Tense and Agreement dissociations in German agrammatic speakers: underspecification vs. hierarchy.
The aim of the present paper was to investigate whether German agrammatic production data are compatible with the Tree-Pruning-Hypothesis (TPH; Friedmann & Grodzinsky, 1997). The theory predicts unidirectional patterns of dissociation in agrammatic production data with respect to Tense and Agreement. However, there was evidence of a double dissociation between Tense and Agreement in our data. The presence of a bidirectional dissociation is incompatible with any theory which assumes a hierarchical order between these categories such as the TPH or other versions thereof (such as Lee's, 2003 top--down hypothesis). It will be argued that the data can better be accounted for by relying on newer linguistic theories such as the Minimalist Program (MP,), which does not assume a hierarchical order between independent syntactic Tense and Agreement nodes but treats them as different features (semantically interpretable vs. uninterpretable) under a single node.
Burchert
Frank
F
Institut für Linguistik, Universität Potsdam, PF 601553, 14415 Potsdam, Germany. burchert@ling.uni-potsdam.de
Swoboda-Moll
Maria
M
Bleser
Ria De
RD
D000161:Acoustic Stimulation; D000328:Adult; D001039:Aphasia, Broca / Q000503:physiopathology*; D005260:Female; D005858:Germany; D006801:Humans; D008037:Linguistics; D008297:Male; D008875:Middle Aged; D010775:Photic Stimulation; D011932:Reading