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Selective impairment of thematic role assignment in sentence processing
1Department of Cognitive Science, Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, MD 21218.
Brain and Language
|October 1, 1991
Summary
This study details a brain-damaged individual with selective deficits in understanding sentence roles but intact grammar processing. This pure dissociation offers new insights into aphasia and normal sentence comprehension.
Area of Science:
- Neuroscience
- Psycholinguistics
- Neurolinguistics
Background:
- Investigating language processing deficits in brain-damaged individuals is crucial for understanding neural mechanisms of language.
- Aphasia, a language disorder resulting from brain damage, often presents with varied impairments in comprehension and production.
Observation:
- A single case study of a brain-damaged subject revealed a unique dissociation.
- The subject demonstrated significant impairment in processing thematic roles within sentences.
- Crucially, the subject retained the ability to process the morphological structure of sentences.
Findings:
- Thematic role processing deficits were evident in both sentence comprehension and production.
- This impairment affected active and passive reversible sentences, with greater severity in passive constructions.
- A preserved capacity for morphological processing was noted despite the thematic role deficits.
Implications:
- This case challenges existing theories of language breakdown in aphasia.
- The findings provide critical data for refining models of normal sentence processing.
- It highlights the complex and modular nature of the human language system.