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Double-agents and trace-deletion in agrammatism

A Beretta1, A Munn

  • 1Department of Linguistics, Michigan State University, East Lansing, 48824, USA. beretta@pilot.msu.edu

Brain and Language
|December 9, 1998
PubMed
Summary

The Trace-Deletion Hypothesis (TDH) suggests agrammatism creates conflicting Agents, causing comprehension errors. This study refutes the TDH by showing agrammatic representations do not involve double-Agents.

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Area of Science:

  • Psycholinguistics
  • Neurolinguistics
  • Syntactic Theory

Background:

  • The Trace-Deletion Hypothesis (TDH) posits that agrammatism results from deleted syntactic traces and an activated default strategy assigning Agent roles.
  • This default strategy allegedly leads to conflicting Agent assignments in certain grammatical structures, explaining comprehension difficulties in individuals with agrammatism.
  • Observed guessing and random performance on comprehension tests for passive and other structures have been attributed to this proposed double-Agent mechanism.

Purpose of the Study:

  • To isolate and test the default strategy component of the Trace-Deletion Hypothesis.
  • To investigate whether agrammatic representations involve the creation of double-Agents as predicted by the TDH.

Main Methods:

  • A sentence-picture matching task was designed to specifically probe the predictions of the TDH's default strategy.
  • Participants' comprehension was assessed using stimuli where one picture option corresponded to the meaning derived from the default strategy.

Main Results:

  • The experimental results demonstrated that agrammatic representations do not produce double-Agents.
  • The findings indicate that the default strategy, as described by the TDH, is not operative in agrammatism.

Conclusions:

  • The Trace-Deletion Hypothesis is refuted by the empirical evidence presented.
  • The proposed mechanism of double-Agents in agrammatism, central to the TDH, is not supported by the study's findings.

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