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Functional category production in English agrammatism
Jiyeon Lee1, Lisa H Milman, Cynthia K Thompson
1Aphasia and Neurolinguistics Research Laboratory, Department of Communication Sciences and Disorders, Northwestern University, 2240 N. Campus Drive, Evanston, IL. 60208-3540, USA.
Aphasiology
|July 22, 2008
Summary
Agrammatic speakers show morphological, not syntactic, deficits in functional categories. Their difficulties with tense and agreement suggest underlying issues with inflectional morphology, not sentence structure.
Area of Science:
- Linguistics
- Neurolinguistics
- Psycholinguistics
Background:
- Agrammatism is characterized by selective deficits in functional categories.
- The Tree Pruning Hypothesis (TPH) posits syntactic tree projection deficits, with higher nodes being more vulnerable.
- Alternative theories attribute functional category impairments to morphological deficits.
Purpose of the Study:
- To investigate the hierarchical nature of functional category deficits in agrammatism.
- To examine the production of complementizers, tense, and agreement morphology in English-speaking agrammatic individuals.
- To test the consistency of verb inflection errors under varying conditions.
Main Methods:
- Experiment 1: Elicited sentence production using complementizers (whether, that, if), tense (-ed), and agreement (-s) markers.
- Experiment 2: Assessed production of finite and nonfinite verb inflection forms.
- Four English-speaking individuals with agrammatism participated.
Main Results:
- Participants successfully produced complex sentences using complementizers, indicating intact Complementizer Phrase (CP) projection.
- Impairments were observed in tense and agreement (Inflectional Phrase, IP) production, with better performance on nonfinite than finite verbs.
- Errors in inflection were primarily substitutions of non-target morphemes, rather than omissions.
Conclusions:
- The deficits observed in agrammatic participants appear morphological rather than syntactic.
- Intact CP projection and ability to implement inflectional rules suggest underlying grammatical competence.
- Failures in grammatical marker instantiation lead to incorrect inflectional forms, supporting distinct mechanisms for IP and CP deficits requiring tailored treatments.
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