[neuroling] Re: Genetics of Language
- From: "giancarlo" <giancarlo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: neuroling@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Mon, 11 Nov 2002 07:03:07 -0700
Joseph Hilferty writes:
>
> giancarlo wrote:
>
>>Furthermore, if the *pruning tree hypothesis* (= agrammatics cannot build
>>and use a syntactic tree) is well founded, then this type of aphasia cannot
>>be language-specific: in every language the affected tool would be the
>>construction of the tree itself.
>>
> It's unclear that this is what's really going on. I'm not a neurolinguist
> myself, but it is well-known that Broca's aphasics can make above-
> chance grammaticality judgments on lots of constructions, even if
> they cannot produce these same constructions. Grodzinsky's
> provocative work has identified a subset of constructions that seem
> to pose a problem for Broca's individuals. Nonetheless, his approach
> has been criticized on a number of fronts (for lots and lots of scrutiny,
> see Grodzinsky, Yosef & commentators. 2000. The Neurology of
> Syntax: Language Use Without Broca?s Area. Behavioral and Brain
> Sciences 23(1): 1?71).
>
> Joe Hilferty
Yes, the behavior of Broca's aphasics is sometimes misleading because they
can make grammaticality judgements. But, if requested to act a sentence
using dolls or to link a sentence to a picture, they show great difficulties
if the sentence is not built after basic word order (Subject-agent - Verb -
Object-theme): D Caplan and N Hildebrandt, Disorders of Syntactic
Comprehension, Cambridge MA, The MIT Press, 1988; MF Schwartz, EM Saffran, O
Marin, The word order problem in agrammatism: I. Comprehension, Brain and
Language, 10, 249-262, 1980; Naama Friedmann. Agrammatism and the
Psychological Reality of the Syntactic Tree. Journal of Psycholinguistic
Research, Vol. 30, No. 1, 2001 1 (Special Issue on Sentence Processing). So
perhaps agrammatics can manage to use a heuristic compensatory strategy if
requested to judge the grammaticality of rather easy sentences but they find
great difficulty if must judge/act sentences like 'The mouse the cat ate had
eaten the cheese'. Indeed Grodzinsky's work is provocative, but many clues
point to a failure of the syntactic parser in agrammatism.
Giancarlo Buoiano.
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