La compréhension asyntaxique dans tous ses états. Des représentations linguistiques aux ressources cognitives

Abstract

Summary: What to do with the various aspects of asyntactic comprehension ? From linguistic representations to cognitive resources. Asyntactic comprehension is a sentence comprehension disorder presented by some brain damaged patients. This trouble is characterized by a selective processing deficit of grammatical information. This review paper discusses the relations between three types of theories explaining asyntactic comprehension. Structural theories define the elements of linguistic representations that are not established in asyntactic comprehenders : these theories suggest a very specific deficit involving some syntactic elements (traces). Procedural theories define the psycholinguistic processes that are deficient in the patients : asyntactic comprehenders should have a deficit of the automatic processing of morphosyntactic information. Resource theories explain the comprehension deficit by a limitation of working memory resources that could result in a slow-down of activation and/or a speed-up of the decline of linguistic information : these theories are appropriate to explain the rapid decline of syntactic information in asyntactic comprehenders. These three theories are not incompatible : structural theories define the linguistic elements that require a rapid processing, and that are especially costly in working memory resources if this rapid processing is deficient. However, the results in favor of these theories should be taken with caution : for experiments, asyntactic comprehenders are often selected according to their expressive disorder (agrammatism). Some case studies suggest a dissociation between agrammatism and asyntactic comprehension. Key words : asyntactic comprehension, syntactic traces, cognitive resources.