Spyridoula Varlokosta

The breakdown of functional categories in Greek aphasia: Evidence from agreement, tense, and aspect

Background: Verbal inflectional errors are among the most prominent characteristics of aphasic nonfluent speech. Several studies have shown that such impairment is selective: subject–verb agreement is relatively intact while tense is severely impaired. A number of researchers view the deficit as structural and attribute errors to a breakdown of functional categories and their projections. Agrammatic individuals are thought to produce trees that are intact up to the Tense node and “pruned” from this node up. A partial preliminary report of the data was presented at the “Science of Aphasia V” conference in Potsdam in 16–21 September 2004. An earlier version of this paper was presented at the Departmental Seminars of the Department of Language and Communication Science at City University (February 2005) and appeared at the Reading Working Papers in Linguistics 6 (2005). We thank two anonymous reviewers for comments on an earlier version of this paper as well as the two reviewers of Aphasiology for their useful comments and suggestions. We also thank speech pathologists M. Diamanti, A. Xofillis, and M. Moudouris for referring the patients. Note: All co‐authors have contributed equally to this article. Aims: The present study investigates (a) the relative sensitivity of functional categories related to verbal inflection in Greek aphasia and the systematicity thereof; and (b) the relation between patterns of impairment in production and grammaticality judgements. Method & Procedures: We present results from a sentence completion and a grammaticality judgement task with seven Greek‐speaking aphasic individuals and seven control participants matched for age and education. Materials were constructed to assess three functional categories: subject–verb agreement, tense, and aspect. Eight verbs were used, balancing estimated familiarity and regularity of aspectual conjugation. Outcomes & Results: A great variability was observed among participants in overall performance but the pattern of performance was quite systematic. The results indicated that inflectional morphemes are not all impaired to the same degree in Greek aphasia. In both tasks, as a group, patients made more errors in aspect than in agreement. The group differences between tense and the other two conditions did not reach statistical significance. Moreover, a comparison of individual aphasic performance in the three functional categories indicated that in every case in which statistically significant differences were observed among the three functional categories, agreement was found to be less impaired than tense, aspect, or both. Conclusions: These findings do not support a global impairment of inflectional morphemes in aphasia but support a selective one and, in particular, a dissociation between agreement, on the one hand, and tense and/or aspect, on the other hand. Moreover, our findings do not support a hierarchical account along the lines of Friedmann and Grodzinsky (1997) but are compatible with Chomskys (2000) Minimalist Program and with Wenzlaff and Clahsens (2004) tense underspecification theory.

Patterns of syntactic development in children with Williams syndrome and Down's syndrome: Evidence from passives and wh‐questions

This study investigates the syntactic abilities of ten individuals with Williams syndrome (WS) (mean chronological age: 8;9 years; mean mental age: 4;8 years) and Downs syndrome (DS) (mean chronological age: 8;7 years; mean mental age: 4;6 years), matched individually on chronological age, mental age and performance IQ. The syntactic components investigated include the comprehension of passives and the production, comprehension and repetition of wh‐questions. Performance is compared to ten younger typically developing (TD) controls matched individually to both experimental groups on mental age (mean chronological age: 4;4 years; mean mental age: 5;0 years). Participants were given a standardized measure of grammatical ability and non‐standardized tasks exploring the comprehension of active and passive sentences, and the production, comprehension and repetition of a range of wh‐question types: wh‐subject, wh‐object, which NP‐subject and which NP‐object. Participants with WS and DS performed similarly on the standardized measure of grammatical ability, as well as on the experimental tasks that tapped comprehension of passives, and production and comprehension of wh‐questions. Participants with DS performed significantly more poorly than both the WS cohort and TD controls on the repetition of wh‐questions. Both the WS and DS cohorts performed significantly more poorly on most of the syntactic tasks compared to the younger TD controls. Individuals with WS and DS experienced significant difficulties in tasks measuring aspects of syntactic ability and performed more poorly than mental age‐matched TD controls. Implications of these findings, with regards to the debates around language “intactness” in WS, as well as the similarities and differences in language abilities in WS and DS, dependent on age and developmental stages studied, are explored.

Pronominal and anaphoric reference in agrammatism

Abstract Subjects with Brocas aphasia have been shown to display difficulties in on-line and off-line tasks involving personal pronouns and reflexives. Off-line tasks have indicated more errors with pronouns than with reflexives while the reverse has been found in on-line studies. In the present off-line study, the comprehension of sentences containing personal pronouns and reflexives is examined in a group of 10 agrammatic participants. Results indicate that subjects had difficulties with both pronouns and reflexives, particularly with reflexives in sentences that contained a quantificational antecedent, as well as with pronouns in exceptional case marking constructions. It is argued that the low performance that subjects exhibited as a group in pronouns and reflexives indicates two distinct impairments, one that concerns coreference and one that concerns A-dependencies, the latter being a manifestation of a general processing failure to link positions. Poor performance on exceptional case marking constructions compared to simple transitive sentences is claimed to be interpreted within theories for reference assignment that distinguish between the two sentence types.

Moving from theta-positions: pronominal clitic doubling in Greek

Abstract This paper re-examines the doubling of pronominal clitics in Greek. It is argued that clitics are not affixes but full words which move in the syntactic component and (ultimately) target the head of T. As for their position in the phrase marker, it is claimed, following Kayne, R., 1975. French Syntax: The Transformational Cycle. MIT Press, Cambridge, MA and (Philippaki-)Warburton [J Ling 13 (1977) 259], that clitics do not head a functional (clitic) projection [in the sense of Sportiche, D., 1992/1996. Clitic Constructions. Ms, UCLA/In: Rooryck, J., Zaring, L. (Eds.), Phrase Structure and the Lexicon. Kluwer Academic, Dordrecht, pp. 213–276, for instance], but are merged in the internal argument position(s) of V. Being both X 0 and X max (Chomsky, N. 1995. Bare phrase structure. In: Webelhuth, G. (Ed.), Government and Binding Theory and the Minimalist Program. Blackwell, Oxford, pp. 383–439), clitics can undergo movement avoiding the Head Movement Constraint. Two alternative solutions of how this movement proceeds are examined and they are both shown to be consistent with our proposal. Furthermore, it is proposed that the relation between the clitic and its DP-double is that of coindexation, with the double occupying an adjunct position, either a remote one (clitic left/right dislocation), or a v P-internal one (doubling without comma intonation). In fact, we attempt to unify the Clitic Left/Right Dislocation and clitic doubling in the sense that both of them involve an argumental clitic. Finally, we show that despite the fact that Greek has clitics in argumental positions, it does not display a number of properties characteristic of polysynthetic languages.

Time for a step change? Improving the efficiency, relevance, reliability, validity and transparency of aphasia rehabilitation research through core outcome measures, a common data set and improved reporting criteria

Nursing, Midwifery and Allied Health Professions Research Unit, Glasgow Caledonian University, Glasgow, UK Division of Linguistics, University of Athens, Athens, Greece Department of Rehabilitation Sciences, Cyprus University of Technology, Limassol, Cyprus Department of English Studies, University of Cyprus, Nicosia, Cyprus University of Valencia, Valencia, Spain Language Theory and Communication Sciences Department, Division of Internal Medicine, Karolinska Institutet, Stockholm, Sweden Division of Linguistics, University of Athens, Athens, Greece on behalf of the Collaboration of Aphasia Trialists

A cross-linguistic study of the acquisition of clitic and pronoun production

ABSTRACT This study develops a single elicitation method to test the acquisition of third-person pronominal objects in 5-year-olds for 16 languages. This methodology allows us to compare the acquisition of pronominals in languages that lack object clitics (“pronoun languages”) with languages that employ clitics in the relevant context (“clitic languages”), thus establishing a robust cross-linguistic baseline in the domain of clitic and pronoun production for 5-year-olds. High rates of pronominal production are found in our results, indicating that children have the relevant pragmatic knowledge required to select a pronominal in the discourse setting involved in the experiment as well as the relevant morphosyntactic knowledge involved in the production of pronominals. It is legitimate to conclude from our data that a child who at age 5 is not able to produce any or few pronominals is a child at risk for language impairment. In this way, pronominal production can be taken as a developmental marker, provided that one takes into account certain cross-linguistic differences discussed in the article.

Case morphology and word order in second language Turkish: Evidence from Greek learners

The optional use of morphology attested in second language learners has been attributed either to a representational deficit or to a ‘surface’ problem with respect to the realization of inflectional affixes. In this article we contribute to this issue by providing empirical data from the early interlanguage of Greek learners of Turkish. Three experiments have been conducted, a cloze task, a sentence picture matching task and an on-line grammaticality judgement task, in order to investigate case morphology and its interaction with word order constraints. The findings of all three experiments point towards a variable use of case morphology, which is also observed in previous studies of Turkish as a second language (L2). Moreover, they show clearly that the learners face difficulties with non-canonical word orders as well as with the interaction of word order constraints and Case. On the other hand, the learners performed well on verbal inflections. On the basis of these findings, we argue that the developmental patterns in the early stages of L2 acquisition cannot be attributed to a global lack of functional categories but rather to more localized difficulties, which seem to be related to (a) whether the features in the L2 are grammaticalized in the first language and (b) the way these features are encoded in the morphosyntax of the first language. Moreover, we claim that processing factors and the specific properties of the morphological paradigms affect L2 development.

Pronoun Comprehension in Individuals With Down Syndrome: Deviance or Delay?

PURPOSE Results of recent pilot studies suggest that the interpretation of pronouns in individuals with Down syndrome (DS) may follow a pattern unattested in typical development, indicating the presence of a selective deficit targeting the comprehension of reflexive pronouns. These findings come at a time when there is a heated debate surrounding pronoun comprehension in typical development as well. This study aims to contribute to these debates by examining pronoun comprehension in Greek, a language that exhibits unusual patterns in pronoun comprehension in typical development. METHOD Seven Greek-speaking individuals with DS and a control group of 14 typically developing (TD) children were tested. The authors examined the comprehension of strong pronouns, reflexive pronouns, and pronominal clitics, using a picture selection task. RESULTS The data reveal evidence of deviant pronoun comprehension in individuals with DS compared with the TD group. The DS group encountered problems in the interpretation of reflexive pronouns when compared with the TD group, while the performance of the two groups was comparable in all remaining conditions. CONCLUSIONS Findings are in line with the selective deficit model of language comprehension in DS, supporting the presence of a cross-linguistic reflexive deficit.

A bound pronoun in modern Greek

Modern Greekidhios has different properties depending on its grammatical function. Non-Subjectidhios must have a binder but it does not seem to obey the locality restrictions characteristic of anaphors (Iatridou 1986). Furthermore, it cannot occur in embedded questions or relative clauses thought it can be found in noun complement constructions and adjuncts. In addition it licenses only sloppy identity interpretations under ellipsis and cannot tolerate split antecedents. Subjectidhios differs in every respect. It need not be bound, it can occur in embedded questions and relative clauses. It does not require a sloppy identity interpretation under ellipsis and it can take split antecedents. We show that these properties ofidhios follow from the assumption non-subjectidhios is an A′-bound pronoun. We derive the properties of subjectidhios by showing that it cannot be a bound pronoun as it is subject to an A′-disjointness constraint typical of bound pronouns.

Wh-questions and relative clauses in Greek agrammatism : Evidence from comprehension and production

Background: Cross-linguistic studies on the production and comprehension of wh-questions and relative clauses, have revealed selective deficits in agrammatism with better performance observed in (a) subject questions and relative clauses compared to object ones; (b) object non-referential who questions compared to object referential questions; and (c) object what questions compared to object who questions. These selective deficits have been discussed within several neurolinguistic accounts (i.e., D-Linking Hypothesis, Derived Order Problem Hypothesis, and Relativised Minimality), which make different predictions. Limited research on wh-questions and relative clauses has been conducted in Greek agrammatism with inconclusive results, leaving open the question of which linguistic factors affect the agrammatic performance and which account best explains the attested patterns. Aims: The aim of the present study is twofold: (a) to investigate the role of three linguistic factors (syntactic function, referentiality, and φ-features) in the production and comprehension of wh-questions and relative clauses in six agrammatic Greek-speaking participants; and (b) to examine which neurolinguistic account can explain the observed patterns. Methods and Procedures: Two elicitation tasks (one for wh-questions and one for relative clauses) and two picture-pointing tasks (one for wh-questions and one for relative clauses) were used. All tasks targeted the following structures: referential and non-referential (who/what) questions, half with subject and half with object extraction, and relative clauses, half with subject and half with object dependencies. Outcomes and Results: Referentiality had a greater impact οn the production and comprehension of wh-questions compared to the other two linguistic factors under investigation, i.e., syntactic function and φ-feature assignment. Syntactic function did not affect the production or comprehension of relative clauses given that no subject/object dissociations were attested. Conclusion: With respect to wh-questions, the patterns observed in our data can be accounted for within the D-Linking Ηypothesis. The lack of subject/object dissociations attested in relative clauses is attributed to the case mismatch between the head of the relative clause and the relativisation site, and to the high proportion of complementiser omission observed in these structures.