TY  - JOUR
A1  - Adelt, Anne
A1  - Stadie, Nicole
A1  - Lassotta, Romy
A1  - Adani, Flavia
A1  - Burchert, Frank
T1  - Feature dissimilarities in the processing of German relative clauses in aphasia
JF  - Journal of neurolinguistics : an international journal for the study of brain function in language behavior and experience
N2  - The cross-linguistic finding of greater demands in processing object relatives as compared to subject relatives in individuals with aphasia and non-brain-damaged speakers has been explained within the Relativized Minimality approach. Based on this account, the asymmetry is attributed to an element intervening between the moved element and its extraction site in object relatives, but not in subject relatives. Moreover, it has been proposed that processing of object relatives is facilitated if the intervening and the moved elements differ in their internal feature structure. The present study investigates these predictions in German-speaking individuals with aphasia and a group of control participants by combining the visual world eye-tracking methodology with an auditory referent identification task. Our results provide support for the Relativized Minimality approach. Particularly, the degree of featural distinctness was shown to modulate the occurrence of the effects in aphasia. We claim that, due to reduced processing capacities, individuals with aphasia need a higher degree of featural dissimilarity to distinguish the moved from the intervening element in object relatives to overcome their syntactic deficit. (C) 2017 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
KW  - Aphasia
KW  - Relative clauses
KW  - Relativized Minimality
KW  - Sentence processing
KW  - Morpho-syntactic features
KW  - Eye tracking
Y1  - 2017
U6  - https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jneuroling.2017.01.002
SN  - 0911-6044
VL  - 44
SP  - 17
EP  - 37
PB  - Elsevier
CY  - Oxford
ER  -