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Alzheimer's disease (AD) results in language impairments and higher-level communication problems. Research into the language of people with AD (pwAD) has mainly focused on nouns; however, improved understanding of verb processing by pwAD could improve diagnostic assessments and communicative interventions. This systematic review synthesizes findings of AD's effects on verbs from single-word, sentence, and discourse tasks. Review of 57 studies revealed that pwAD were less accurate than controls on single-word tasks and less accurate with verbs than nouns on these tasks. They had difficulty comprehending sentences featuring multiple verbs or verbs with reversible thematic roles. Discourse production by pwAD was marked by vagueness, including declines in total output and propositional content and a preference for generic verbs and simple syntax. Few studies examining sentence production or discourse comprehension were found. Future research should address relationships between long-term memory and language preservation as well as verb use in discourse., (Copyright © 2021 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.)

We investigated language functions in 32 members of a four generation family with several members affected by Specific Language Impairment with an extensive language test battery in order to determine the prevalence, overlap, and homogeneity of linguistic deficits within one pedigree. In sum, one fourth of all family members tested fulfilled the criteria of Specific Language Impairment. Despite of some similarities in language abilities, different combinations of language deficits were observed, and individual language profiles varied substantially. Thus, though there is a high prevalence of language deficits in this family which raises the likelihood of a genetic origin of these deficits, and though all affected study participants displayed selective linguistic deficits with normal non-verbal functioning, language testing showed considerable variance in overlap and homogeneity of linguistic deficits. Thus, even in one genetic population, an underlying linguistic disorder manifests itself in different language abilities to a variant degree., (Copyright © 2016 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.)

The purpose of the present investigation was to evaluate the contribution of age-at-insult and brain pathology on longitudinal outcome and recovery of pragmatic language in a sample of children and adolescents with traumatic brain injury (TBI). Children and adolescents with mild to severe TBI (n=112) were categorized according to timing of brain insult: (i) Middle Childhood (5-9 years; n=41); (ii) Late Childhood (10-11 years; n=39); and (iii) Adolescence (12-15 years; n=32) and group-matched for age, gender and socio-economic status (SES) to a typically developing (TD) control group (n=43). Participants underwent magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) including a susceptibility weighted imaging (SWI) sequence 2-8 weeks after injury and were assessed on measures of pragmatic language and behavioural functioning at 6- and 24-months after injury. Children and adolescents with TBI of all severity levels demonstrated impairments in these domains at 6-months injury before returning to age-expected levels at 2-years post-TBI. However, while adolescent TBI was associated with post-acute disruption to skills that preceded recovery to age-expected levels by 2-years post injury, the middle childhood TBI group demonstrated impairments at 6-months post-injury that were maintained at 2-year follow up. Reduced pragmatic communication was associated with frontal, temporal and corpus callosum lesions, as well as more frequent externalizing behaviour at 24-months post injury. Findings show that persisting pragmatic language impairment after pediatric TBI is related to younger age at brain insult, as well as microhemorrhagic pathology in brain regions that contribute to the anatomically distributed social brain network. Relationships between reduced pragmatic communication and more frequent externalizing behavior underscore the need for context-sensitive rehabilitation programs that aim to increase interpersonal effectiveness and reduce risk for maladaptive behavior trajectories into the long-term post injury., (Copyright © 2015 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.)

Specific language impairment is associated with enduring problems in language-related functions. We followed the spatiotemporal course of cortical activation in SLI using magnetoencephalography. In the experiment, children with normal and impaired language development heard spoken real words and pseudowords presented only once or two times in a row. In typically developing children, the activation in the bilateral superior temporal cortices was attenuated to the second presentation of the same word. In SLI children, this repetition effect was nearly nonexistent in the left hemisphere. Furthermore, the activation was equally strong to words and pseudowords in SLI children whereas in the typically developing children the left hemisphere activation persisted longer for pseudowords than words. Our results indicate that the short-term maintenance of linguistic activation that underlies spoken word recognition is defective in SLI particularly in the left language-dominant hemisphere. The unusually rapid decay of speech-evoked activation can contribute to impaired vocabulary growth., (Copyright © 2014 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.)

The immediate and long-term neural correlates of linguistic processing deficits reported following paediatric and adolescent traumatic brain injury (TBI) are poorly understood. Therefore, the current research investigated event-related potentials (ERPs) elicited during a semantic picture-word priming experiment in two groups of highly functioning individuals matched for various demographic variables and behavioural language performance. Participants in the TBI group had a recorded history of paediatric or adolescent TBI involving injury mechanisms associated with diffuse white matter pathology, while participants in the control group never sustained any insult to the brain. A comparison of N400 Mean Amplitudes elicited during three experimental conditions with varying semantic relatedness between the prime and target stimuli (congruent, semantically related, unrelated) revealed a significantly smaller N400 response in the unrelated condition in the TBI group, indicating residual linguistic processing deviations when processing demands required the quick detection of a between-category (unrelated) violation of semantic expectancy., (Copyright © 2012 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.)

To determine the areas involved in reorganization of language to the right hemisphere after early left hemisphere injury, we compared fMRI activation patterns during four production and comprehension tasks in post-surgical epilepsy patients with either left (LH) or right hemisphere (RH) speech dominance (determined by Wada testing) and healthy controls. Patient groups were carefully matched for IQ, lesion location and size. RH patients' activation across all tasks was greatest in right hemisphere areas homotopic to areas activated by LH and control participants. Differences in right vs. left dominant hemisphere activation were limited to homologous areas typically activated by language tasks, supporting the hypothesis that language localization following transfer to the RH is the mirror-image of localization in the absence of transfer. The similarity of these findings to those in patients with larger, peri-sylvian lesions suggests that these areas in both hemispheres may be uniquely predisposed to subserve various language functions., (Copyright © 2012 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.)

Behavioral variation in Broca's aphasia has been characterized as boundless, calling into question the validity of the syndrome-based schema and related diagnostic methods of acquired language disorders. More generally, this putative variability has cast serious doubts on the feasibility of localizing linguistic operations in cortex. We present a new approach to the quantitative analysis of deficient linguistic performance, and apply it to a large data set, constructed from the published literature: Comprehension data of 69 carefully selected Broca's aphasic patients, tested on nearly 6000 stimulus sentences, were partitioned in different ways, and subjected to a series of analyses. While a certain amount of variability is indeed evident in the data, our quantitative analyses reveal a highly robust selective impairment pattern for the group: the patients' ability to analyze syntactic movement is severely compromised, in line with the Trace-Deletion Hypothesis. Further analyses suggest that patients' performance on no-movement sentence types exhibits less variation than on sentences that contain movement. We discuss the clinical and theoretical implications of our results.

A think-aloud method was used to examine the content of information available to working memory during narrative comprehension in a CHI population. Twenty severe CHI participants (>1 year post-injury) and 20 controls talked aloud after they read each sentence of story narratives. Trabasso and Magliano's (1996a) verbal protocol analysis was then used to code for the production of inferential and non-inferential clauses and the memory operations that supported inferential clause production. We found that CHI and control groups produced a comparable number of clauses, that inferences dominated narrative comprehension, and that both groups produced more explanatory inferences than predictive or associative inferences. Despite these qualitative similarities, the CHI group demonstrated poorer comprehension, generated proportionately fewer inferences, relied less on retrieval as a memory source for explanatory inferences, and produced more non-inferential clauses and associative inferences.

This paper reports the results of a normative study of the 60-item version of the Boston Naming Test (BNT) in a group of 371 native Dutch-speaking Flemish children between the ages of 6 and 12 years. Analysis of test results revealed that BNT performance was significantly affected by age and gender. The gathered norms were shown to be significantly lower than published norms for comparable North-American children. Error analysis disclosed remarkable similarities with data from elderly subjects, with verbal semantic paraphasias and 'don't know' responses occurring most frequently. Finally, BNT scores were shown to correlate strongly with general intelligence as measured with the Raven Progressive Matrices. The relation between both measures can be of help in the diagnosis of identification naming deficits and impaired word-retrieval capacities.

An adult of above normal intelligence, BL, underwent left hemispherectomy at age five, and subsequently graduated from college and has been regularly employed. Using standardized neuropsychological instruments, previous extensive testing had revealed optimal performance for a hemispherectomized subject. To probe communicative abilities in greater detail, and to examine current questions about linguistic superiority of the left hemisphere and "crowding" of right hemisphere functions, 12 additional protocols were administered. BL performed at normal or above on nearly all protocols. However, performance on production of phonemically complex words was effortful, and deficits were seen on two tests requiring comprehension of linguistic contrasts in prosody (Linguistic Prosody Test) and syntax (the Active-Passive Test). These findings support previous claims of reduced ability in specific, circumscribed linguistic functions in the left hemispherectomized person, and lead to suggestions for further testing of communicative competence in individuals with a single intact hemisphere.

This study investigated the ability to describe and categorize common objects following brain injury. Thirteen subjects with moderate to severe traumatic brain injury (TBI) and 13 noninjured controls participated in this project. The project consisted of 3 parts: 1. A spontaneous condition, 2. A training session, and 3. An application condition. During the spontaneous condition, subjects were asked to describe common objects. Following the spontaneous condition, subjects participated in a multi-trial training session to learn 8 perceptual features. The protocol concluded with an application condition where subjects were asked to apply all 8 features to describe additional objects. Overall, noninjured subjects provided more features than the group with TBI. However, subjects with TBI benefited from the training session, as they were able to learn more features across the repeated trials. Furthermore, both groups performed better during the application condition compared to the spontaneous description of objects. The results indicate that the multi-trial training session was effective in teaching subjects the 8 perceptual features.

Idiom comprehension was assessed in 10 aphasic patients with semantic deficits by means of a string-to-picture matching task. Patients were also submitted to an oral explanation of the same idioms, and to a word comprehension task. The stimuli of this last task were the words following the verb in the idioms. Idiom comprehension was severely impaired, with a bias toward the literal interpretation. Very few errors were produced with words, making impossible to establish a correlation between comprehension of idioms and of individual words. The difficulties in idiom comprehension seemed to be due to the fact that patients rely on a literal-first strategy, accessing a figurative interpretation only when the linguistic analysis fails to yield acceptable results.

In this cross-population study, we use narratives as a context to investigate language development in children from 4 to 12 years of age from three experimental groups: children with early unilateral focal brain damage (FL; N=52); children with specific language impairment (SLI; N=44); children with Williams syndrome (WMS; N=36), and typically developing controls. We compare the developmental trajectories of these groups in the following domains: morphological errors, use of complex syntax, complexity of narrative structure, and types and frequency of evaluative devices. For the children with early unilateral brain damage, there is initial delay. However, by age 10, they are generally within the normal range of performance for all narrative measures. Interestingly, there are few, if any, side specific differences. Children with SLI, who have no frank neurological damage and show no cognitive impairment demonstrate significantly more delay on all morphosyntactic measures than the FL group. Quantitatively, on morphosyntactic measures, the SLI group clusters with those children with WMS who are moderately retarded. Together these data help us to understand the extent and nature of brain plasticity for language development and those aspects of language and discourse that are dissociable.

Profiles of verbal learning and memory performance were compared for typically developing children and for four developmental disorders characterized by different patterns of language functioning: specific language impairment, early focal brain damage, Williams Syndrome, and Down Syndrome. A list-learning task was used that allowed a detailed examination of the process of verbal learning, recall, and recognition (California Verbal Learning Test--Children's Version). Distinct patterns of performance characterized the four disorders. These patterns were consistent with the language deficits typically seen in the disorders, with the exception of a dissociation seen in Williams Syndrome.

We examined the development of some features of morphosyntactic ability, specifically the acquisition of auxiliaries and use of agreement marking, along with sentence processing capacity. We used a conceptually simple task called the Tags Question Task, which is a method for evaluating a number of language processes in the production of a commonly used, familiar linguistic device. We compared the performance of children with early focal lesions (N=21), children with specific-language impairment (N=24), and typically developing children (N=24) matched in age and nonverbal ability; additional analyses involved comparisons of children matched on performance level. The data converge to support a "delayed" development of language behavior in our clinical groups, as overall patterns of performance and age-related changes on individual tag features and tag questions were strikingly similar in all three groups across a number of methods of comparison. Implications for theories of the development of brain-language relationships as they pertain to early focal brain damage, specific-language impairment, and the language acquisition process in typically developing children are discussed.

Grammaticality judgments and processing times associated with violation detection were examined in typically developing children, children with focal brain lesions (FL) acquired early in life, and children with specific language impairment (SLI). Grammatical sensitivity in the FL group, while below typically developing children, was above levels seen in children with SLI. Age effects were noted with developmental changes in sensitivity extending into adolescence. Developmental delays in grammatical processing were particularly pronounced for children with SLI, who showed sensitivity levels below those of younger typically developing children. Sensitivity to agreement violations was also protracted in the SLI group providing further evidence of the vulnerability of morphology, a pattern not unlike that seen in adult aphasics. Findings for the FL group provide compelling evidence of neural and behavioral plasticity in children with early unilateral brain injury. Moreover, results from these children underscore how very different compensatory organization may be compared to profiles seen in adult aphasics who have comparable lesions. In contrast, although it was expected that the SLI children would perform below the typically developing children, the disadvantage seen with respect to the FL group suggests that the underlying pathology responsible for SLI may be more pervasive and less plastic than the focal pathology of children with early brain damage.

In this study, 22 children with early left hemisphere (LHD) or right hemisphere (RHD) focal brain lesions (FL, n=14 LHD, n=8 RHD) were administered an English past tense elicitation test (M=6.5 years). Proportion correct and frequency of over-regularization and zero-marking errors were compared to age-matched samples of children with specific language impairment (SLI, n=27) and with typical language development (TD, n=27). Similar rates of correct production and error patterns were observed for the children with TD and FL; whereas, children with SLI produced more zero-marking errors than either their FL or TD peers. Performance was predicted by vocabulary level (PPVT-R) for children in all groups, and errors did not differ as a function of lesion side (LHD vs. RHD). Findings are discussed in terms of the nature of brain-language relations and how those relationships develop over the course of language learning.

This study examined the nature of verb deficits in 14 individuals with probable Alzheimer's Disease (PrAD) and nine with agrammatic aphasia. Production was tested, controlling both semantic and syntactic features of verbs, using noun and verb naming, sentence completion, and narrative tasks. Noun and verb comprehension and a grammaticality judgment task also were administered. Results showed that while both PrAD and agrammatic subjects showed impaired verb naming, the syntactic features of verbs (i.e., argument structure) influenced agrammatic, but not Alzheimer's disease patients' verb production ability. That is, agrammatic patients showed progressively greater difficulty with verbs associated with more arguments, as has been shown in previous studies (e.g., Kim & Thompson, 2000; Thompson, 2003; Thompson, Lange, Schneider, & Shapiro, 1997), and suggest a syntactic basis for verb production deficits in agrammatism. Conversely, the semantic complexity of verbs affected PrAD, but not agrammatic, patients' performance, suggesting "bottom-up" breakdown in their verb lexicon, paralleling that of nouns, resulting from the degradation or loss of semantic features of verbs.

Eleven children with early focal lesions were compared with 70 age-matched controls to assess their performance in repeating non-words, in learning new words, and in immediate serial recall, a triad of abilities that are believed to share a dependence on serial ordering mechanisms (e.g.,; ). Results for the experimental group were also compared with other assessments previously reported for the same children by. The children with brain injury showed substantial impairment relative to controls in the experimental tasks, in contrast with relatively unimpaired performance on measures of vocabulary and non-verbal intelligence. The relationships between word learning, non-word repetition, and immediate serial recall were similar to those observed in several other populations. These results support previous reports that there are persistent processing impairments following early brain injury, despite developmental plasticity. They also suggest that word learning, non-word repetition, and immediate serial recall may be relatively demanding tasks, and that their relationship is a fundamental aspect of the cognitive system.

Williams syndrome (WMS), a rare neurogenetic disorder, has been in the forefront of research in cognitive psychology for the last 10 years. Studies of grammatical development in 14 Hungarian WMS children are presented: they were examined on tasks testing regular and irregular morphology; measures of digit span were also obtained. Results on the production of accusative and plural forms confirmed for Hungarian that regardless of the frequency of the item, inflected forms of irregulars are harder to produce, and often regularized in WMS, revealing a dissociation between the rules of grammar vs. the mental lexicon. Overall performance on the morphology task is associated with the capacity of phonological short-term memory: subjects with higher span perform better on both tasks. The specification of the surprisingly close relation of phonological short-term memory with the linguistic measures awaits further study.

We examined the morphosyntax of eight left hemispherectomized children at two different stages and compared it to MLU-matched normals. We found that the language of the hemispherectomies paralleled that of their MLU matches with respect to the specific morphosyntactic characteristics of each stage. Our findings provide strong evidence for the presence of functional categories in all early grammars and demonstrate that grammatical development, regardless of its neural substrate, is highly constrained by UG and follows a narrowly determined course. We discuss our findings within a neurobiological framework in which etiology defines the integrity of the remaining hemisphere, which in turn, determines its potential for linguistic reorganization and/or acquisition.

Difficulties in resolving pronominal anaphora have been taken as evidence that Specific Language Impairment (SLI) involves a grammar-specific impairment. The present study explores an alternative view, that grammatical deficits in SLI are sequelae of impaired speech perception. This perceptual deficit specifically affects the use of phonological information in working memory, which in turn leads to poorer than expected syntactic comprehension. This hypothesis was explored using a connectionist model of sentence processing that learned to map sequences of words to their meanings. Anaphoric resolution was represented in this model by recognizing the semantics of the correct antecedent when a bound pronoun was input. When the model was trained on distorted phonological inputs-simulating a perceptual deficit-it exhibited marked difficulty resolving bound anaphors. However, many other aspects of sentence comprehension were intact; most importantly, the model could still resolve pronouns using gender information. In addition, the model's deficit was graded rather than categorical, as it was able to resolve pronouns in some sentences, but not in others. These results are consistent with behavioral data concerning syntactic deficits in SLI. The model provides a causal demonstration of how a perceptual deficit could give rise to grammatical deficits in SLI.

The present paper focuses on two studies, one on English (Schneiderman & Saddy, 1988) and the other on Italian (De Vreese, Neri Rubichi, & Salvioli, 1996), which report on right hemisphere damaged subjects' inability to correctly insert a word or phrase into an already well-formed sentence under certain stimulus conditions. Despite their strikingly similar findings, the results of the studies are interpreted quite differently. Schneiderman & Saddy consider the deficit to be syntactic, while De Vreese et al. view it as occurring at the lexical category or morphological level. An analysis and regrouping of the stimulus items from both studies indicate that a single syntactic interpretation could account for their results. Suggestions are made for further analyses and research to increase our understanding of the syntactic capacities of the intact right hemisphere.

Several studies have suggested that patients with Parkinson's disease (PD) have sentence comprehension difficulty in part because of their limited executive resources. However, these assessments confound the executive resources contributing to sentence comprehension with the resources needed for task performance. In the present study, we used a word detection technique that minimizes task demands in order to evaluate attentional and processing speed resources during the comprehension of simple sentences without subordinate clauses and sentences containing subject-relative and object-relative center-embedded subordinate clauses. We found that PD patients have poor sensitivity to phonetic errors embedded in unbound grammatical morphemes, regardless of the clausal structure of the sentence, suggesting difficulty attending to grammatical morphemes. We also found that PD patients are significantly slowed in their sensitivity to phonetic errors in content words embedded in object-relative center-embedded sentences. Slowed sensitivity to content words in object-relative sentences was correlated with timed executive measures of planning. On a traditional measure of comprehension, these PD patients were impaired for sentences containing object-relative center-embedded clauses compared to sentences with subject-relative center-embedded clauses, and comprehension of object-relative sentences was correlated with executive measures. Our findings are consistent with the claim that limited executive resources for strategic attention and processing speed contribute to the sentence comprehension difficulties of PD patients.

Deficits in pragmatic language ability are common to a number of clinical populations, for example, right-hemisphere damage (RHD), Autism and traumatic brain injury (TBI). In these individuals the basic structural components of language may be intact, but the ability to use language to engage socially is impaired. Despite the nature of these difficulties being well documented, exactly what causes these difficulties is less clear. Furthermore, the current status of causal explanations for pragmatic difficulties across these populations is divergent and sometimes contradictory. This paper explores the empirical validity of three theories that attempt to explain pragmatic language impairment. It is recommended that a new, more convergent approach to investigating the causes of pragmatic language disability be adopted.

Neurofibromatosis, type I (NF-I) is associated with verbal and nonverbal neuropsychological deficits and neuroanatomical anomalies. Few relationships between CNS abnormalities and cognitive function in this population, however, have been found. Reading disabilities and developmental language impairments in the general population have been associated with particular morphologic features in inferior frontal gyrus (IFG) and Heschl's gyrus (HG). We compared the morphology of these regions in children with NF-I and controls. Verbal skills in NF-I were related to IFG morphology, such that individuals with NF-I who showed "typical" gyral patterns in the right hemisphere performed worse across language measures than those showing an extra "atypical" gyrus. A doubling of HG in the left and right hemispheres was also significantly associated with performance on several neuropsychological measures. This is the first study to link regional gyral morphology with language function in NF-I. A possible molecular basis for the observed relationships is discussed.

We report the performance of two patients with lexico-semantic deficits following left MCA CVA. Both patients produce similar numbers of semantic paraphasias in naming tasks, but presented one crucial difference: grapheme-to-phoneme and phoneme-to-grapheme conversion procedures were available only to one of them. We investigated the impact of this availability on the process of lexical selection during word production. The patient for whom conversion procedures were not operational produced semantic errors in transcoding tasks such as reading and writing to dictation; furthermore, when asked to name a given picture in multiple output modalities--e.g., to say the name of a picture and immediately after to write it down--he produced lexically inconsistent responses. By contrast, the patient for whom conversion procedures were available did not produce semantic errors in transcoding tasks and did not produce lexically inconsistent responses in multiple picture-naming tasks. These observations are interpreted in the context of the summation hypothesis (Hillis & Caramazza, 1991), according to which the activation of lexical entries for production would be made on the basis of semantic information and, when available, on the basis of form-specific information. The implementation of this hypothesis in models of lexical access is discussed in detail.

Over the last few decades, the number of studies concerning the role of subcortical structures in cognition has increased due to advances in neuroimaging. We describe the language and speech disturbances found in 16 patients with subcortical lesions (9 in basal ganglia and 7 in thalamus), evaluated by CT scan, MRI, and SPECT. Language assessment included the Boston Diagnostic Aphasia Examination, Boston Naming Test, and Token Test. Motor-articulatory alterations predominated in the non-thalamic group; in the thalamic group, there was a higher frequency of language alterations, especially in naming and auditory comprehension; verbal memory and attentional impairments may have contributed to this. We also found hypoperfusion in cortical language areas, and therefore participation of cortical dysfunction cannot be ruled out.

In comparison to younger adults, older adults demonstrate deficiencies in cognitive and linguistic abilities. Such cognitive factors that decline with age include working memory capacity and inhibitory abilities. The purpose of the present investigation was to measure differences in time course processing of inference revision abilities, as well as working memory, as they exist relative to adult age differences. Fifteen neurologically intact older adults and 15 younger adults participated in this study. A cross-modal lexical priming paradigm was chosen as the measure of the inference revision task; the listening span task of Tompkins, Bloise, Timko, and Baumgaertner (1994) was selected as the measure of working memory. Both groups demonstrated normal priming effects. No age-related differences were found on the working memory measure. Age-related differences did emerge on inferencing abilities. A significant correlation emerged between the older group's performance on comprehending inference revisions and their working memory capacity. Generally, inhibitory abilities and working memory capacity appeared to adversely affect older participant's performance., (Copyright 2002 Elsevier Science (USA).)

We analyzed postsurgery linguistic outcomes of 43 hemispherectomy patients operated on at UCLA. We rated spoken language (Spoken Language Rank, SLR) on a scale from 0 (no language) to 6 (mature grammar) and examined the effects of side of resection/damage, age at surgery/seizure onset, seizure control postsurgery, and etiology on language development. Etiology was defined as developmental (cortical dysplasia and prenatal stroke) and acquired pathology (Rasmussen's encephalitis and postnatal stroke). We found that clinical variables were predictive of language outcomes only when they were considered within distinct etiology groups. Specifically, children with developmental etiologies had lower SLRs than those with acquired pathologies (p =.0006); age factors correlated positively with higher SLRs only for children with acquired etiologies (p =.0006); right-sided resections led to higher SLRs only for the acquired group (p =.0008); and postsurgery seizure control correlated positively with SLR only for those with developmental etiologies (p =.0047). We argue that the variables considered are not independent predictors of spoken language outcome posthemispherectomy but should be viewed instead as characteristics of etiology., (Copyright 2001 Elsevier Science.)

In the study of language acquisition following early brain damage, results have been divergent. On one hand, some studies claim that language eventually resumes to normal, whereas, on the other hand, studies show lasting deficits throughout development. Discrepancies in the results could arise from different etiologies and tests used. This study attempts to determine the extent to which the development of verb production is affected in later development in children who had simple partial epilepsy (SPE). Measures of diversity and fluency of three verb types, namely main verbs, auxiliary and copula verbs, and nonfinite verbs were used on three children diagnosed as SPE and compared to control groups. Our main results show a limited production of auxiliary verbs. Further analysis of their productions suggest a telegraphic style of speech, as reflected by a superior production of nonfinite verb type compared with normal children. These findings are interpreted as reflecting long-lasting consequences of early brain damage with respect to language development., (Copyright 2001 Academic Press.)

This article argues in favor of the hypothesis that computational complexity determines order of acquisition of functional categories by normal children and patterns of impairment vs. relative preservation of these categories in children with Specific Language Impairment. Complexity is defined in terms of the properties of functional categories of the language the (ab)normal child is acquiring. The results of a study on present/past tense production and comprehension, carried out with children with and without Specific Language Impairment confirm the predictions of the computational complexity hypothesis. It is shown that it is easier to compute kernel functional categories than those that introduce further semantic modifications in the sentence., (Copyright 2001 Academic Press.)

The purpose of this article is to document the existence of a group of natural language speakers who display non-target-like production of the syntax at the highest structural level, the C-domain, but produce the syntax of lower structural levels in a target-like way. This group consists of very early L1 learners, children with Specific Language Impairment, adult L2 learners, and patients with Broca's aphasia. The group is established on the basis of data from Swedish and German, but can presumably be discerned for any language. The assumption that the non-target-like production of C-domain syntax is related to Broca's area is discussed, as are some consequences for modern syntactic theory., (Copyright 2001 Academic Press.)

In both language acquisition research and the study of language impairments in Broca's aphasia there is an ongoing debate whether or not phrase-structure representations contain the Complementizer Phrase (CP) layer. To shed some light on this debate, I will provide data on German child language and on German agrammatic Broca's aphasia. Analyses of subordinate clauses, wh-questions, and verb placement indicate that early child grammars do not generate the CP layer yet, whereas the ability to project the CP layer is retained in agrammatism., (Copyright 2001 Academic Press.)

The research reported here focuses on the early acquisition of event structure in German. Based on longitudinal studies from 5 normally developing (ND) and 6 language-impaired (LI) children, a model of "event structural bootstrapping" is presented that spells out how ND children log into the verb lexicon. They project a target-consistent event tree, depicting the head-of-event of transitions. Young LI children, failing to employ this bootstrapping strategy, resort to radically underspecified event representations. The results from a truth-value judgment experiment with 16 ND and 16 LI children showed that ND children perform correctly on transitional verbs, while LI children perform at chance level on the same tasks. These findings are accounted for by the model of event structural bootstrapping to the extent that LI children lack an explicit representation of the head-of-event., (Copyright 2001 Academic Press.)

This paper includes (i) a comparison of the developmental pattern of certain morphosyntactic features in normally developing (ND) Greek children with similar data from a group of children with specific language impairment and (ii) a new analysis of the differences found. The analysis is based on a minimalist notion of LF interpretability. Depending on the feature-specification of lexical items (i.e., [+/- interpretable] at LF), a different route of development follows. In addition, phonological salience of both interpretable and noninterpretable features is argued to play an important role in an account of crosslinguistic differences in both normal and exceptional development., (Copyright 2001 Academic Press.)

A new concept of Agreement (AGR) has been represented as a Formal Feature that can appear in a wide range of different configurations (Chomsky, 1998). A case study from language disorders supports and extends this abstract concept. The child shows no agreement in Inflectional Phrase me can and Determiner Phrase them eyes. We then extend the notion of AGR to include verb-Prepositional Phrase relations, where the child also systematically avoids certain prepositions (go beach). The analysis is supported by intuitional data from compounds (sweep with broom --> broom-swept). We also define a systematic notion of Possible deficit as a premature fixation of functional items which normally require additional Phi-features. The notion of Maximization of Formal Features then emerges as a significant feature of learnability from both a normal and disordered perspective., (Copyright 2001 Academic Press.)

Japanese exhibits two different types of morphological processes. Some morphologically complex predicates are generated within the domain of the lexicon, whereas others are generated outside the domain of the lexicon. An elicited production task involving both types of complex predicates was administered to six Japanese children with specific language impairment (JSLI) and six children with normal language development (JNLD). The JSLI children experienced significant difficulty forming the lexicon-external complex predicates but much less difficulty with the lexicon-internal complex predicates while the performance of the JNLD children exhibited no such asymmetry. These preliminary results suggest that the deficit of SLI affects the ability to construct implicit procedural rules for morphology that are generated outside the lexicon while their lexical operations for morphology that are generated within the domain of the lexicon remain relatively unimpaired., (Copyright 2001 Academic Press.)

This paper aims to investigate the syntactic comprehension of reversible relative clauses in a group of eight Greek children with specific language impairment (SLI) and two control groups of normally developing children matched on chronological and language age, respectively. An experiment using an acting out procedure was undertaken. Group analysis revealed that SLI children's performance is qualitatively different than that of both control groups. Interpreting the data, processes involved in syntactic comprehension are taken into consideration. It is claimed that processing demands impede SLI children's performance due to a deficit in their competence grammar., (Copyright 2001 Academic Press.)

The present study focuses on the relation between a grammatical and a lexical-semantic aspect of verb production. The spontaneous speech of three different populations (normally developing children, agrammatic aphasics, and children with a specific language impairment) has been analyzed with respect to the proportion of finite clauses and the diversity of the produced lexical verbs. The group results show that in the three populations both the proportion of finite verbs and the variability of the lexical verbs is low. When the individual scores are considered, differences between the normally developing children and the language-impaired subjects show up. Whereas in normally developing children verb finiteness and verb variability go hand-in-hand, the reverse relationship between these variables is observed in the agrammatic aphasics and the children with a specific language impairment. Given this reverse relationship, it is probable to assume two separate disorders. We therefore suggest an impairment at the interface level where lexical information and syntactic structure are integrated during sentence production., (Copyright 2001 Academic Press.)

The paper presents a comparison of the development of the Italian determiner system in three different populations: normally developing children, a child recovering from childhood aphasia from the age of 3 years, 9 months, and 11 specific language impairment (SLI) children. Data from Italian normal children provide evidence for the hypothesis (1) that no prefunctional stage exists as far as the determiner system is concerned and (2) that the syntactic properties of determiners play an essential triggering role early on. The analysis of the determiner system in the aphasic child has a double interest. On the one hand, it may help to shed light on some of the intriguing questions concerning this type of disorder; on the other, it may be relevant for the discussion of the notion of agrammatism. Results of the morphosyntactic analysis reveal that, apart from timing differences, recovery from childhood aphasia shares important features with normal development. Differently from mean length of utterance (MLU)-matched normal controls and the aphasic child, SLI children omit determiners significantly more often than almost any other functional category or free morpheme. We will argue that the reasons for the SLI children's atypical behavior have to be sought in the nonaccessibility to or in the misappreciation of one fundamental syntactic property of determiners: their role as elements that assign argumenthood to nominal expressions (Szabolcsi, 1987; Longobardi, 1994)., (Copyright 2001 Academic Press.)

Despite considerable interest in the linguistic dimensions of right-hemisphere (RH) pragmatic language disorders, the cognitive bases for these are rarely examined. This study investigated two alternative explanations. First, RH pragmatic language disorders may reflect failure of the RH to synthesise incoming and preexisting information, verbal and visuospatial. In this case language and visuospatial performance should covary. Alternatively such disorders may reflect damage to executive control of all cognitive processing secondary to frontal system failure. In this case language and executive function would be associated. Further, in the former case, subjects should be insensitive to the plausibility of information, whereas in the latter they would be fixated by the literal meaning of information and therefore highly sensitive to plausibility. Eighteen patients with RH damage were compared to 20 matched controls on a range of language and neuropsychological tasks. Pragmatic performance was generally correlated to RH (visuospatial) function, not to executive function. Nonetheless RH patients were found to have problems ignoring plausibility. Thus the specific RH hypothesis described needs to be reconsidered., (Copyright 2000 Academic Press.)

Discourse production was investigated in 16 patients with left-temporal-lobe epilepsy (LTLE) and 17 neurologically normal relatives. Narrative was elicited with the Joanette and Goulet (1989) eight frame "Cowboy" cartoon on three immediately consecutive occasions. Variables of interest were fluency (words/s), speaking time, and word count. While controls produced increasingly concise forms of the story over repetitions, the TLE group became more verbose. Fluency did not not differentiate the groups. These findings suggest that LTLE is associated with macrolinguistic disturbances. The role of capacity limitations and motivational factors in TLE discourse production is discussed., (Copyright 2000 Academic Press.)

This study reports the reading difficulties of five children following unilateral left hemisphere stroke sustained either before or during the early stages of literacy acquisition. Although each of the children experienced a period of disturbed language processing in the initial stages postonset, at the time of testing none of the children were considered to be clinically aphasic. Yet, on a standardized test of oral reading each of the children achieved a reading age that lagged behind chronological age and marked reading impairments were disclosed in four of the five children. A set of standardized and nonstandardized tests, aimed at measuring aspects of cognitive and spoken language processing that are considered to be important for normal reading acquisition, was administered. Where nonstandardized tests were used, performance of each of the stroke children was compared to that of groups of normally developing control children, closely matched for chronological age. A range of residual deficits in cognitive and spoken language processing was disclosed among the five brain-damaged children that appeared to be associated with their reading impairments. Two children had expectedly poor reading due to a selective impairment in verbal IQ; a specific phonological reading disorder was revealed in two children, each of which had a residual impairment to phonological awareness; and delayed reading acquisition was observed in one child with a general language deficit. It is suggested that when a child suffers damage to the left hemisphere in the early stages of reading acquisition, difficulties with learning to read are likely to ensue and may arise as a consequence of an underlying cognitive or linguistic deficit., (Copyright 2000 Academic Press.)

Syntactic comprehension of German patients with dementia of the Alzheimer type was investigated and compared to healthy controls matched with respect to age, sex, and education. Special attention was directed at syntactic structures, which, in contrast to a language like English, are feasible in a grammatically rich language like German. In a sentence picture matching paradigm, only semantically reversible sentences were used. Syntactic complexity ranged from simple active voice sentences to more complex sentences like center-embedded object relative sentences. In comparison to their controls, patients showed a deficit in nearly all categories. Their performance was not influenced by age, but was heavily influenced by the degree of cognitive impairment. Patients with mild cognitive impairment, as defined by a MMSE score of 20 or higher, showed only slight difficulties in syntactic processing, whereas patients with moderate to severe impairment (MMSE < 20) did not perform above chance limits in most syntactic categories. It appears as though syntactic comprehension is only mildly affected in the early stages of Alzheimer's disease and is rather severely impaired in more advanced stages. In the present report, results are discussed in terms of working memory demands for syntactic processing., (Copyright 2000 Academic Press.)

Twenty children with early focal lesions were compared with 150 age-matched control subjects on 11 online measures of the basic skills underlying language processing, a digit span task, and 6 standardized measures. Although most of the children with brain injury scored within the normal range on the majority of the tasks, they also had a disproportionately high number of outlier scores on the reaction time tests. This evidence for a moderate impairment of the basic skills underlying language processing contrasts with other evidence suggesting that these children acquire normal control of the functional use of language. Furthermore, these children scored within the normal range on a measure of general cognitive ability, suggesting that there is no particular sparing of linguistic functions at the expense of general cognitive functions. Using the MPD procedure (Valdés-Pérez & Pericliev, 1997), we found that the controls and the five clinical groups could be best distinguished with two measures of online processing (word repetition and visual number naming) and one standardized test subcomponent (the CELF Oral Directions subtest). The 12 children with left hemisphere lesions scored significantly lower than the 8 other children on the CELF-RS measure. Within the group of children with cerebral infarct, the nature of the processing disability could be linked fairly well to site of lesion. Otherwise, there was little relation between site or size of lesion and the pattern of deficit. These results support a model in which damage to the complex functional circuits subserving language leads to only minor deficits in process efficiency, because of the plasticity of developmental processes., (Copyright 2000 Academic Press.)

Tallal (1999) defends an earlier presentation of 160 variables predicting classification of 59 children for specific language impairment (SLI) from the statistical criticisms of Zhang and Tomblin (1998). I present here 3 additional reasons why it is wrong to conclude from Tallal's original 1985 analysis and presentation that it is specifically temporal processing variables that underlie SLI. On the contrary, these data lend no support to this position., (Copyright 2000 Academic Press.)