The syntactic characterization of agrammatism

Abstract A new characterization of agrammatism is suggested, based on new data from Hebrew speaking agrammatic aphasics, and a reexamination of data from Russian and Italian. This characterization is formed in relation to linguistic levels of representation. First, the description of agrammatism as omission of closed-class items is challenged on the basis of the data, and a new description is suggested—viewing agrammatism as mis-selection of items + default: in English the default procedure may always be used, but in the other languages discussed, the patient is forced, for structural reasons, to unconscious guessing that results, in many instances, in syntactically aberrant sentences in which each lexical item is well formed. Second, after discussing issues concerning the proper relation between linguistic theories and processing models, a condition on a syntactic level (S-structure) in linguistic theory (Chomsky, 1981) is proposed, to account for agrammatic data from all the languages considered. It is then shown that agrammatic performance in a variety of tasks (including comprehension) is explained naturally as a consequence of this condition. Finally, several related processing issues are discussed. In particular, the relationship between the proposed structural account and the model offered by Bradley et al. (1980).

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