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Abstract:
The hallmarks of receptive agrammatism are impaired
processing of closed-class items and of non-canonical syntactic
structures. The prototypical syntactic deficit is impaired
comprehension of passive and object cleft sentences, but relatively
intact comprehension of active and subject cleft sentences.
Originally reported only in Broca's aphasia, these selective
deficits have been found in a wide variety of neurologically
impaired populations, and in intact normals under stress. Recently,
Dick, Bates, Wulfeck, & Dronkers showed that single and
combined stressors (e.g. noise mask, compressed speech, low pass
filter) superimposed on a sentence interpretation task can evince
an agrammatic profile in normals. The current study extends these
findings by comparing performance in English to that in German, a
language where case and noun-verb agreement morphology as well as
syntax disambiguate agent-patient relations. The results of this
study indicate that sentence comprehension in stressed English- and
German-speaking normals is qualitatively and quantitatively similar
to that of aphasic patients performing equivalent sentence
interpretation tasks in these two languages.
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