Jean-Luc Nespoulous

Agrammatism in Sentence Production without Comprehension Deficits: Reduced Availability of Syntactic Structures and/or of Grammatical Morphemes? A Case Study

A French-speaking patient with Brocas aphasia--following a left-hemisphere lesion involving the sylvian region but sparing Brocas area--is presented. Like G. Miceli, A. Mazzuchi, L. Menn, and H. Goodglasss (1983, Brain and Language, 19, 65-97) case 2, this patient produces agrammatic speech in the absence of any comprehension deficit. Unlike Micelis patient, though, agrammatic speech can be observed in all sentence production tasks (from spontaneous speech to repetition, oral reading, and writing) whereas production of individual words--be they open class or closed class--is almost always intact. On the basis of extensive (psycho)linguistic testing, it is argued that this patients deficit is not central and not crucially syntactic (at least) at the level of knowledge but seems to disrupt specifically those (automatic?) processes responsible for both retrieval and production of free-standing grammatical morphemes whenever they have to be inserted into phrases and sentences.

Anomia in moderate aphasia: problems in accessing the lexical representation.

This study has two objectives: (1) to determine through the analysis of surface manifestations of anomia whether one or several anomic syndromes exist, (2) to identify the psycholinguistic process at fault in anomia with reference to M. F. Garretts (1982, in A. Ellis (Ed.), Normality and pathology in cognitive functions, London/New York: Academic Press) language production model. Two naming tasks were administered to 24 moderate aphasics. Test A was a standard naming task, and test B was a similar task which included subtests designed to indicate which level of representation was affected whenever patients did not name the target word. The subtests required, respectively, the identification of (a) a conceptual property, (b) two semantic attributes, (c) the first and (d) last syllable of the target word, and (e) the target word itself. Descriptive statistics yielded three groups of subjects different in terms of surface anomic manifestations, yet unrelated to clinical type of aphasia. Moreover, no significant differences between groups emerged on the subtests. All groups showed a good performance on the conceptual and the semantic subtests, suggesting preservation of high-level cognitive and semantic processes. In contrast, subjects evidenced poorer performances in syllabic identification, indicating a disruption of lower level mechanisms which are assumed to retrieve and process formal lexical representations. Results support the view that aphasic anomia originates from a difficulty in accessing the formal lexical representation and not from a semantic problem.

Intrinsic organization of sequences of phonemic approximations: a preliminary study

Abstract The intrinsic organization of sequences of phonemic approximations (SPAs) to a single target were studied in a conduction (C1), and two Wernickes (W1–W2) aphasic patients. Thirty-eight SPAs recorded in conversational speech were analyzed. New methods of analysis were proposed in order to investigate different aspects of these SPAs, such as the degree of approximation to the target, the length of the SPAs, the sensitivity to the number of syllables of the target word and different aspects of phonological information. The analysis revealed that different kinds of SPAs may be distinguished according to their degree of intrinsic organization. Results provide some information as to the functioning of monitoring feedback mechanisms implied in on-line processes of speech production.

Syntactic parsing and the availability of prepositions in agrammatic patients

Abstract The ability of three agrammatic and six non-agrammatic patients to (1) carry out syntactic parsing and (2) access and produce three different types of prepositions—lexical, idiosyncratic and syntactic—was assessed in a new type of sentence-completion test. Contrary to standard versions of such a task, the presence of equal intervals between words in the stimuli sentences (even when no morpheme was indeed missing) allowed to control for initial syntactic parsing as well as for subsequent lexical retrieval and production of the missing preposition. Results suggest (1) that agrammatic as well as non-agrammatic subjects achieved appropriate syntactic parsing; (2) that, even though no clearcut structural effect was evidenced, lexical prepositions tended to be more involved in substitutions than the other subtypes of prepositions; (3) that, error patterns were, in some cases, similar in different clinical types of patients; and (4) that across-patient variability in performance was frequent, even among...