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Objective Cochlear implants (CIs) provide access to the auditory world for deaf individuals. We investigated whether CIs enforce attentional alterations of auditory cortical processing in post-lingually deafened CI users compared to normal-hearing (NH) controls. Methods Event-related potentials (ERPs) were recorded in 40 post-lingually deafened CI users and in a group of 40 NH controls using an auditory three-stimulus oddball task, which included frequent standard tones (Standards) and infrequent deviant tones (Targets), as well as infrequently occurring unique sounds (Novels). Participants were exposed twice to the three-stimulus oddball task, once under the instruction to ignore the stimuli (ignore condition), and once under the instruction to respond to infrequently occurring deviant tones (attend condition). Results The allocation of attention to auditory oddball stimuli exerted stronger effects on N1 amplitudes at posterior electrodes in response to Standards and to Targets in CI users than in NH controls. Other ERP amplitudes showed similar attentional modulations in both groups (P2 in response to Standards, N2 in response to Targets and Novels, P3 in response to Targets). We also observed a statistical trend for an attenuated attentional modulation of Novelty P3 amplitudes in CI users compared to NH controls. Conclusions ERP correlates of enhanced CI-mediated auditory attention are confined to the latency range of the auditory N1, suggesting that enhanced attentional modulation during auditory stimulus discrimination occurs primarily in associative auditory cortices of CI users. Significance The present ERP data support the hypothesis of attentional alterations of auditory cortical processing in CI users. These findings may be of clinical relevance for the CI rehabilitation.

Purpose Adults with mild-to-moderate age-related hearing loss typically exhibit issues with speech understanding, but their processing of syntactically complex sentences is not well understood. We test the hypothesis that listeners with hearing loss' difficulties with comprehension and processing of syntactically complex sentences are due to the processing of degraded input interfering with the successful processing of complex sentences. Method We performed a neuroimaging study with a sentence comprehension task, varying sentence complexity (through subject–object order and verb–arguments order) and cognitive demands (presence or absence of a secondary task) within subjects. Groups of older subjects with hearing loss ( n = 20) and age-matched normal-hearing controls ( n = 20) were tested. Results The comprehension data show effects of syntactic complexity and hearing ability, with normal-hearing controls outperforming listeners with hearing loss, seemingly more so on syntactically complex sentences. The secondary task did not influence off-line comprehension. The imaging data show effects of group, sentence complexity, and task, with listeners with hearing loss showing decreased activation in typical speech processing areas, such as the inferior frontal gyrus and superior temporal gyrus. No interactions between group, sentence complexity, and task were found in the neuroimaging data. Conclusions The results suggest that listeners with hearing loss process speech differently from their normal-hearing peers, possibly due to the increased demands of processing degraded auditory input. Increased cognitive demands by means of a secondary visual shape processing task influence neural sentence processing, but no evidence was found that it does so in a different way for listeners with hearing loss and normal-hearing listeners.

Referential dependencies for pronouns and reflexives can be established at different linguistic levels. According to the economy hierarchy of dependencies, syntactic dependencies are ‘cheaper’ than semantic dependencies, which are ‘cheaper’ than discourse dependencies. Psycholinguistic research on English and Dutch has shown that the interpretation of reflexives for which discourse operations are needed (i.e., in locative prepositional phrases) is computationally more costly than the interpretation of coargument reflexives that are based on syntactic dependencies only. Similarly, semantic bound variable interpretation has been shown to be less computationally demanding than discourse-based coreference interpretation. The current study investigates these dependencies in German and replicates the finding that semantic bound variable interpretation is cheaper than discourse-based coreference interpretation. In contrast and as predicted by theoretical accounts that postulate a close relationship of the verb and preposition in German that yields chain formation, no difference was found for the reflexives, supporting the idea that reflexives in prepositional phrases in German depend on the same interpretive mechanisms as coargument reflexives, indicating that the underlying syntactic configuration differs from that in other Germanic languages.

Contains fulltext : 204302.pdf (Publisher’s version ) (Open Access) Introduction: Words are not processed in isolation but in rich contexts that are used to modulate and facilitate language comprehension. Here, we investigate distinct neural networks underlying two types of contexts, the current linguistic environment and verb-based syntactic preferences. Methods: We had two main manipulations. The first was the current linguistic environment, where the relative frequencies of two syntactic structures (prepositional object [PO] and double-object [DO]) would either follow everyday linguistic experience or not. The second concerned the preference toward one or the other structure depending on the verb; learned in everyday language use and stored in memory. German participants were reading PO and DO sentences in German while brain activity was measured with functional magnetic resonance imaging. Results: First, the anterior cingulate cortex (ACC) showed a pattern of activation that integrated the current linguistic environment with everyday linguistic experience. When the input did not match everyday experience, the unexpected frequent structure showed higher activation in the ACC than the other conditions and more connectivity from the ACC to posterior parts of the language network. Second, verb-based surprisal of seeing a structure given a verb (PO verb preference but DO structure presentation) resulted, within the language network (left inferior frontal and left middle/superior temporal gyrus) and the precuneus, in increased activation compared to a predictable verb-structure pairing. Conclusion: In conclusion, (1) beyond the canonical language network, brain areas engaged in prediction and error signaling, such as the ACC, might use the statistics of syntactic structures to modulate language processing, (2) the language network is directly engaged in processing verb preferences. These two networks show distinct influences on sentence processing. 15 p.

We introduce here the word-by-word paradigm, a dynamic setting, in which two people take turns in producing a single sentence. This task requires a high degree of coordination between the partners and the simplicity of the task allows us to study with sufficient experimental control behavioral and neural processes that underlie this controlled interaction. For this study, 13 pairs of individuals engaged in a scripted word-by-word interaction, while we recorded the neural activity of both participants simultaneously using wireless EEG. To study expectation building, different semantic contexts were primed for each participant. Semantically unexpected continuations were introduced in 25% of all sentences. In line with the hypothesis, we observed amplitude differences for the P200-N400-P600 ERPs for unexpected compared to expected words. Moreover, we could successfully assess speech and reaction times. Our results show that it is possible to measure ERPs and RTs to semantically unexpected words in a dyadic interactive scenario.

Purpose The purpose of this study was to investigate the processing of morphosyntactic cues (case and verb agreement) by children with cochlear implants (CIs) in German which -questions, where interpretation depends on these morphosyntactic cues. The aim was to examine whether children with CIs who perceive the different cues also make use of them in speech comprehension and processing in the same way as children with normal hearing (NH). Method Thirty-three children with CIs (age 7;01–12;04 years;months, M = 9;07, bilaterally implanted before age 3;3) and 36 children with NH (age 7;05–10;09 years, M = 9;01) received a picture selection task with eye tracking to test their comprehension of subject, object, and passive which -questions. Two screening tasks tested their auditory discrimination of case morphology and their perception and comprehension of subject–verb agreement. Results Children with CIs who performed well on the screening tests still showed more difficulty on the comprehension of object questions than children with NH, whereas they comprehended subject questions and passive questions equally well as children with NH. There was large interindividual variability within the CI group. The gaze patterns of children with NH showed reanalysis effects for object questions disambiguated later in the sentence by verb agreement, but not for object questions disambiguated by case at the first noun phrase. The gaze patterns of children with CIs showed reanalysis effects even for object questions disambiguated at the first noun phrase. Conclusions Even when children with CIs perceive case and subject–verb agreement, their ability to use these cues for offline comprehension and online processing still lags behind normal development, which is reflected in lower performance rates and longer processing times. Individual variability within the CI group can partly be explained by working memory and hearing age. Supplemental Material https://doi.org/10.23641/asha.7728731

There is a high degree of variability in speech intelligibility outcomes across cochlear-implant (CI) users. To better understand how auditory cognition affects speech intelligibility with the CI, we performed an electroencephalography study in which we examined the relationship between central auditory processing, cognitive abilities, and speech intelligibility. Postlingually deafened CI users (N=13) and matched normal-hearing (NH) listeners (N=13) performed an oddball task with words presented in different background conditions (quiet, stationary noise, modulated noise). Participants had to categorize words as living (targets) or non-living entities (standards). We also assessed participants' working memory (WM) capacity and verbal abilities. For the oddball task, we found lower hit rates and prolonged response times in CI users when compared with NH listeners. Noise-related prolongation of the N1 amplitude was found for all participants. Further, we observed group-specific modulation effects of event-related potentials (ERPs) as a function of background noise. While NH listeners showed stronger noise-related modulation of the N1 latency, CI users revealed enhanced modulation effects of the N2/N4 latency. In general, higher-order processing (N2/N4, P3) was prolonged in CI users in all background conditions when compared with NH listeners. Longer N2/N4 latency in CI users suggests that these individuals have difficulties to map acoustic-phonetic features to lexical representations. These difficulties seem to be increased for speech-in-noise conditions when compared with speech in quiet background. Correlation analyses showed that shorter ERP latencies were related to enhanced speech intelligibility (N1, N2/N4), better lexical fluency (N1), and lower ratings of listening effort (N2/N4) in CI users. In sum, our findings suggest that CI users and NH listeners differ with regards to both the sensory and the higher-order processing of speech in quiet as well as in noisy background conditions. Our results also revealed that verbal abilities are related to speech processing and speech intelligibility in CI users, confirming the view that auditory cognition plays an important role for CI outcome. We conclude that differences in auditory-cognitive processing contribute to the variability in speech performance outcomes observed in CI users.

Two experiments investigated the effects of case and verb agreement cues on the comprehension and production of which-questions in typically developing German children (aged 7–10) and adults. Our aims were to determine (a) whether they make use of morphosyntactic cues (case marking and verb agreement) for the comprehension of which-questions, (b) how these questions are processed, and (c) whether the presence and position of morphosyntactic cues available for the listener influence the speaker’s production of which-questions. Performance on a picture selection task with eye tracking shows that children with low working memory make less use of morphosyntactic cues than children with high working memory and adults when interpreting object questions. Gaze data of both groups reveal garden-path effects and revisions for object and passive questions, which can be explained by a constraint-based account. Furthermore, children’s difficulties with object questions are related to the type of disambiguation cue. In a question elicitation task with patient-initial items, children overall prefer production of passives, whereas adults’ productions depend on the availability of disambiguation cues for the listener.

This Event Related Potentials (ERP) study investigates auditory processing of sentences with so-called code-switches in Russian learners of German. It has often been argued that switching between two languages results in extra processing cost, although it is not completely clear yet what exactly causes these costs. ERP presents a good method to (start to) answer this question, since different ERP effects provide insight in the underlying processes that take place. We presented three groups of speakers (German first-language speakers, Russian speakers with intermediate and Russian speakers with very good knowledge of German as a second language) with German sentences that either ended ‘normally’ i.e. with a word that fitted the meaning of the sentence, or with a semantically unexpected word, or with the Russian translation of the semantically normal German word. Comparing the two groups of Russian speakers allows for examining the influence of proficiency on the processing of code-switches. The results showed that the semantically unexpected word elicited an N400 in both the first language (L1) and the more proficient second language (L2) group, but not in the less proficient L2 group. Code-switches resulted in an N400-like pattern in all three groups, and also in a Late Positive Component (LPC), which was most pronounced in the less proficient L2 group. This positivity is, although somewhat later, quite similar to the well-known P300 effect that is found with stimuli with unexpected external properties.

Various types of morphological information can serve as cues to assist comprehension and production of complex sentences, i.e., case and/or gender information. These cues are realized differently in different languages, and thus might have different effects. We examined the effects of case and gender information on comprehension and repetition of wh-questions and topicalization sentences, for German- and Hebrew-speaking typically developing children, and compared between the two languages. The participants were typically developing children, 3–6;8 years old, German- and Hebrew-speaking. Comprehension was examined using a picture-matching task and production by using a repetition task. In half of the sentences the two figures were of the same gender and in half – of different genders. In Hebrew this difference manifests on verb agreement and in German – on the determiner. We compared between the children's performance on the different types of sentences, and between sentences with and without the gender/case cues. Findings show the classical subject–object asymmetry in comprehension and repetition, and display a difference between German and Hebrew in the way cues assist comprehension and repetition. We argue that the difference between the facilitating effect of gender and case information relates to whether it is realized on subject–verb agreement or not.

In syntactic theories of word categorization the status of prepositions as belonging to either a lexical (e.g., nouns, verbs) or a functional category (e.g., determiners, complementizers) is under debate. It has also been suggested that prepositions are a hybrid between the two categories depending on their usage. We investigated this classification question empirically in an ERP study with twelve mono-syllabic German prepositions in lexical (e.g., locative prepositions as in on the table) and subcategorized (e.g., selected by the verb as in waiting for) use. Thirty adult participants listened to sentences containing prepositions either in lexical or subcategorized use. Violations to lexical prepositions elicited an N400 – a component typically associated with lexical-semantic processing. Violations to subcategorized prepositions elicited a P600 – a component typically associated with structural/syntactic processing. In addition to lexical and subcategorized prepositions, the processing of sentence-final nouns following each type of preposition was measured. In both cases P600 effects were elicited. In addition to the positive effect, nouns in the context of incongruent lexical prepositions elicited an N400 effect. These qualitatively different processing results for lexical and subcategorized prepositions (and for nouns in the context of prepositions) suggest that depending on their use prepositions are processed like lexical or like functional words. By providing empirical evidence, we conclude that in terms of syntactic categorization, prepositions should be classified as a hybrid between a lexical and functional category.

Objective: The authors aimed to determine whether hearing impairment affects sentence comprehension beyond phoneme or word recognition (i.e., on the sentence level), and to distinguish grammatically induced processing difficulties in structurally complex sentences from perceptual difficulties associated with listening to degraded speech. Effects of hearing impairment or speech in noise were expected to reflect hearer-specific speech recognition difficulties. Any additional processing time caused by the sustained perceptual challenges across the sentence may either be independent of or interact with top-down processing mechanisms associated with grammatical sentence structure. Design: Forty-nine participants listened to canonical subject-initial or noncanonical object-initial sentences that were presented either in quiet or in noise. Twenty-four participants had mild-to-moderate hearing impairment and received hearing-loss-specific amplification. Twenty-five participants were age-matched peers with normal hearing status. Reaction times were measured on-line at syntactically critical processing points as well as two control points to capture differences in processing mechanisms. An off-line comprehension task served as an additional indicator of sentence (mis)interpretation, and enforced syntactic processing. Results: The authors found general effects of hearing impairment and speech in noise that negatively affected perceptual processing, and an effect of word order, where complex grammar locally caused processing difficulties for the noncanonical sentence structure. Listeners with hearing impairment were hardly affected by noise at the beginning of the sentence, but were affected markedly toward the end of the sentence, indicating a sustained perceptual effect of speech recognition. Comprehension of sentences with noncanonical word order was negatively affected by degraded signals even after sentence presentation. Conclusion: Hearing impairment adds perceptual processing load during sentence processing, but affects grammatical processing beyond the word level to the same degree as in normal hearing, with minor differences in processing mechanisms. The data contribute to our understanding of individual differences in speech perception and language understanding. The authors interpret their results within the ease of language understanding model.

This study compares speech production data of agrammatic aphasic speakers in Dutch, German, and English to examine the relative importance of different properties of determiners and pronouns (such as case, gender, definiteness) in these three languages. Agrammatic aphasic speakers omit determiners and use relatively few pronouns in their speech production. Ruigendijk (2007) compared Dutch and German-speaking agrammatic speakers’ performance and showed that the German group omitted more determiners. The current study adds data from English-speaking agrammatic aphasics to test the hypothesis that the more severe problems in German agrammatism were caused by case morphology, which is not present on Dutch and English determiners. The results show that English patterns with Dutch, and thus support the hypothesis that it is case morphology that makes the German determiners more problematic.

In the course of language acquisition, children interpret pronouns differently from adults. In some languages and ages, children accept “The girl and grandma met, and then the girl drew her” as describing the girl drawing herself. This study tested whether this difficulty is symmetrically reflected in comprehension and production, by assessing the comprehension and production of pronouns and reflexives in children acquiring German and Hebrew. Comprehension was tested using a sentence-picture matching task in 44 German-speaking children aged 3;3-6;2, and 54 Hebrew-speaking children aged 2;4-6;7. Production was assessed using a sentence elicitation task for 44 German-speaking children aged 3;1-6;8, and 60 Hebrew-speaking children aged 2;4-6;7. The results indicate a very clear symmetry between comprehension and production of pronouns in language acquisition. German-speaking children master the comprehension of pronouns and do not allow for local antecedents for pronouns already from age 4;3, and they also do not use pronouns for local antecedents in production. Crucially, the Hebrew-speaking children, who allow local antecedents in pronoun interpretation up to age 6, also produce pronouns with local antecedents (namely, to describe reflexive actions) up to this age. An individual-level analysis of the performance of 50 Hebrew-speaking children who were tested in both comprehension and production yielded a similar symmetrical pattern: the children who incorrectly produced pronouns in the reflexive condition showed the same pattern in comprehension, choosing a reflexive picture (with local antecedent) for sentences with pronouns.

Research on reference assignment points to two types of referential status: d(iscourse)-linked and non-d-linked, which, as the labels suggest are determined by whether or not the entity in question depends on information previously introduced in discourse. In this paper, we examine the online interpretation of the Dutch reflexive zich (‘himself/herself’) as an instance of d-linking. We show that the real-time comprehension behavior of this reflexive supports our claim that d-linking depends strictly on the coargumenthood relation between zich and its antecedent, which is reflected in phrase–structure representation. Here we show that d-linked dependencies in Dutch, just like d-linked dependencies in English, demand increased processing resources for their implementation. Results from an offline questionnaire converge with this conclusion by revealing that acceptability differences are not the source of the increased processing demands. We couch these results in a model of syntax–discourse correspondence built around the notion of coargumenthood that predicts these sources of processing cost and captures the behavior of other related dependencies.

Background: This study explored the relation between the production of determiners and case markers and the production of verbs and verb inflections in agrammatism. Determiners and case markers require case and therefore depend on the existence of case‐assigning constituents. The project on case assignment in Dutch has been carried out under auspices of the Graduate School of Behavioral and Cognitive Neurosciences in Groningen (BCN) and the Center for Language and Cognition in Groningen (CLCG). Naama Friedmann was supported by a university grant for the encouragement of research. We are grateful to Roel Jonkers for providing the Dutch data, and to Roelien Bastiaanse and Aviah Gvion for their comments on a previous version of this paper. Aims: Since verbs and verb inflections are case assigners, and are impaired in agrammatism, we tested whether the presence of verbs and verb inflection affects the production of determiners and case markers in Dutch and Hebrew agrammatism. Methods & Procedures: A total of ...

Studies of agrammatic Broca's aphasia reveal a diverging pattern of performance in the comprehension of reflexive elements: offline, performance seems unimpaired, whereas online—and in contrast to both matching controls and Wernicke's patients—no antecedent reactivation is observed at the reflexive. Here we propose that this difference characterizes the agrammatic comprehension deficit as a result of slower-than-normal syntactic structure formation. To test this characterization, the comprehension of three Dutch agrammatic patients and matching control participants was investigated utilizing the cross-modal lexical decision (CMLD) interference task. Two types of reflexive-antecedent dependencies were tested, which have already been shown to exert distinct processing demands on the comprehension system as a function of the level at which the dependency was formed. Our hypothesis predicts that if the agrammatic system has a processing limitation such that syntactic structure is built in a protracted manner, this limitation will be reflected in delayed interpretation. Confirming previous findings, the Dutch patients show an effect of distinct processing demands for the two types of reflexive-antecedent dependencies but with a temporal delay . We argue that this delayed syntactic structure formation is the result of limited processing capacity that specifically affects the syntactic system.

Agrammatic speech lacks determiners and pronouns. This study investigates if and how syntactic, lexical and pragmatic properties of determiners and pronouns contribute to this lack. We analysed spontaneous speech samples and compared these to control data. The results imply that lexical properties, i.e. gender information, are preserved. Syntactic properties are an important factor, as the relationship between the realisation of case-assigning elements and determiners indicates. Finally, only few pragmatic errors are made, suggesting that pragmatic knowledge is preserved. However, different omission rates for indefinite and definite determiners indicate that pragmatic properties may play a role in the agrammatic problems.

We report results of an experimental study with Dutch agrammatic aphasics that investigated their ability to interpret pronominal elements in transitive clauses and Exceptional Case Marking constructions (ECM). Using the obtained experimental results as a tool, we distinguish between three competing linguistic theories that aim at determining principles responsible for pronoun distribution: Government and Binding ( Chomsky, 1981 ), Reflexivity ( Reinhart & Reuland, 1993 ), and Primitives of Binding ( Reuland, 2001 ). The obtained results are inconsistent with Government and Binding, but consistent with the latter two theories. We further show that the Primitives of Binding framework most naturally explains our results. Our proposal is based on the different performance demonstrated by patients in transitive clauses and ECM constructions, in combination with the often-made claim in the literature regarding the limitation of processing resources in this population (e.g., Haarmann and Kolk, 1991 , Haarmann and Kolk, 1994 , Zurif et al., 1993 , among others).

Agrammatic speech is characterized by the omission and substitution of grammatical morphemes. Some recent papers suggest that certain patterns of omission and substitution are ruled by linguistic, that is, syntactic processes (e.g., Hagiwara, 1995; Friedmann & Grodzinsky, 1997; Bastiaanse & Van Zonneveld, 1998). In the present paper, the omission pattern of case markers in the spontaneous speech of Dutch and German speakers with agrammatic aphasia is analyzed within the framework of Chomsky's (1986) case theory , which says that every phonetically realized NP must receive (abstract) case. The inflected verb (I) assigns nominative case to the subject in the sentence, and the verb (V) assigns dative and accusative case to the indirect and direct object, respectively. This, in combination with the knowledge that verbs and verb inflections are notoriously difficult for speakers with agrammatism, served as the basis for this study. We hypothesize that, if no case assigner is produced, the noun will receive nominative case by default or the case marking morpheme (i.e., the determiner) will be omitted. This hypothesis has been tested and was supported by the data.

To allow for a systematic variation of linguistic complexity of sentences while acoustically controlling for intelligibility of sentence fragments, a German corpus, Oldenburg linguistically and audiologically controlled sentences (OLACS), was designed, implemented, and evaluated. Sentences were controlled for plausibility with a questionnaire survey. Verification of the speech material was performed in three listening conditions (quiet, stationary, and fluctuating noise) by collecting speech reception thresholds (SRTs) and response latencies as well as individual cognitive measures for 20 young listeners with normal hearing. Consistent differences in response latencies across sentence types verified the effect of linguistic complexity on processing speed. The addition of noise decreased response latencies, giving evidence for different response strategies for measurements in noise. Linguistic complexity had a significant effect on SRT. In fluctuating noise, this effect was more pronounced, indicating that fluctuating noise correlates with stronger cognitive contributions. SRTs in quiet correlated with hearing thresholds, whereas cognitive measures explained up to 40% of the variance in SRTs in noise. In conclusion, OLACS appears to be a suitable tool for assessing the interaction between aspects of speech understanding (including cognitive processing) and speech intelligibility in German.

Theoretical accounts of the language production process have claimed that grammatical encoding steps during the formulation stage happen in a largely automatic fashion, unimpeded by other cognitive processes. By eliciting agreement attraction errors, our study tested the effect of external distractor noise on the generation of subject–verb agreement in spoken language. We modelled noisy environments with three different speech-free sounds with spectral, or both spectral and intensity modulation characteristics of speech. In silence and unmodulated noise, we found evidence for a plural mismatch effect, where a plural local noun attracts agreement away from a singular marked head noun. Under modulated noise the error patterns changed, and the number of errors increased in cases where the head noun of the preamble was marked for plural. In addition, background noise led to a reduction of speech rate and a reduction of utterance latency. Our results indicate that unspecific, speech-free noise can create a secondary task load which exerts an influence on the grammatical encoding stage of sentence formulation. We suggest that additional load leads to a slowing down of processing and subsequent difficulty to access the correct number information of the head noun when trying to retrieve an inflected verb form. Subjects overcome this difficulty by resorting to default singular marking on the verb. The results of this study challenge previous claims about the informational encapsulation of the grammatical encoding stage.

Case provides the language user with a rich source of information for conveying meaningful messages in natural language use. Psycholinguistic research has shown that in the intact human language system, the morphologically realised case might help to distinguish the arguments, identify the syntactic function, and trigger certain parsing mechanisms, such as attachment decisions, establishing phrase boundaries, and, thus, providing essential information for comprehension. The question arises if and how a disturbance of the language system as in aphasia affects this ability to use case information. This article starts with a brief introduction to aphasiology, sketching the language problems known to characterise the different aphasic syndromes. It then discusses some important accounts for the aphasic impairment in language comprehension, either directly addressing morphological case in the impaired language system or highly related issues, such as the comprehension of canonical and non-canonical sentences. For production, the emphasis is on cross-linguistic findings on the realisation of case-marked entities such as demonstrative pronouns and pronouns.

This paper discusses the influence of stationary (non-fluctuating) noise on processing and understanding of sentences, which vary in their syntactic complexity (with the factors canonicity, embedding, ambiguity). It presents data from two RT-studies with 44 participants testing processing of German sentences in silence and in noise. Results show a stronger impact of noise on the processing of structurally difficult than on syntactically simpler parts of the sentence. This may be explained by a combination of decreased acoustical information and an increased strain on cognitive resources, such as working memory or attention, which is caused by noise. The noise effect for embedded sentences is less than for non-embedded sentences, which may be explained by a benefit from prosodic information.

The workshop Production-Comprehension Asymmetries in Child Language held in Osnabruck in 2009 is the starting point for this book. The workshopdeveloped fromthe observation that children's production skills appear to precede their comprehension skills in a number of phenomena, e.g. pronouns or negation. The volume provides cross-linguistic evidence for such asymmetric development and investigates grammatical and methodical explanations of the observed asymmetries.

It has repeatedly been shown that agrammatic Broca's aphasics have serious problems with the retrieval of verbs on action naming tests (Miceli, Silveri, Villa & Caramazza, 1984; Kohn, Lorch & Pearson, 1989; Basso, Razzano, Faglioni & Zanobio, 1990; Jonkers, 1998; Kim & Thompson, 2000). Less attention has been paid to the production of verbs at the sentence level (but see Miceli, Mazzuchi, Menn & Goodglass, 1983; Thompson, Shapiro, Li & Schendel, 1995; Thompson, Lange, Schneider & Shapiro, 1997; Bastiaanse & Van Zonneveld, 1998; Bastiaanse, Rispens & Van Zonneveld, 2000; Friedmann, 2000), although it has been mentioned that in agrammatic spontaneous speech verbs are lacking (Saffran, Berndt & Schwartz, 1989; Thompson et al., 1995, but see Bastiaanse & Jonkers, 1998).In this paper, three cross-linguistic studies are discussed to show that these problems with verbs have consequences for other grammatical morphemes and structures that have been mentioned to be impaired in agrammatic speech and that these consequences are different per language, depending on linguistic characteristics. The first study focuses on finiteness and compares the production of finite verbs in matrix and embedded clauses in Dutch and English, showing that a linguistic rule in Dutch (Verb Second), which does not exist in English, can explain the different performance of Dutch and English agrammatic Broca's aphasics. The second study focuses on determiners and (finite) verbs in German and shows that poor determiner production is directly related to poor verb production. The last study demonstrates that the ability to construct negative sentences is dependent on the language specific relation between verb movement and negation: Dutch and Norwegian agrammatics perform equally well on affirmative and negative sentences, whereas English and Spanish agrammatics are more impaired on negative sentences.Overall, these studies show that the problems agrammatics encounter with verbs and their properties have a spin-off on the production of other word-classes and that the characterization 'problems with grammatical morphemes' is too general for telegraphic speech.

We investigated if linguistic complexity contributes to the variation of the speech reception threshold in noise (SRTN) and thus should be employed as an additional design criterion in sentence tests used for audiometry.Three test lists were established with sentences from the Göttingen sentence test ( KollmeierWesselkamp, 1997 ). One list contained linguistically simple sentences, the other two lists contained sentences with two types of linguistic complexity. For each listener the SRTN was determined for each list.Younger and older listeners with normal hearing and older listeners with hearing impairment were tested.Younger listeners with normal hearing showed significantly worse SRTNs on the complex lists than on the simple list. This difference could not be found for either of the older groups.The effect of linguistic complexity on speech recognition seems to depend on age and/or hearing status. Hence, pending further research, linguistic complexity seems less relevant as a sentence test design criterion for clinical-audiological purposes, but we argue that a test with larger variation in linguistic complexity across sentences might show a relation between linguistic complexity and speech recognition even in a clinical population.

We investigated the comprehension of pronouns and reflexives by children and agrammatic aphasics in a cross-linguistic study of Dutch, Spanish and Italian. We compared the interpretation of these elements in transitive and Exceptional Case Marking constructions to be able to distinguish between three important theories on Binding: Government and Binding (Chomsky, 1981), Reflexivity (1993) and Primitives of Binding (2001). The results are in favor of a theory that distinguishes between the interpretation of pronouns in transitive and ECM structures, such as Reflexivity or Primitives of Binding. We propose that a natural explanation follows from Primitives of Binding, combining the notion of economy with the claim that children and agrammatic aphasics have a limited amount of processing resources available for performing syntactic operations. Thus, the economy hierarchy for reference establishment is different resulting in problems with interpretation of pronouns in ECM sentences.

Both German children and adults acquiring Dutch as a second language are tested on their production of determiners and adjectival inflection in attributive position. Both groups tend to overgeneralise the common determiner (de). Children overgeneralise the inflected adjective, while adults make mistakes in two directions: they overgeneralise both the inflected and the uninflected adjective. This age effect is reminiscent of what is found for L2 learners of Dutch with a Turkish and a Moroccan Arabic background (see Blom, Polišenská & Weerman 2006, 2008b), but there are differences as well. The most conspicuous difference is that the German children seem on the right track with respect to the uninflected adjective, whereas the Turkish and Moroccan Arabic children fossilise the inflected variant. It is argued that the L1 background cannot explain this difference and in general only plays a marginal role in the acquisition of Dutch determiners and adjectival inflection. Instead it is suggested that the quality and the quantity of the Dutch input plays a role, alongside the age difference.

In this paper, we investigate the ability of Dutch agrammatic Broca's and Wernicke's aphasics to assign reference to possessive pronouns in elided VP constructions. The assumption is that the comprehension problems in these two populations have different sources that are revealed in distinct patterns of responses. The focus is primarily on the performance of the agrammatic group whose errors in comprehension are not viewed as a consequence of a breakdown of grammatical knowledge but as a result of limited processing resources (for an overview see Grodzinsky, 2000). The results of the present study provide evidence for the psycholinguistic reality of the economy hierarchy as proposed in the Primitives of Binding (Reuland, 2001). According to the economy hierarchy proposed for the non-brain-damaged, the more economical semantic dependencies are preferred over the costlier discourse dependencies. This hierarchy is reflected in agrammatic aphasia where the semantic dependencies are available on time and preferred over the discourse dependences that are not available on time as a result of the lack of processing resources with consequences for comprehension.