TY  - JOUR
A1  - Burchert, Frank
A1  - De Bleser, Ria
T1  - Passives in agrammatic sentence comprehension : a German Study
N2  - 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
Y1  - 2004
ER  -