Grammatical Production Research Articles

Grammatiche dell'italiano ‘Pour Les Dames’ nel Settecento: Antonio Curioni fra Parigi e Londra

Across eighteenth-century Europe, a number of authors composed grammars, of their own language or of foreign languages, either dedicated to a ‘lady’ or addressed to a readership of ‘ladies’. Grammarians who indicated in the titles of their works that they had written ‘for the Ladies’, ‘pour les Dames’, ‘per le Dame’, ‘für die Damen’ (or ‘für Frauenzimmer’) often further specified, either in the subtitle or in the body of the text, that they meant to address, more broadly, a readership of beginners.The Italian Antonio Curioni, in the last decades of the eighteenth century, published a number of works, first in Paris and then in London, meant to help readers learn the Italian language and its grammar, following a progressive method aimed at beginners and then more advanced learners, including grammars ‘à l'usage des Dames’. Most of Curioni's works were dedicated to female figures, young ‘ladies’ of the higher classes, who represented the predominant part of his intended readership.This essay examines Curioni's works within the grammatical production ‘pour les Dames’ of the time and against the background of the flourishing, and very competitive, market of grammars meant for a readership eager to learn Italian.

Grammatical production deficits in PPA: Relating narrative and structured task performance

Grammatical production deficits in PPA: Relating narrative and structured task performance

The Effects of Communicative Grammar Teaching on Students’ Achievement of Grammatical Knowledge and Oral Production

So far the students of Le Hong Phong Junior High School have been taught grammar with GTM (Grammar-Translation Method), which just prepares learners for conventional grammar-paper tests. Despite their considerable knowledge of grammar, the students fail to use the language they have learnt to communicate in real-life situations. The purpose of this study was to investigate whether the communicative grammar teaching method was effective in terms of students’ grammatical knowledge and oral communication, and their attitudes towards this teaching method. The results of the study highlight the treatment on both grammatical knowledge and oral communication as well as positive attitudes from the students. These lead to two major conclusions that the communicative grammar teaching indeed helped the students improve their grammar competence and use it effectively in communication, at least in oral production. Besides, this implementation appealed the students’ interest in grammar lessons.

Phonologic errors as a clinical marker of the logopenic variant of PPA

To disentangle the clinical heterogeneity of nonsemantic variants of primary progressive aphasia (PPA) and to identify a coherent linguistic-anatomical marker for the logopenic variant of PPA (lv-PPA). Key speech and language features of 14 cases of lv-PPA and 18 cases of nonfluent/agrammatic variant of PPA were systematically evaluated and scored by an independent rater blinded to diagnosis. Every case underwent a structural MRI and a Pittsburgh compound B (PiB)-PET scan, a putative biomarker of Alzheimer disease. Key speech and language features that showed association with the PiB-PET status were entered into a hierarchical cluster analysis. The linguistic features and patterns of cortical thinning in each resultant cluster were analyzed. The cluster analysis revealed 3 coherent clinical groups, each of which was linked to a specific PiB-PET status. The first cluster was linked to high PiB retention and characterized by phonologic errors and cortical thinning focused on the left superior temporal gyrus. The second and third clusters were characterized by grammatical production errors and motor speech disorders, respectively, and were associated with low PiB brain retention. A fourth cluster, however, demonstrated nonspecific language deficits and unpredictable PiB-PET status. These findings suggest that despite the clinical and pathologic heterogeneity of nonsemantic variants, discrete clinical syndromes can be distinguished and linked to specific likelihood of PiB-PET status. Phonologic errors seem to be highly predictive of high amyloid burden in PPA and can provide a specific clinical marker for lv-PPA.

BANZAI

This paper presents BANZAI, a new intelligent language tutor program developed by the author over the past two years. The BANZAI application is programmed in Java and runs in a web browser over the Internet. It is designed to develop learners' grammatical and sentence production skills in Japanese as well as to instill cultural knowledge about Japan. It handles Japanese characters so learners can read and produce sentences in kana and kanji. More importantly, BANZAI employs artificial intelligence (AI) and natural language processing (NLP) technology, which enables the program to read, parse, and correct sentences typed by learners. The NLP analyzer consists of a lexicon, a morphological generator, a word segmentor, a morphological parser, a syntactic parser, an error detector, and a feedback generator. The first section of this paper provides an overview of BANZAI's capability. The second and third sections briefly describe each component of the NLP analyzer and explain how the system handles student errors. The fourth section illustrates actual lessons and sample exercises provided by BANZAI. The program has been integrated into the Japanese curriculum at the University of San Francisco since the autumn of 2000. Questionnaire results indicate an enthusiastic student response.

Hebrewer

This paper reports on the grammatical and programmatical production aspects of the Hebrewer, a cross-platform web-based reference work in the form of a Hebrew inflection generator. The Hebrewer, a Java applet/servlet combination, is currently capable of generating 2,500 nouns in full declension and 500 verbs in full conjugation, displaying the results in vocalized Hebrew and allowing users to print the inflection charts.

Dissociations between fluency and agrammatism in primary progressive aphasia

Background: Classical aphasiology, based on the study of stroke sequelae, fuses speech fluency and grammatical ability. Nonfluent (Broca's) aphasia often is accompanied by agrammatism; whereas in the fluent aphasias grammatical deficits are not typical. The assumption that a similar relationship exists in primary progressive aphasia (PPA) has led to the dichotomisation of this syndrome into fluent and nonfluent subtypes. Aims: This study compared elements of fluency and grammatical production in the narrative speech of individuals with PPA to determine if they can be dissociated from one another. Methods & Procedures: Speech samples from 37 individuals with PPA, clinically assigned to agrammatic (N = 11), logopaenic (N = 20), and semantic (N = 6) subtypes, and 13 cognitively healthy control participants telling the “Cinderella Story” were analysed for fluency—i.e., words per minute (WPM) and mean length of utterance in words (MLU-W)—and grammaticality, i.e., the proportion of grammatically correct sentences, open-to-closed-class word ratio, noun-to-verb ratio, and correct production of verb inflection, noun morphology, and verb argument structure. Between-group differences were analysed for each variable. Correlational analyses examined the relation between WPM and each grammatical variable, and an off-line measure of sentence production. Outcomes & Results: Agrammatic and logopaenic groups both had lower scores on the fluency measures and produced significantly fewer grammatical sentences than did semantic and control groups. However, only the agrammatic group evinced significantly impaired production of verb inflection and verb argument structure. In addition some semantic participants showed abnormal open-to-closed and noun-to-verb ratios in narrative speech. When the sample was divided on the basis of fluency, all the agrammatic participants fell in the nonfluent category. The logopaenic participants varied in fluency but those with low fluency showed variable performance on measures of grammaticality. Correlational analyses and scatter plots comparing fluency and each grammatical variable revealed dissociations within PPA participants, with some nonfluent participants showing normal grammatical skill. Conclusions: Grammatical production is a complex construct comprising correct usage of several language components, each of which can be selectively affected by disease. This study demonstrates that individuals with PPA show dissociations between fluency and grammatical production in narrative speech. Grammatical ability, and its relationship to fluency, varies from individual to individual, and from one variant of PPA to another, and can even be found in individuals with semantic PPA in whom a fluent aphasia is usually thought to accompany preserved ability to produce grammatical utterances.

Broca’s Area: Rethinking Classical Concepts From a Neuroscience Perspective

Just about one and one-half centuries ago, Paul Broca identified the posterior third left frontal convolution of the human brain as a critical area for speech production. Although years of cerebrovascular accident localization studies partially confirmed Broca’s claim, recent years have seen a clarification and expansion of the role Broca’s area plays in serial processing of language and speech as well as a probable role in nonlinguistic processing. This article will review some of the more recent anatomical and physiological research, including lesion studies, imaging research, and interoperative electrocortical stimulation studies. The article will summarize the research on the role of the human inferior frontal gyrus in lexical, phonologic, and grammatical production, the so-called “mirror mechanism” and other aspects of cognitive processing and motor execution.

Syntax at Age Two: Cross-Linguistic Differences1

The 1990s witnessed a major expansion in research on children's morphosyntactic development, due largely to the availability of computer-searchable corpora of spontaneous speech in the CHILDES database. This led to a rapid emergence of parallel findings in different languages, with much attention devoted to the widely attested difficulties in inflectional morphology in the speech of two-year-olds. First written in 1995, and framed within the terms of contemporary syntactic theories, this article argues that cross-linguistic differences in the distribution of children's morphosyntactic errors provide important clues to the source of the errors, in particular whether they are morphological or syntactic in origin. The article takes as its starting point some striking previous findings that children's verb inflection errors are systematically correlated, on a sentence-by-sentence basis, with errors in the use of overt subjects, and with the use of syntactically complex constructions such as wh-questions. The article shows that these correlations are found in some languages but not in others, and argues that these differences are predictable, based on the verb movement and case licensing properties of individual languages. The article argues that children's errors reflect a combination of grammatical and speech production deficits.

Can a ‘single hit’ cause limitations in language development? A comparative study of Swedish children with hearing impairment and children with specific language impairment

Studies of language in children with mild-to-moderate hearing impairment (HI) indicate that they often have problems in phonological short-term memory (PSTM) and that they have linguistic weaknesses both in vocabulary and morphosyntax similar to children with specific language impairment (SLI). However, children with HI may be more likely than children with SLI to acquire typical language skills as they get older. It has been suggested that the more persisting problems in children with SLI are due to a combination of factors: perceptual, cognitive and/or linguistic. The main aim of this study was to explore language skills in children with HI in comparison with children with SLI, and how children with both HI and language impairment differ from those with non-impaired spoken language skills. PSTM, output phonology, lexical ability, receptive grammar and verb morphology were assessed in a group of children with mild-to-moderate HI (n = 11) and a group of children with SLI (n = 12) aged 5 years 6 months to 9 years 0 months. The HI group tended to score higher than the SLI group on the language measures, although few of the differences were significant. The children with HI had their most obvious weaknesses in PSTM, vocabulary, receptive grammar and inflection of novel verbs. The subgroup of children with HI (five out of 10) who also showed evidence of grammatical output problems was significantly younger than the remaining children with HI. Correlation analysis showed that the language variables were not associated with age, whereas hearing level was associated with PSTM. Children with HI are at risk for at least a delay in lexical ability, receptive grammar and grammatical production. The problems seen in the HI group might be explained by their low-level perceptual deficit and weak PSTM. For the SLI group the impairment is more severe. From a clinical perspective an important conclusion is that the language development in children with even mild-to-moderate HI deserves attention and support.

Grammatical performance of children with language disorder on structured elicitation and narrative tasks

The primary objective was to compare the grammatical output of children with language disorders on different tasks.Sixty‐five children with language disorders, aged six to eleven, completed the syntactic formulation (elicitation) and narrative subtests from the Assessment of Comprehension and Expression 6–11 (Adams et al. 2001). Grammatical variables were computed for the narrative data and their relationship with the syntactic formulation subtest score examined. The use of ten specific constructions was compared in the two contexts.The syntactic formulation score correlated highly with narrative grammatical variables. However, for seven of the ten constructions, the elicitation task was more likely than the narrative to yield specific target structures.Structured elicitation is an efficient normative measure of grammatical production capacity. For specific structures, elicitation and narrative may give a different picture of output. Elicitation is more facilitative and may more closely reflect grammatical knowledge. Target structures were less likely to be used in the narrative, which reflects grammatical performance in a cognitively and linguistically demanding task.

Productivity of lexical categories in French-speaking children with cochlear implants

The productivity of lexical categories was studied longitudinally in a sample of 17 young hearing-impaired French-speaking children with cochlear implants. Age of implantation ranged from 22 months to 76 months. Spontaneous speech samples were collected at six-month intervals over a period of 36 months, starting at the one-word stage. Four general measures of their linguistic production (number of utterances, verbal fluency, vocabulary, and grammatical production) as well as 36 specific lexical categories, according to the CHILDES codes, were computed in terms of tokens, i.e., total number of words. Cochlear-implanted children (CI) were compared to a French database of normally hearing children aged 2–4 compiled by the first author. Follow-up results indicate that, at the two-year post-implantation follow-up, noun, and verb morphology was significantly impaired. At the three-year follow-up, the cochlear-implanted group had recovered on adjectives, determiners and nouns, main verbs, and auxiliaries. The two groups differed significantly in processing locative adverbs, prepositions, pronouns, and verbs (infinitive verb, modal, and modal lexical), but individual variability within the cochlear-implanted group was substantial. Results are discussed in terms of recovery and developmental trends and variability in the acquisition of lexical categories by French children two years and three years post-implantation.

Bidirectionnalité, discontinuités et conflits. Un nouveau regard sur la grammaire traditionnelle française de la première moitié du XXe siècle

ABSTRACT: In this contribution, we offer an analysis of 25 grammars of French which constitute the upper layer of the grammatical production of the first half of the 20th century. It appears from this analysis that traditional French syntax is fundamentally bidirectional. It combines a categorial bottom-up approach (focusing on the use of word classes) and a top-down approach, which originally was purely logical, based on the division of the sentence in semantic / logical constituents. These two perspectives not only produced some 'excesses’, but also led to the problem of the articulation of these two perspectives. Thus, one finds a discontinuity (lack of interface between word and syntactic functions, absence of syntagms or word groups, absence of recursivity) and several 'conflicts’ in the analysis (2 types of complements, 2 classifications of the complements, 2 generic terms for syntactic function, etc.).

Production of grammatical morphemes in Cantonese aphasia

Background: The manifestation of impaired production of closed-class morphemes in Chinese aphasia has been examined in recent years (Lu, 1994; Packard, 1990, 1993; Tzeng, Chen, & Hung, 1991; Yiu & Worrall, 1996). However, these studies employed tasks that either allowed the patients to use avoidance strategies to conceal their impairment or modelled the target morphemes and thus provided cues to the patient. Hence, a contextually highly constrained task was used in this study. Aims: This study aimed at confirming previous observations regarding continuity across clinical types in grammatical morpheme production, dissociable performances among markers of the same morpheme category and among homophonous functors serving different functions, and to identify factors determining the accessibility of grammatical morphemes. Methods & Procedures: The Cloze test without modelling of target morphemes was employed. A wide range of functors were examined including: aspect markers; negative markers; classifiers with sub-types of verbal, sortal, container, and collective classifiers; pronouns encompassing personal, predicative, and adverbial pronouns; coverbs; structural particles including the nominative, adjectival, and adverbial particles, and one modal particle; and structural suffixes including one associated with descriptive complements and one with resultative complements. Six fluent and four non-fluent Cantonese-speaking aphasic patients were involved. They suffered either a head trauma or a unilateral left CVA at least 6 months prior to the first test session. Outcomes & Results: The main findings were largely consistent with previous reports: (1) Pronouns, coverbs, structural and modal particles, and structural suffixes presented greater difficulty to the patients than aspect markers, negative markers and classifiers. (2) Dissociations in performance were found among different members of the same category and between homophonous morphemes serving different functions. (3) Performances of the fluent and non-fluent groups differed quantitatively rather than qualitatively, with better performance on all categories by the fluent group. (4) Neither substitutions nor omissions dominated the error patterns of either aphasia group. Conclusions: The results confirm previous observations that the difference between fluent and non-fluent aphasic patients with regard to the production of grammatical morphemes is non-categorical, and that morphemes of the same category and homophonous markers of different functions may present different degrees of difficulty to the patients. Furthermore, factors including global vs local relationships, conceptual complexity, semantic value, frequency of occurrence, and optionality of occurrence may help determine the relative accessibility of functors.

Assessment of specific language impairment in Swedish

The results from pre-testings of 42 children selected for a cross-linguistic study are discussed to establish the usefulness of the assessment instruments used and whether the children selected are similar to children with specific language impairment (SLI) from other countries. The results from assessments of grammatical production, language comprehension and phonology clearly distinguished children with SLI from age-matched controls, while they differed from language matched controls only on phonological measures. As a group the children with SLI were about 2 years delayed on grammatical production measures and about 1 year on language comprehension. The assessment instruments used thus seem capable of distinguishing children with SLI. The Swedish children selected exhibit the same range of problems as children with SLI selected in other countries.

Language deficits, localization, and grammar: evidence for a distributive model of language breakdown in aphasic patients and neurologically intact individuals.

Selective deficits in aphasic patients' grammatical production and comprehension are often cited as evidence that syntactic processing is modular and localizable in discrete areas of the brain (e.g., Y. Grodzinsky, 2000). The authors review a large body of experimental evidence suggesting that morpho-syntactic deficits can be observed in a number of aphasic and neurologically intact populations. They present new data showing that receptive agrammatism is found not only over a range of aphasic groups, but is also observed in neurologically intact individuals processing under stressful conditions. The authors suggest that these data are most compatible with a domain-general account of language, one that emphasizes the interaction of linguistic distributions with the properties of an associative processor working under normal or suboptimal conditions.

Grammatical production versus grammatical recognition

This paper looks into the errors made by Saudi students in their production and recognition of grammatical structures in English. It was found that the number of errors that Saudi students make in production is higher than that in recognition. This means that Saudi students are less competent in grammatical production than in grammatical recognition.

Children with word-finding difficulties--prevalence, presentation and naming problems.

There is increasing interest from therapists and researchers in children's word-finding difficulties (WFDs). Word finding difficulties are usually considered to be present when children are able to identify a referent from a set of exemplars, but have difficulty producing the target word when shown a picture or in conversation. Word finding difficulties are associated with a number of conversational forms such as delays in the production of a word, the use of long pauses within phrases, frequent use of place holders ('uh', 'um', etc.) and the use of circumlocutions. Although interest is being shown in WFDs, most of the data come from relatively small samples with the result that one knows little about the prevalence of the condition, what circumstances exacerbate the condition, the occurrence of associated difficulties and the types of therapy that are employed. To obtain this information a survey was carried out in the South-East of England of practitioners working with children who have language difficulties. Twenty-three per cent of children in language support services were identified as having WFDs. Most respondents used a mixture of formal and informal assessments. It was reported that WFDs were associated with difficulties in grammatical production, word meaning and grammatical comprehension. WFDs in addition were more likely to occur in situations with high processing demands. A variety of intervention strategies were identified. These findings are discussed in relation to current practice and the authors understanding of the condition.

Language Development in Children with Simple-Partial Left-Hemisphere Epilepsy

The nature of cerebral involvement in the acquisition of language was addressed in this longitudinal study of children with an early diagnosis of epilepsy with simple-partial seizures (SPE) and with epileptogenic foci localized in the left frontal (LF) lobe. Yearly evaluations of six SPE-LF children on tests of linguistic comprehension (pointing, understanding of narrative, and understanding of prepositions) and production (repetition, lexical diversity, and grammatical production) were carried out between the ages of 3 and 8 years and compared to those of large samples of control children on the same tasks and at each age level. Linguistic production of all children were transcribed, coded, and analyzed using the Child Language Data Exchange System (MacWhinney & Snow, 1991). Individual evolution trajectories revealed that SPE-LF children showed a clear dissociation in linguistic performance between comprehension and production. Linguistic comprehension gradually improved to reach normal performance levels by age 7 while linguistic production, even at later stages, remained quite poor. This dissociation in the development of linguistic performance in SPE-LF children suggests a complex interplay between brain maturation dynamics and dysfunction modulating the succession of stages in language development. The observed persistent deficits in specific aspects of linguistic performance argue for an early involvement of the anterior areas of the left cerebral hemisphere in the production of language.

La Gramaticografía Del Siglo xviii, entre Tradición y Reorientación

SummaryWith the transition from the so-called ‘Golden Ages’ to the age of Enlightenment, Spain lost its political and cultural hegemony to its northern neighbour, France. In the field of the language studies, this change is evident especially in the area of lexicography: theDiccionario de la Real Academia Española(1726–1739) was soon modeled after theDictionnaire de l’Académie Française(1694). In grammaticography, things seem to have been different, at least if one listens to those few historians of linguistics who payed attention to 18th-century Spanish linguistics. The overall judgements range from ‘a total lack of good grammar’ to a ‘complete disregard of modern [i.e., French] theories’. However, a closer look at the grammatical production of the time does not confirm any of these assessments. Apart from Latin grammars in the tradition of Nebrija and bilingual Spanish-French grammars clearly influenced by contemporary French theories, there are a tradition of monolingual grammaticography, which are totally up-to-date on contemporary European grammatical discussions, focussed, as they were, on the teachings of Port-Royal. TheGramática de la lengua castellanaof the Spanish Royal Academy follows along the same lines by developing even more the logical approach to grammatical description. Before starting to write down the final version of their grammar, the Academicians even went as far as to study dozens of grammars of other languages, old and new, Western as well as non-Western, in order to get a more general linguistic framework and to follow more closely the theories of the scholar who, in the eyes of the grammarians of Port-Royal, was the starting point of ‘modern’ linguistics, the Spaniard Francisco Sanchez de las Brozas (1523–1600/1601).