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Inaug.--diss.--Giessen. / Lebenslauf. At head ot title: Aus der Psychiatrischen und nervenklinik der Universität Giessen. "Literaturverzeichnis": p. 19.

Thesis (doctoral)--University of Newcastle upon Tyne, 1993. / BLDSC reference no.: DX176660.

Note: / Grammatical features of Chinese identified as fonnal equivalents to those of Western languages reported to be susceptible to agrammatic deficits were incorporated in a test battery administered to fourteen Chinese.!speaking aphasics in 1987. Results show selective omission of closed-class items in repetition tasks as well as in spontaneous speech by some patients, errors arising from either disregard or misconstrual of such items in their grammaticality judgments, and a tendency to misinterpret sentences other than ones in the canonical SVO word order. Repetition impairment appears to occur independently of asyntactic comprehension and/or poor grammaticality judgment, thus vitiating the argument for a central deficit (Zurif & Caramazza 1976). Errors of omission were committed not only by nonfluent subjects but by all aphasic types, including a Wernicke's aphasic. Further, no substitution errors occurred, not even in the Wernicke's aphasic. This pattern of behavior is interpreted as a function of the structural properties of Chinese. In light of Bates and MacWhinney's (1982, 1987) theory of language use, the reliance on word-order cues for sentence comprehension is attributed to their greater availability, ifnot infallible reliability. These fmdings support the contention that agrammatics have an idiosyncratic grammar (cf. Stemberger 1984, Jarema 1985). / Certains traits grammaticaux des langues occidentales susceptibles d'un desordre agrammatique ont leur equivalent fonnel dans la langue chinoise. Ces traits fonnent Ie noyau d'une serie d'epreuves administrees aquatorze aphasiques chinois. Les resultats montrent l'omission selective des mots appartenant ala classe fennee dans les repetitions et dans Ie langage spontane de cenains patients, des erreurs d'omission invoiontaire ou d'une . fausse interpretation de tels mots dans leurs jugements de grammaticalite, ainsi qu'une tendance amal interpreter des phrases qui ne sont pas dans l'ordre canonique SVO (sujet, verbe, et objet). Le desordre de la faculte de repetition semble etre independant de la comprehension asyntaxique et de Ia capacite de jugement de grammaticalite ou des deux ala fois, ce qui n'est pas compatible avec l'hypothese d'un deficit central (Zurif et Caramazza 1976). Des erreurs par omission ont ete observees non seulement chez les sujets nonfluents mais chez tous les aphasiques, y compris un aphasique de Wernicke. En outre, aucune erreur de substitution n'a ete observee, pas meme chez l'aphasique de Wernicke. Ce comportement est interprete comme etant lie aux characteristiques structurelles de la langue chinoise. Ala lumiere de la throrie de l'utilisation du langage de Bates et MacWhinney (1982, 1987), Ie fait de s'appuyer sur l'ordre des mots pour comprendre des phrases est attribue asa plus grande disponibilite, sinon ason soutien infaillible. Ces donnees soutiennent l'hypothese selon laquelle les agrammatiques possedent une grammaire idiosyncratique (cf. Sternberger 1984, Jarema 1985).

Mesulam's (1982) report describing six patients with a slowly progressive aphasia without accompanying signs of dementia led to the recognition of a syndrome now known as Primary Progressive Aphasia (PPA). Many more patients have been described since Mesulam's description was published: 171 published contacts with 112 patients diagnosed with the syndrome are reviewed in this thesis. However, the published literature is both unsystematic and incomplete, making it difficult to place the findings into a coherent theoretical framework. In addition, no previous work has specifically attempted to specify the difference between PPA and dementia of Alzheimer's type (DAT), although the two disorders are easily confused since many language deficits can masquerade as memory or cognitive deficits. This thesis is an attempt to remedy these short-comings. Using a serial case study approach, the linguistic deficits of 11 PPA patients are analyzed in a cognitive neuropsychological framework, and contrasted with the linguistic deficits of a group of 11 DAT patients. Several tools were developed or refined specifically to manage the details of such an analysis. These include a production system designed to infer functional dissociations in the language system from an analysis of patient performance on a computerized version of the Psycholinguistic Assessment Battery (Caplan & Bub, 1990). Although the results suggest that there is great heterogeneity of symptoms within the PPA population, several deficits which may prove useful in making the differential diagnosis are examined closely, including deficits in reading, abstract word comprehension, auditory comprehension, affixed word processing, and semantic access. Implications of the findings for current models of language processing are discussed.

Independently proposed linguistic analyses permit us to characterize function words and inflectional morphology as one class. These elements are hypothesized to constitute heads of functional projections. In this thesis, the Head Accessibility Hypothesis is proposed to account for the representations aphasics have of lexical and functional projections. It maintains that, as a consequence of the interactional nature of the modular grammar embodied in the principles and parameters version of Government-Binding theory (Chomsky 1982, 1986), syntactic deficits may be due to problems at the level of access to the Mental Lexicon. The implications of this hypothesis for syntactic comprehension in general and for the comprehension of causatives by aphasic patients are tested in a series of batteries administered to nine French aphasics and ten controls. The results support the proposal that the Head Accessibility Hypothesis correctly accounts for the patterns of present and absent linguistic elements in the representations computed by all types of aphasics.

This thesis proposes to lay some of the groundwork for an investigation of the prepositional deficit in aphasia. We observe that (i) the status of the category PREPOSITION is problematic for linguistic theory and (ii) patterns of loss in aphasia do not affect prepositions uniformly. In accordance with the view that such sets of theoretical and aphasiological observations can and must be related, an overview of the structural (linguistic) properties of prepositions, an examination of a compatible sentence processing (psycholinguistic) model, and an exhaustive review of the literature on prepositions and aphasia were undertaken. A set of refined predictive hypotheses was then extracted. Preliminary results from a case study suggest that the theoretical argument/adjunct distinction is indeed valid on a processing level. Furthermore, they suggest it might be useful to re-frame the issue of how prepositional structures are compromised in pathology by considering how verb retrieval problems can affect the processing of those structures.

Inaug.--diss.--Giessen. / Lebenslauf. At head ot title: Aus der Psychiatrischen und nervenklinik der Universität Giessen. "Literaturverzeichnis": p. 19.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Wisconsin--Madison, 1942. / Typescript. Includes abstract and vita. eContent provider-neutral record in process. Description based on print version record. Includes bibliographical references (leaves [246]-258).

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Wisconsin--Madison, 1975. / Typescript. Vita. eContent provider-neutral record in process. Description based on print version record. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 155-163).