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Asyntactic thematic role assignment: the use of a temporal-spatial strategy
A Chatterjee1, L M Maher, L J Gonzalez Rothi
1Department of Neurology, University of Alabama at Birmingham 35294-0017, USA.
Brain and Language
|May 1, 1995
Summary
A right-hemisphere stroke impaired a patient's ability to link grammatical roles to meaning. He used temporal-spatial strategies, suggesting a common mapping deficit in sentence production and comprehension.
Area of Science:
- Neuroscience
- Psycholinguistics
- Cognitive Science
Background:
- Syntactic comprehension relies on mapping grammatical categories to semantic roles.
- Right-hemisphere lesions can impact complex language processing.
- Thematic role assignment is crucial for understanding sentence meaning.
Observation:
- A left-handed male patient with a right-hemisphere infarct exhibited significant deficits in syntactic comprehension.
- The patient could not accurately map grammatical subjects and objects to thematic roles (agent, patient).
- Conceptual knowledge of thematic roles remained intact, suggesting a specific mapping impairment.
Findings:
- The patient's difficulty was not due to short-term memory deficits or a specific vulnerability to passive sentences.
- Instead of random assignment, the patient employed a temporal-spatial strategy for thematic role assignment.
- This strategy was also observed in his sentence production tasks, indicating a shared deficit.
Implications:
- Suggests that mapping thematic roles to grammatical categories is a shared process in both sentence production and comprehension.
- Raises the possibility of underlying spatial representations for thematic roles preceding grammatical elaboration.
- Highlights the critical role of the right hemisphere in specific aspects of syntactic-semantic mapping.