Tense and Agreement dissociations in German agrammatic speakers: Underspecification vs. hierarchy

• Published in: Brain and language Vol. 94; no. 2; pp. 188 - 199
• Main Authors: Burchert, Frank, Swoboda-Moll, Maria, Bleser, Ria De
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: San Diego, CA Elsevier Inc 01.08.2005; Elsevier
• Subjects: Acoustic Stimulation; Adult; Adult and adolescent clinical studies; Agrammatism; Agreement; Aphasia; Aphasia, Broca - physiopathology; Biological and medical sciences; Disorders of higher nervous function. Focal brain diseases. Central vestibular syndrome and deafness. Brain stem syndromes; Female; Functional categories; German; Germany; Humans; Linguistic Theory; Linguistics; Male; Medical sciences; Middle Aged; Nervous system (semeiology, syndromes); Neurology; Organic mental disorders. Neuropsychology; Photic Stimulation; Psychology. Psychoanalysis. Psychiatry; Psychopathology. Psychiatry; Reading; Tense; Tree pruning; Germany; Tense; Agreement; Tree pruning; Functional categories; Agrammatism; Aphasia; German; Human; Nervous system diseases; Language disorder; Grammatical category; Cerebral disorder; Communication disorder; Central nervous system disease; Dissociation; Neurological disorder
• ISSN: 0093-934X; 1090-2155
• DOI: 10.1016/j.bandl.2004.12.006

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, Chomsky, 2000), 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.