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Tense and agreement in clausal representations: Evidence from German agrammatic aphasia
Brain and Language 91 (2004) 104–105 www.elsevier.com/locate/b&l
Tense and agreement in clausal representations: Evidence from German agrammatic aphasia Frank Burchert,* Maria Swoboda-Moll, and Ria De Bleser Universita¨t Potsdam, Linguistik, PF 601553, 14415 Potsdam, Germany Available online 22 July 2004
Introduction Recently, many neurolinguistic studies have focused on syntactic trees in agrammatic aphasia with a special focus on functional projections such as the Tense-phrase (TP) and Agreement-phrase (AgrP). The results obtained in these studies have been interpreted as neuropsychological evidence for independent clausal representations of Tense (TNS) and Agreement (Agr) in line with the Split-Inflection hypothesis (Pollock, 1989). Friedmann and Grodzinsky (1997) found that TNS and Agr are not equally impaired in agrammatism and they proposed the Tree-Pruning-Hypothesis (TPH) to account for this dissociation. According to this hypothesis, the hierarchical order of functional nodes in the syntactic tree plays a crucial role and TNSmorphemes, which are assumed to be located higher in the tree, are more likely to be impaired than Agr-morphemes. A contradictory hypothesis has been put forward by Lee (2003). In agreement with the logic of a syntactic tree constructed in a top–down fashion, she assumes that higher syntactic nodes are more likely to be spared in agrammatism. The dissociation between TNS and Agr has been replicated in a number of studies (German: Wenzlaff & Clahsen, in press; Spanish: Benedet, Christiansen, & Goodglass, 1998) but not in others (German: Penke, 2001; Korean: Lee, 2003; Greek: Stavrakaki & Kouvava, 2003). Therefore, the issue remains highly controversial not only with respect to a dissociating impairment of TNS and Agr in a single direction, but also with respect to their representation within the syntactic tree. This is particularly relevant for German, a language for which a different ordering of TNS and Agr morphemes compared to English has been proposed by theoretical linguists.
The study We report a study conducted with nine German speaking agrammatic patients and nine control subjects without language deficits. The aim of the study was twofold. A first aim was to test the cross-linguistic validity of a TNS-Agr dissociation in agrammatic aphasia and find out whether patterns of impairment of these functional elements follow the proposed hierarchy for German, thus providing evidence for Agr being located higher in the syntactic tree than TNS. A second aim was to determine whether impairments in TNS and/or Agr are modalityspecific or rather modality-independent. For this purpose, different
Corresponding author. E-mail address: [email protected] (F. Burchert).
0093-934X/$ - see front matter Ó 2004 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. doi: 10.1016/j.bandl.2004.06.054
tasks were administered to the patients, namely, a forced choice sentence completion task to test their abilities to correctly inflect a verb either for TNS (n = 48 test items) or for Agr (n = 48) and a grammaticality judgment test (n = 288).
Results and discussion The results of the individual agrammatics indicate that performance on TNS and Agr does not necessarily dissociate and if it does, the dissociation is not one-sided. A first subgroup performed either generally above chance (3/9) or generally at chance (3/9). In a second subgroup of our patients, two subjects were better on TNS than on Agr and one showed the reverse dissociation with TNS being more impaired than Agr. In view of these results, our conclusion is that functional dissociations between TNS and Agr can occasionally be found in German agrammatics. However, given the double dissociation between TNS and Agr, the impairment of functional elements cannot be related to their hierarchical position in the syntactic tree, in contrast to the proposals made by the TPH and Lee (2003). For the same reason, our results do not provide empirical evidence for a syntactic tree in German in which Agr is placed higher than TNS as opposed to English. The results are rather compatible with recent assumptions of Chomsky’s Minimalist Program, according to which Agr and TNS are considered to be syntactically fundamentally different from each other with the former being an uninterpretable feature of the finite verb and not an independent functional projection AgrP and the latter being an interpretable feature which is located in the T-node. Within such a framework, impairments in TNS and/or Agr can be defined in terms of feature-underspecification (cf. Wenzlaff & Clahsen, 2004). With respect to modality-specific impairments of functional categories, the majority of our patients (7/9) showed different results on TNS and/or Agr in the sentence completion task and the grammaticality judgment test, indicating that problems with functional categories like TNS and Agr are not modality-independent (cf. Friedmann & Grodzinsky, 1997) and, hence, not due to a central representational deficit as it has been proposed by Berndt and Caramazza (1980).
References Benedet, M. J., Christiansen, J. A., & Goodglass, H. (1998). A crosslinguistic study of grammatical morphology in Spanish- and English-speaking agrammatic patients. Cortex, 34, 309–336.
Abstract / Brain and Language 91 (2004) 104–105 Berndt, R. S., & Caramazza, A. (1980). A redefinition of the syndrome of Broca’s aphasia: Implications of a neurospsychological model of language. Applied Psycholinguistics, 1, 225– 278. Friedmann, N., & Grodzinsky, Y. (1997). Tense and Agreement in agrammatic production: Pruning the syntactic tree. Brain and Language, 56, 397–425. Lee, M. (2003). Dissociations among functional categories in Korean agrammatism. Brain and Language, 84, 170–188.
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Penke, M. (2001). Controversies about CP: A comparison of language acquisition and language impairments in Broca’s aphasia. Brain and Language, 77, 351–363. Pollock, J. -Y. (1989). Verb movement, Universal Grammar, and the structure of IP. Linguistic Inquiry, 20, 365–424. Stavrakaki, S., & Kouvava, S. (2003). Functional categories in agrammatism: Evidence from Greek. Brain and Language, 86, 129–141. Wenzlaff, M., & Clahsen, H. (2004). Tense and agreement in German agrammatism. Brain and Language, 89, 57–68.
Tense and agreement in clausal representations: Evidence from German agrammatic aphasia Frank Burchert,* Maria Swoboda-Moll, and Ria De Bleser Universita¨t Potsdam, Linguistik, PF 601553, 14415 Potsdam, Germany Available online 22 July 2004
Introduction Recently, many neurolinguistic studies have focused on syntactic trees in agrammatic aphasia with a special focus on functional projections such as the Tense-phrase (TP) and Agreement-phrase (AgrP). The results obtained in these studies have been interpreted as neuropsychological evidence for independent clausal representations of Tense (TNS) and Agreement (Agr) in line with the Split-Inflection hypothesis (Pollock, 1989). Friedmann and Grodzinsky (1997) found that TNS and Agr are not equally impaired in agrammatism and they proposed the Tree-Pruning-Hypothesis (TPH) to account for this dissociation. According to this hypothesis, the hierarchical order of functional nodes in the syntactic tree plays a crucial role and TNSmorphemes, which are assumed to be located higher in the tree, are more likely to be impaired than Agr-morphemes. A contradictory hypothesis has been put forward by Lee (2003). In agreement with the logic of a syntactic tree constructed in a top–down fashion, she assumes that higher syntactic nodes are more likely to be spared in agrammatism. The dissociation between TNS and Agr has been replicated in a number of studies (German: Wenzlaff & Clahsen, in press; Spanish: Benedet, Christiansen, & Goodglass, 1998) but not in others (German: Penke, 2001; Korean: Lee, 2003; Greek: Stavrakaki & Kouvava, 2003). Therefore, the issue remains highly controversial not only with respect to a dissociating impairment of TNS and Agr in a single direction, but also with respect to their representation within the syntactic tree. This is particularly relevant for German, a language for which a different ordering of TNS and Agr morphemes compared to English has been proposed by theoretical linguists.
The study We report a study conducted with nine German speaking agrammatic patients and nine control subjects without language deficits. The aim of the study was twofold. A first aim was to test the cross-linguistic validity of a TNS-Agr dissociation in agrammatic aphasia and find out whether patterns of impairment of these functional elements follow the proposed hierarchy for German, thus providing evidence for Agr being located higher in the syntactic tree than TNS. A second aim was to determine whether impairments in TNS and/or Agr are modalityspecific or rather modality-independent. For this purpose, different
Corresponding author. E-mail address: [email protected] (F. Burchert).
0093-934X/$ - see front matter Ó 2004 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. doi: 10.1016/j.bandl.2004.06.054
tasks were administered to the patients, namely, a forced choice sentence completion task to test their abilities to correctly inflect a verb either for TNS (n = 48 test items) or for Agr (n = 48) and a grammaticality judgment test (n = 288).
Results and discussion The results of the individual agrammatics indicate that performance on TNS and Agr does not necessarily dissociate and if it does, the dissociation is not one-sided. A first subgroup performed either generally above chance (3/9) or generally at chance (3/9). In a second subgroup of our patients, two subjects were better on TNS than on Agr and one showed the reverse dissociation with TNS being more impaired than Agr. In view of these results, our conclusion is that functional dissociations between TNS and Agr can occasionally be found in German agrammatics. However, given the double dissociation between TNS and Agr, the impairment of functional elements cannot be related to their hierarchical position in the syntactic tree, in contrast to the proposals made by the TPH and Lee (2003). For the same reason, our results do not provide empirical evidence for a syntactic tree in German in which Agr is placed higher than TNS as opposed to English. The results are rather compatible with recent assumptions of Chomsky’s Minimalist Program, according to which Agr and TNS are considered to be syntactically fundamentally different from each other with the former being an uninterpretable feature of the finite verb and not an independent functional projection AgrP and the latter being an interpretable feature which is located in the T-node. Within such a framework, impairments in TNS and/or Agr can be defined in terms of feature-underspecification (cf. Wenzlaff & Clahsen, 2004). With respect to modality-specific impairments of functional categories, the majority of our patients (7/9) showed different results on TNS and/or Agr in the sentence completion task and the grammaticality judgment test, indicating that problems with functional categories like TNS and Agr are not modality-independent (cf. Friedmann & Grodzinsky, 1997) and, hence, not due to a central representational deficit as it has been proposed by Berndt and Caramazza (1980).
References Benedet, M. J., Christiansen, J. A., & Goodglass, H. (1998). A crosslinguistic study of grammatical morphology in Spanish- and English-speaking agrammatic patients. Cortex, 34, 309–336.
Abstract / Brain and Language 91 (2004) 104–105 Berndt, R. S., & Caramazza, A. (1980). A redefinition of the syndrome of Broca’s aphasia: Implications of a neurospsychological model of language. Applied Psycholinguistics, 1, 225– 278. Friedmann, N., & Grodzinsky, Y. (1997). Tense and Agreement in agrammatic production: Pruning the syntactic tree. Brain and Language, 56, 397–425. Lee, M. (2003). Dissociations among functional categories in Korean agrammatism. Brain and Language, 84, 170–188.
105
Penke, M. (2001). Controversies about CP: A comparison of language acquisition and language impairments in Broca’s aphasia. Brain and Language, 77, 351–363. Pollock, J. -Y. (1989). Verb movement, Universal Grammar, and the structure of IP. Linguistic Inquiry, 20, 365–424. Stavrakaki, S., & Kouvava, S. (2003). Functional categories in agrammatism: Evidence from Greek. Brain and Language, 86, 129–141. Wenzlaff, M., & Clahsen, H. (2004). Tense and agreement in German agrammatism. Brain and Language, 89, 57–68.