral temporal regions; a greater activation of Broca's area in processing antecedent-gap relations was not found. Moreover, the posterior part of Broca's area was conjointly activated by both sentence conditions. Broca's area is thus involved in general syntactic processing as required by grammaticality judgments and does not seem to have a specific role in processing syntactic transformations. (C) 2004 Wiley-Liss, Inc},
  language  = {en}
}
@article{BurchertSwobodaMollDeBleser2005,
  author    = {Burchert, Frank and Swoboda-Moll, Maria and De Bleser, Ria},
  title     = {Tense and Agreement dissociations in German agrammatic speakers : Underspecification vs. hierarchy},
  year      = {2005},
  abstract  = {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},
  language  = {en}
}
@article{BurchertWeldlichDeBleser2005,
  author    = {Burchert, Frank and Weldlich, C. and De Bleser, Ria},
  title     = {Focus in the left periphery : a cue to agrammatic sentence comprehension?},
  year      = {2005},
  language  = {en}
}
@article{BurchertSwobodaMollDeBleser2005,
  author    = {Burchert, Frank and Swoboda-Moll, Maria and De Bleser, Ria},
  title     = {The left periphery in agrammatic clausal representations : evidence from German},
  year      = {2005},
  abstract  = {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},
  language  = {en}
}
@article{RauschBurchertDeBleser2005,
  author    = {Rausch, P. and Burchert, Frank and De Bleser, Ria},
  title     = {Parallels in the breakdown of CP and DP-internal movement processes in agrammatism : a preliminary case study},
  issn      = {0093-934X},
  year      = {2005},
  language  = {en}
}
@article{SchroederStadiePostleretal.2005,
  author    = {Schr{\"o}der, Astrid and Stadie, Nicole and Postler, Jenny and Lorenz, Antje and Swoboda-Moll, Maria and Burchert, Frank and De Bleser, Ria},
  title     = {Does training-induced improvement of noncanonical sentence production in agrammatic aphasia generalize to comprehension? : a multiple single case study},
  issn      = {0093-934X},
  year      = {2005},
  language  = {en}
}