Syntactic Comprehension Research Articles

Training with cognitive sequences improves syntactic comprehension in agrammatic aphasics.

A major open question in cognitive neuroscience concerns the modularity of language: does human language rely, in part, on neural processes that are not language specific? Such reliance would predict that learning should transfer between non-linguistic and linguistic domains via this common neural basis. To test this prediction, we studied effects of non-linguistic cognitive sequence training on syntactic comprehension of six left-hemisphere damaged aphasic patients. Syntactic comprehension impairment was quantified before and after 10 weeks of training on a non-linguistic sequence processing task. This task used a transformational rule specifically corresponding to the transformation required for understanding a particular type of sentence referred to as relativised. Non-linguistic sequencing improved significantly with training (day effect: F(9,45)=3.7, <0.005). Moreover, a significant transfer of this improvement was observed for relativised, but not active nor passive sentences (pre-post x type interaction: F(2,10)=4.72, <0.05). The specificity of this transfer indicates that language relies partially on functional and neural processes that are not language specific.

Phonology and syntax in specific language impairment: Evidence from a connectionist model

Difficulties in resolving pronominal anaphora have been taken as evidence that Specific Language Impairment (SLI) involves a grammar-specific impairment. The present study explores an alternative view, that grammatical deficits in SLI are sequelae of impaired speech perception. This perceptual deficit specifically affects the use of phonological information in working memory, which in turn leads to poorer than expected syntactic comprehension. This hypothesis was explored using a connectionist model of sentence processing that learned to map sequences of words to their meanings. Anaphoric resolution was represented in this model by recognizing the semantics of the correct antecedent when a bound pronoun was input. When the model was trained on distorted phonological inputs—simulating a perceptual deficit—it exhibited marked difficulty resolving bound anaphors. However, many other aspects of sentence comprehension were intact; most importantly, the model could still resolve pronouns using gender information. In addition, the model’s deficit was graded rather than categorical, as it was able to resolve pronouns in some sentences, but not in others. These results are consistent with behavioral data concerning syntactic deficits in SLI. The model provides a causal demonstration of how a perceptual deficit could give rise to grammatical deficits in SLI.

Acute conduction aphasia: An analysis of 20 cases

In this study, the linguistic performance of 20 patients with acute conduction aphasia (CA) is described. CA presented as a relatively homogeneous aphasic syndrome characterized by a severe impairment of repetition and fluent expressive language functions with frequent phonemic paraphasias, repetitive self-corrections, word-finding difficulties, and paraphrasing. Language comprehension as assessed by tests of auditory and reading comprehension was only mildly impaired, whereas most patients performed poorly on the Token Test. Verbal-auditory short-term memory was reduced in all patients except one and seems to play a role in associated cognitive deficits, such as impaired syntactic comprehension or reduced mental arithmetics. A follow-up examination of 12 patients showed that CA often resulted in a chronic language deficit. Lesion locations were the posterior temporal and inferior parietal lobe.

On-line syntactic processing in aphasia: Studies with auditory moving window presentation

Twenty-eight aphasic patients with left hemisphere strokes and matched control subjects were tested on an auditory moving windows task in which successive phrases of a sentence were presented in response to subjects’ self-paced button presses and subjects made timed judgments regarding the plausibility of each sentence. Pairs of sentences were presented that differed in syntactic complexity. Patients made more errors and/or took longer in making the plausibility judgments than controls, and were more affected than controls by the syntactic complexity of a sentence in these judgments. Normal subjects showed effects of syntactic structure in self-paced listening. On-line syntactic effects differed in patients as a function of their comprehension level. High-performing patients showed the same effects as normal control subjects; low performing patients did not show the same effects of syntactic structure. On-line syntactic effects also differed in patients as a function of their clinical diagnosis. Broca’s aphasic patients’ on-line performances suggested that they were not processing complex syntactic structures on-line, while fluent aphasics’ performances suggested that their comprehension impairment occurred after on-line processing was accomplished. The results indicate that many aphasic patients retain their ability to process syntactic structure on-line, and that different groups of patients with syntactic comprehension disorders show different patterns of on-line syntactic processing.

Syntactic comprehension in Parkinson's disease: Investigating early automatic and late integrational processes using event-related brain potentials.

Syntactic comprehension in Parkinson's disease: Investigating early automatic and late integrational processes using event-related brain potentials.

Syntactic comprehension in Parkinson's disease: Investigating early automatic and late integrational processes using event-related brain potentials.

Parkinson's disease (PD) has been associated with a general impairment of procedures and with an impairment of syntactic procedures in particular. The present study investigated comprehension processes in PD using event-related brain potentials (ERPs). PD patients and controls listened to sentences that were either correct or syntactically or semantically incorrect. The language-related ERP component correlated with semantic processes (N400) was present in both groups. In the syntactic domain, early automatic processes (early negativity) appeared normal in PD, whereas late integrational processes (P600) were modulated by this disease. The present findings suggest that the basal ganglia primarily do not support early automatic syntactic processes during comprehension but rather support processes of syntactic integration.

Does impaired grammatical comprehension provide evidence for an innate grammar module?

Children with specific language impairment (SLI) have distinctive impairments in the comprehension of sentences that involve long-distance syntactic relationships. This has been interpreted as evidence for impairment in an innate grammatical module. An alternative theory attributes such difficulties to lower level problems with speech perception or deficits in phonological working memory. These theoretical accounts were contrasted using comprehension data from three subgroups: 20 children with SLI, 19 children with mild–moderate hearing loss, and normally developing children matched on age and/or language level. There were close similarities between the hearing-impaired and SLI groups on a measure of phoneme perception. Children with SLI did poorly on tests assessing knowledge of Binding principles and in assigning thematic roles in passive sentences whereas hearing-impaired children performed close to control levels, indicating that poor speech perception cannot account for this pattern of deficit. However, the pattern of errors on syntactic tasks and the relatively weak correlation between different indicators of syntactic deficit seemed incompatible with a modular hypothesis. We propose that limited processing capacity is the principal determinant of deficient syntactic comprehension in SLI.

Sibling resemblance for specific components of linguistic competence in families of speech/language impaired children

We examined performance on specific linguistic tests in 23 English and French speaking families, recruited from clinical and other sources, of children who met the following criteria for specific language impairment (SLI): clinically diagnosed language impairment without peripheral hearing loss, mental retardation (non-verbal IQ≥70), neurological disorder, schizophrenia or autism. Subjects, at least 9 years old, completed a battery of French or English language tests, including derivational morphology, verb tense morphology, grammaticality judgement, syntactic comprehension, and pointing. listening comprehension and WUG pluralization test were analyzed only in the English group. The verb tense morphology (real words) and verb tense morphology (non-real words), respectively, showed non-parametric sibling correlations of 0.39 and 0.35 ( p<0.05, two-tailed) in 38 pairs (mixed gender) from ten French test pedigrees. In the English group, derivational morphology showed significant 0.52 correlation in 41 sibling pairs from the densely affected FE pedigree. After controlling for age, sibling correlation for verb tense morphology (real words) remained significant, and derivational morphology correlation in the FE pedigree was borderline ( p=0.05). Impaired grammatical morphology is a predominant aspect of SLI, and the present study, which requires independent replication, suggests that verb tense morphology and derivational morphology warrant particular attention in future familial and genetic studies.

On the categorization of aphasic typologies: the SOAP (a test of syntactic complexity).

This paper presents a new measure of syntactic comprehension abilities in brain-damaged populations known as the SOAP (Subject-relative, Object-relative, Active, and Passive), along with data supporting its sensitivity and specificity. This assessment tool examines comprehension of sentences (matched for length) of four syntactic construction types: active, passive, subject-relative, and object-relative. Data are presented that indicate that the SOAP provides a sensitive and reliable differentiation of aphasia subgroups. The SOAP's sensitivity in differentiating broad behavioral (anterior/posterior-lesioned) groups is compared to the auditory comprehension component of the Boston Diagnostic Aphasia Examination (BDAE), supporting its sensitivity differentiating between anterior- and posterior-lesioned groups. It is argued that this tool can be an important accompaniment to standard aphasia assessment batteries in more sensitively defining syntactic comprehension deficits.

Comprensión de la sintaxis española por lectores sordos chilenos

The purpose of this study is to explore how Chilean, deaf readers comprehend sentences that contain different syntactic structures in Spanish. Each of the subjects, students and adults, individually completed a test of syntactic comprehension that required them to read a series of printed sentences and act them out with dolls and small objects according to their interpretation of each text. Results showed that, although the adults were more successful in interpreting the sentences than the students, overall, the deaf subjects demonstrated a very defficient level of comprehension of any sentence that deviated from a basic SVO word order consisting of explicit, noun-verb-noun elements. Overextension of the mimimal distance principle and imposition of SVO word order predominated as reading strategies employed by deaf subjects of both age groups.

Comprehension of Reversible Relative Clauses in Specifically Language Impaired and Normally Developing Greek Children

This paper aims to investigate the syntactic comprehension of reversible relative clauses in a group of eight Greek children with specific language impairment (SLI) and two control groups of normally developing children matched on chronological and language age, respectively. An experiment using an acting out procedure was undertaken. Group analysis revealed that SLI children's performance is qualitatively different than that of both control groups. Interpreting the data, processes involved in syntactic comprehension are taken into consideration. It is claimed that processing demands impede SLI children's performance due to a deficit in their competence grammar.

A Developmental Phonological Short-Term Memory Deficit: A Case Study

A developmental case of phonological short-term memory deficit was studied in a highly educated subject. The subject, BS, who had obtained a Ph.D. in molecular biology, demonstrated striking deficits on some short-term memory tasks, particularly for auditorily presented nonword lists. With visual presentation and with meaningful words, he often scored at a normal level. The results indicate a deficit in retaining phonological information but an ability to use visual, lexical, and semantic information to boost recall. Despite this phonological short-term memory deficit, BS scored at a normal level on a syntactic comprehension test and on reading of nonwords. He was impaired, however, on repeated list learning, learning of foreign vocabulary, and transcribing dictated materials. The implications of these results for models of short-term memory and the uses of phonological retention in cognitive processing are discussed.

Cognitive sequence processing and syntactic comprehension in schizophrenia.

It has been repeatedly demonstrated that schizophrenic patients are impaired in the comprehension of sentences with complex syntax. We investigated the hypothesis that this syntactic comprehension impairment in schizophrenia is not a purely linguistic dysfunction, but rather the reflection of a cognitive sequence processing impairment that is revealed as task complexity increases. We tested 10 schizophrenic patients using a standard measure of syntactic comprehension, and a non-linguistic sequence processing task, both of which required simple and complex transformation processing. Patients' performance impairment on the two tasks was highly correlated (r2 = 0.84), and there was a significant effect for complexity, independent of the task. These results are quite similar to those of aphasic patients with left hemisphere lesions. This suggests that syntactic comprehension deficits in schizophrenia reveal the dysfunction of cognitive sequence processing mechanisms that can be expressed both in linguistic and non-linguistic sequence tasks.

Syntactic Comprehension, Verbal Memory, and Calculation Abilities in Spanish-English Bilinguals

This article analyzes the interfering effect of the second language (L2) on the first language (L1) in native Spanish speakers living in the United States. We examined 3 linguistic aspects: (a) syntactic comprehension, (b) verbal memory, and (c) calculation abilities. We carried out 2 different studies. In the 1st study, we studied syntactic understanding in 50 Spanish-English bilinguals. For all participants, L1 was Spanish and L2 was English, and all learned English early in life and had attended English schools. Results for the Spanish Syntactic Comprehension Test (Marcos & Ostrosky, 1995) were compared with the normative results obtained with 40 Spanish monolingual participants. We observed that the closer to the English syntax the sentences were, the easier it was for the participants to understand them. Participants who had been exposed to English between the ages of 5 and 12 outperformed participants exposed to English before 5 years of age. Language preference correlated with syntactic comprehension. Women outperformed men. In the 2nd study, verbal memory and calculation abilities were examined in L1 and L2 in a group of 85 Spanish-English bilinguals. Parallel versions of the different tests were administered in Spanish and English. The results indicated some significant differences between the 2 languages in several verbal learning and calculation ability subtests. Most of the verbal memory subtests were better performed in L1. Scores on tasks measuring speed and calculation accuracy were higher in the participant's native language. Best spoken language proved to be a significant variable in some verbal memory subtests performed in English but not in Spanish. We analyze implications of bilingualism in neuropsychological testing. We also present some suggestions to minimize the bilingualism effect.

The left frontal convolution plays no special role in syntactic comprehension

Grodzinsky's localization claim can be questioned on empirical grounds. The Trace Deletion Hypothesis fails to account for a number of comprehension facts in Broca's aphasia and conduction aphasics show similar comprehension patterns. Frontoparietal systems are recruited during sentence comprehension only under conditions of increased processing load and/or attentional demands.

Syntactic Comprehension Deficits in Alzheimer's Disease

Syntactic comprehension of German patients with dementia of the Alzheimer type was investigated and compared to healthy controls matched with respect to age, sex, and education. Special attention was directed at syntactic structures, which, in contrast to a language like English, are feasible in a grammatically rich language like German. In a sentence picture matching paradigm, only semantically reversible sentences were used. Syntactic complexity ranged from simple active voice sentences to more complex sentences like center-embedded object relative sentences. In comparison to their controls, patients showed a deficit in nearly all categories. Their performance was not influenced by age, but was heavily influenced by the degree of cognitive impairment. Patients with mild cognitive impairment, as defined by a MMSE score of 20 or higher, showed only slight difficulties in syntactic processing, whereas patients with moderate to severe impairment (MMSE < 20) did not perform above chance limits in most syntactic categories. It appears as though syntactic comprehension is only mildly affected in the early stages of Alzheimer's disease and is rather severely impaired in more advanced stages. In the present report, results are discussed in terms of working memory demands for syntactic processing.

From Broca's aphasia to the language module: A transformation too large?

This commentary focuses on the larger implications of Grodzinsky's hypothesis. Although Grodzinsky argues persuasively that the syntactic comprehension deficits in Broca's aphasia involve mainly an inability to comprehend sentences requiring a transformational movement of phrasal constituents, his larger claim for a distinct and dedicated “language organ” in the left hemisphere is much less tenable.

Comprehension deficits of Broca's aphasics provide no evidence for traces

The data provided by Grodzinsky demonstrating a syntactic comprehension deficit in Broca's patients provide no evidence for the theoretical concepts of movement, trace or “trace deletion.” The comprehension deficit data can be more economically accounted for with traditional grammatical concepts that are less theory-internal and more empirically based.

Syntactic comprehension in Broca's aphasic Spanish-speakers: null effects of word order

The syntactic and nonsyntactic strategies used for understanding sentences by Spanish-speaking Broca's aphasic patients in off-line tasks were analysed. It is emphasized that given the characteristics of syntax in Spanish, such as its flexibility (greater freedom in the order of constituents), the function of the direct object with the preposition a (to) and the effect of determiners, research with Spanish-speaking patients will allow for a characterization of specific disorders that cannot be generalized on the basis of research conducted in other languages. A linguistic instrument was applied to 10 Broca's aphasic patients. A forced choice task was used in which the patient listened to 190 different reversible sentences and was asked to select one of four options presented on a plate; each option contained a pair of animals performing a specific act and only one option was correct. The results showed significant differences in the use of syntactic and nonsyntactic strategies. Broca's aphasic patients used only morpho-syntactic marks with high cue validity. No significant effects of word order were found. These findings imply the existence of specific off-line linguistic mechanisms that influence the comprehension in non-fluent aphasic patients.

The complexity of ‘asyntactic’ comprehension: investigations of an unusual dissociation between passives and object relatives

All of the theories of ‘asyntactic’ comprehension assume some sort of hierarchy of syntactic or processing difficulty, although there is a lack of consensus on what this ordering is [Berndt RA, Mitchum CC, Wayland S. Patterns of sentence comprehension in aphasia: a consideration of three hypotheses. Brain Language 1997;60:197–221.]. All incorporate at minimum the supposition that, for most (nonfluent) patients, passives are harder than actives, and object relatives are harder than subject relatives, which are comparable in length, number and type of semantic roles and number of clauses. A minority of studies has found that object relatives may be affected in the absence of vulnerable passives [Ansell BJ, Flowers CR. Aphasic adults' use of heuristic and structural linguistic cues for sentence analysis. Brain Language 1982;16:61–72; Shernoff EH, Blossom-Stach C, Martin RC. Consequences of thematic role therapy for speed of processing. Brain Language 1994;47:512–515; Berndt RA, Mitchum CC, Wayland S. Patterns of sentence comprehension in aphasia: a consideration of three hypotheses. Brain Language 1997;60:197–221.]. This latter pattern is problematic for the trace-antecedent and mapping-deficit accounts, which impute a defective representation or procedure for handling the traces of moved semantic roles, but is explainable under Caplan and Hildebrandt's [Caplan D, Hildebrandt N. Disorders of syntactic comprehension. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1988.] specific deficits hypothesis, as the two differ in type of movement (A- versus A-bar) while still respecting syntactic complexity. This paper presents a case with the reverse dissociation, conflicting with complexity on one of two tasks. As a challenge to all three linguistically-dependent hypotheses, and resource-limitation hypotheses, which also predict ‘complexity’ in parsing and/or mapping, unless a task demand or additional deficit is imputed [e.g. Frazier L, Friederici AD. On deriving the properties of agrammatic comprehension. Brain Language 1991;40:51–66; Miyake A, Carpenter PA, Just MA. Reduced resources and specific impairments in normal and aphasic sentence comprehension. Cognitive Neuropsychol 1995;12:651–679.], the patient's dissociation turned out to be attributable, as Frazier and Friederici [Frazier L, Friederici AD. On deriving the properties of agrammatic comprehension. Brain Language 1991;40:51–66.] predicted, to an interaction between her processing disorder and the task, albeit indirectly. Control studies showed that the patient had the competence to process passives off-line but that her access to or use of passive verb morphology was not effective in real time. This processing disorder became apparent off-line in a task where the passive morphology was unexpected in item-list composition. The dissociation is explained in terms of the relative contributions of controlled and automatic processing to sentence comprehension.