Location of lesions in stroke patients with deficits in syntactic processing in sentence comprehension.

Sixty patients, 46 with left-hemisphere strokes and 14 with right-hemisphere strokes, and 21 normal control subjects were tested for the ability to use syntactic structures to determine the meaning of sentences. Patients enacted thematic roles (the agent, recipient and goal of an action) in 12 examples of each of 25 sentence types, which were designed to test a wide variety of syntactic operations. Both right-and left-hemisphere damaged patients performed worse than control subjects on syntactically complex sentences, and left-hemisphere patients performed worse than right-hemisphere patients. Eighteen patients with left-hemisphere strokes underwent CT scanning to image the perisylvian association cortex. There was no difference between the performance of patients with anterior and posterior lesions, and no correlation between the degree of impairment and the size of lesions in different regions of the perisylvian cortex. These results are consistent with the view that syntactic processing involves an extensive neural system, whose most important region is the left perisylvian cortex. When these results are combined with those of other studies, the picture that emerges is one in which, within this cortical region, this system manifests features of both distributed and localized processing.

[1]  T. Shallice,et al.  Deep Dyslexia: A Case Study of , 1993 .

[2]  M. Just,et al.  From the SelectedWorks of Marcel Adam Just 1992 A capacity theory of comprehension : Individual differences in working memory , 2017 .

[3]  A. Damasio,et al.  Lesion analysis in neuropsychology , 1989 .

[4]  J C Mazziotta,et al.  Cerebral glucose metabolism in Wernicke's, Broca's, and conduction aphasia. , 1989, Archives of neurology.

[5]  Colin M. Brown,et al.  The syntactic positive shift (sps) as an erp measure of syntactic processing , 1993 .

[6]  David Caplan,et al.  Processing capacity and sentence comprehension in patients with alzheimer's disease , 1995 .

[7]  Robert Kluender,et al.  Subjacency as a processing phenomenon , 1993 .

[8]  Jack L. Lancaster,et al.  Proceedings of Workshop 1, the Human Brainmap Database Held in San Antonio, Texas on November 29-December 1, 1992. , 1993 .

[9]  S. Kosslyn,et al.  Using locations to store shape: an indirect effect of a lesion. , 1993, Cerebral cortex.

[10]  M. Garrett,et al.  Syntactically Based Sentence Processing Classes: Evidence from Event-Related Brain Potentials , 1991, Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience.

[11]  Lyn Frazier,et al.  Theories of sentence processing , 1987 .

[12]  Lee Osterhout,et al.  Event-related potentials and syntactic anomaly: Evidence of anomaly detection during the perception of continuous speech , 1993 .

[13]  H. Funkenstein,et al.  Broca aphasia , 1978, Neurology.

[14]  N. Geschwind,et al.  Cerebral lateralization. Biological mechanisms, associations, and pathology: I. A hypothesis and a program for research. , 1985, Archives of neurology.

[15]  Myrna F. Schwartz,et al.  Syntactic transparency and sentence interpretation in aphasia , 1987 .

[16]  G. Waters,et al.  Characteristics of syntactic comprehension deficits following closed head injury versus left cerebrovascular accident. , 1990, Journal of speech and hearing research.

[17]  A. Caramazza,et al.  Dissociation of algorithmic and heuristic processes in language comprehension: Evidence from aphasia , 1976, Brain and Language.

[18]  J. Mazziotta,et al.  Cerebellar glucose metabolism in chronic aphasia , 1987, Neurology.

[19]  D. Caplan,et al.  Sentence Comprehension in Patients with Alzheimer′s Disease , 1994, Brain and Language.

[20]  B. Volpe,et al.  Impaired syntactic comprehension and production in Broca's aphasia , 1988, Neurology.

[21]  J. Mazziotta,et al.  Cerebral Glucose Metabolism: Differences in Wernicke's, Broca's, and Conduction Aphasia , 1986 .

[22]  M M Mesulam,et al.  Large‐scale neurocognitive networks and distributed processing for attention, language, and memory , 1990, Annals of neurology.

[23]  D. Caplan Discrimination of normal and aphasic subjects on a test of syntactic comprehension , 1987, Neuropsychologia.

[24]  B. Rosen,et al.  Functional mapping of the human visual cortex by magnetic resonance imaging. , 1991, Science.

[25]  Maryellen C. MacDonald,et al.  Probabilistic constraints and syntactic ambiguity resolution , 1994 .

[26]  Lorraine K Tyler,et al.  Real-time comprehension processes in agrammatism: A case study , 1985, Brain and Language.

[27]  N. Geschwind,et al.  Cerebral lateralization. Biological mechanisms, associations, and pathology: III. A hypothesis and a program for research. , 1985, Archives of neurology.

[28]  K. Poeck Lesion Analysis in Neuropsychology by Hanna Damasio and Antonio R. Damasio, Oxford University Press, 1989. £34.00 (x + 227 pages) ISBN 0 19 503919 X , 1990, Trends in Neurosciences.

[29]  S. Pinker The language instinct : the new science of language and mind , 1994 .

[30]  Lyn Frazier,et al.  Against lexical generation of syntax , 1989 .

[31]  N. Geschwind Disconnexion syndromes in animals and man. I. , 1965, Brain : a journal of neurology.

[32]  D. Caplan,et al.  Syntactic determinants of sentence comprehension in aphasia , 1985, Cognition.

[33]  Myrna F. Schwartz,et al.  Sensitivity to grammatical structure in so-called agrammatic aphasics , 1983, Cognition.

[34]  J. Allman,et al.  Mapping human visual cortex with positron emission tomography , 1986, Nature.

[35]  David E. Kuhl,et al.  Correlations of glucose metabolism and structural damage to language function in aphasia , 1984, Brain and Language.

[36]  T. Reinhart Anaphora and semantic interpretation , 1983 .

[37]  D. Caplan,et al.  Chapter 3. CT-Scan correlates of agrammatism , 1989 .

[38]  A. Galaburda,et al.  Topographical variation of the human primary cortices: implications for neuroimaging, brain mapping, and neurobiology. , 1993, Cerebral cortex.

[39]  R. F. Thompson,et al.  The search for the engram. , 1976, The American psychologist.

[40]  James L. McClelland,et al.  Connections and disconnections: Acquired dyslexia in a computational model of reading processes. , 1989 .

[41]  James L. McClelland,et al.  Mechanisms of Sentence Processing: Assigning Roles to Constituents of Sentences , 1986 .

[42]  G. Salamon,et al.  Proportional localization system for anatomical interpretation of cerebral computed tomograms. , 1985, Journal of computer assisted tomography.

[43]  James L. McClelland,et al.  Sentence comprehension: A parallel distributed processing approach , 1989, Language and Cognitive Processes.

[44]  David Caplan,et al.  Agrammatism in sentence production without comprehension deficits: Reduced availability of syntactic structures and/or of grammatical morphemes? A case study , 1988, Brain and Language.

[45]  E. Renzi,et al.  Normative Data and Screening Power of a Shortened Version of the Token Test , 1978, Cortex.

[46]  David Caplan,et al.  Neurolinguistics and linguistic aphasiology , 1987 .

[47]  A. Galaburda,et al.  Human Cerebral Cortex: Localization, Parcellation, and Morphometry with Magnetic Resonance Imaging , 1992, Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience.

[48]  Lyn Frazier,et al.  Exploring the architecture of the language-processing system , 1991 .

[49]  L. Squire,et al.  Comparison of metabolic rates, language, and memory in subcortical aphasias , 1983, Brain and Language.

[50]  Harold Goodglass,et al.  Contrasting cases of Italian agrammatic aphasia without comprehension disorder , 1983, Brain and Language.

[51]  N. Alpert,et al.  Localization of Syntactic Comprehension by Positron Emission Tomography , 1996, Brain and Language.

[52]  David Caplan,et al.  Assignment of thematic roles to nouns in sentence comprehension by an agrammatic patient , 1986, Brain and Language.

[53]  M. Schwartz,et al.  The word order problem in agrammatism I. Comprehension , 1980, Brain and Language.

[54]  P. Holcomb,et al.  Event-related brain potentials elicited by syntactic anomaly , 1992 .

[55]  J. R. Hughes Cerebral lateralization: biological mechanisms, associations and pathology , 1987 .

[56]  J. Talairach,et al.  Co-Planar Stereotaxic Atlas of the Human Brain: 3-Dimensional Proportional System: An Approach to Cerebral Imaging , 1988 .

[57]  D. Knopman,et al.  Computed tomographic scan correlates of auditory comprehension deficits in aphasia: A prospective recovery study , 1983, Annals of neurology.

[58]  M. Raichle,et al.  A Stereotactic Method of Anatomical Localization for Positron Emission Tomography , 1985, Journal of computer assisted tomography.

[59]  David Caplan,et al.  Disorders of Syntactic Comprehension , 1988 .

[60]  J C Mazziotta,et al.  Temporoparietal cortex in aphasia. Evidence from positron emission tomography. , 1990, Archives of neurology.

[61]  D. Swinney,et al.  An On-Line Analysis of Syntactic Processing in Broca′s and Wernicke′s Aphasia , 1993, Brain and Language.

[62]  F. Sanides THE CYTO-MYELOARCHITECTURE OF THE HUMAN FRONTAL LOBE AND ITS RELATION TO PHYLOGENETIC DIFFERENTIATION OF THE CEREBRAL CORTEX. , 1964, Journal fur Hirnforschung.

[63]  J. Jackson On the nature of the duality of the brain. , 1874 .