Tense and agreement in German agrammatism.
This study presents results from sentence-completion and grammaticality-judgment tasks with 7 German-speaking agrammatic aphasics and 7 age-matched control subjects examining tense and subject-verb agreement marking. For both experimental tasks, we found that the aphasics achieved high correctness scores for agreement, while tense marking was severely impaired. To account for the observed tense-agreement dissociation, we suggest that the functional category T(ense)/INFL(ection) is tense-defective in agrammatic aphasia, i.e., it is specified for [+/-Realis], but not for [+/-Past]. It will also be argued that other accounts, specifically the tree-pruning model, do not explain our findings.
Wenzlaff
Michaela
M
Department of Linguistics, University of Essex, Colchester C04 3SQ, UK.
Clahsen
Harald
H
D000368:Aged; D000369:Aged, 80 and over; D001039:Aphasia, Broca / Q000175:diagnosis* / Q000523:psychology; D001288:Attention; D001364:Awareness; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D007802:Language; D007807:Language Tests; D008297:Male; D008875:Middle Aged; D009483:Neuropsychological Tests; D011578:Psycholinguistics; D011932:Reading; D012660:Semantics