Agrammatic Comprehension of Simple Active Sentences With Moved Constituents: Hebrew OSV and OVS Structures

This study examines agrammatic comprehension of object-subject-verb (OSV) and object-verb-subject (OVS) structures in Hebrew. These structures are syntactically identical to the basic order subject-verb-object (SVO) sentence except for the movement of the object to the beginning of the sentence, and...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Journal of speech, language, and hearing research language, and hearing research, 2003-04, Vol.46 (2), p.288-297
Main Authors: Friedmann, Naama, Shapiro, Lewis P
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Adolescent
Adult
Aged
Agrammatism
Aphasia
Aphasia, Broca - physiopathology
Aphasia, Conduction - physiopathology
Audiologists
Audiology
Biological and medical sciences
Care and treatment
Communicative disorders
Comparative studies
Comprehension
Conduction aphasia
Female
Fundamental and applied biological sciences. Psychology
Hebrew language
Humans
Linguistics
Male
Matching tasks
Medical sciences
Middle Aged
Otorhinolaryngology. Stomatology
Psycholinguistics
Sentence structure
Syntactic movement
Task performance
Task Performance and Analysis
Vertebrates: nervous system and sense organs
Citations: Items that this one cites
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Summary:This study examines agrammatic comprehension of object-subject-verb (OSV) and object-verb-subject (OVS) structures in Hebrew. These structures are syntactically identical to the basic order subject-verb-object (SVO) sentence except for the movement of the object to the beginning of the sentence, and thus enable empirical examination of syntactic movement in agrammatic comprehension. Seven individuals with agrammatism, 7 individuals with conduction aphasia, and 7 individuals without language impairment, all native speakers of Hebrew, performed a sentence-picture matching task. The task compared OSV and OVS sentences to SVO sentences and to subject and object relatives. Individuals with agrammatism performed more poorly than those in either of the other groups. Their comprehension of SVO sentences was significantly above chance, but comprehension of OSV and OVS sentences was at chance and was poorer than comprehension of SVO sentences. These results show that agrammatic comprehension of structures that involve movement of a noun phrase is impaired even when the structure is a simple active sentence, in line with the Trace Deletion Hypothesis (TDH; Y. Grodzinsky, 1990, 1995a, 2000). A modification is suggested to accommodate the TDH with the VP Internal Subject Hypothesis, according to which individuals with agrammatism use an "Avoid Movement" strategy in comprehension.
ISSN:1092-4388
1558-9102
DOI:10.1044/1092-4388(2003/023)