Two different dysgraphic syndromes in a regular orthography, spanish.

In opaque orthographies, such as English and French, three central dysgraphic syndromes have been described: surface dysgraphia, phonological dysgraphia, and deep dysgraphia. Writing breakdown patterns reveal that spelling can proceed by phoneme-to-grapheme conversion, or by a more direct or lexical approach. Ardila et al. (1989, 1991) claim that for Spanish speakers a lexical strategy for reading and writing is not an option due to the regularity of the orthography of this language. In this study we report two clear cases of dysgraphia in Spanish, one of surface dysgraphia and another of phonological dysgraphia, where a dissociation between lexical and sublexical writing can be observed, thus contradicting Ardila's position.

What is a word? Recognizing polymorphemic lexical items in DLI.

This paper addresses issues of frequency and transparency in word recognition and their importance for the organization of the mental lexicon in Developmentally Language Impaired (DLI) francophones. A simple visual lexical decision task probes responses of DLI and control participants when presented with verbs. DLI participants are sensitive to whole-word frequency and show little or no transparency effects. These results are interpreted as indicating that words are not organized according to "morphological families" in the DLI mental lexicon, but rather according to a principle of frequency. These facts support the hypothesis that words in the DLI mental lexicon lack lexical features and morphological structure.

Does phonological change play a role in the recognition of derived forms across modalities?

This study investigates the way in which phonological change during derivation influences the access of complex words in the on-line performance of English-speaking subjects during word recognition. Three visual lexical decision experiments were administered (cross-modal priming, visual priming and simple). Overall, the results showed that the forms which were subject to phonological change during derivation were always recognized significantly slower than those without phonological alterations. The results confirm the role of phonological change in accessing derived words. They also have important implications for a theory of lexical representation.

Processing compounds: A cross-linguistic study.

This study explores the role of semantic transparency and morphological headedness in the on-line visual recognition of French and Bulgarian compounds using a constituent repetition priming paradigm. The results reported show significant constituent priming effects for both languages. Moreover, distinct priming patterns emerged, demonstrating that the semantic transparency of individual constituents, their position in the string, and morphological headedness interact in the processing of compounds.

The role of morphological structure in the processing of compounds: the interface between linguistics and psycholinguistics.

This study presents a cross-linguistic investigation of lexical access and subjects' sensitivity to the internal morphological structure of compounds in two highly inflected languages, Greek and Polish. The following questions were addressed: Are individual constituents activated during on-line word recognition? To what extent does internal morphological structure play a role during lexical access? Is there an interaction between headedness and constituent-priming given that the inflection that the second constituent carries determines the gender, number, and case of the compound? Our results show activation of individual constituents of compounds during priming, a strong word effect, and a positional advantage for first constituents in spite of the presence of second constituent heads.

The mental representation of singular and plural nouns in Algerian Arabic as revealed through auditory priming in agrammatic aphasic patients.

Working within the theoretical framework of prosodic nonconcatenative morphology developed by McCarthy (1975) for Semitic languages, we addressed, in the present paper, the issues of lexical representation, morphological relatedness, and modes of access in Algerian Arabic--a dialect of Standard Arabic--in an auditory morphological priming experiment. More specifically, we investigated the process of word recognition of singular and plural nouns in the performance of 24 non-brain-damaged subjects and 2 Algerian-speaking agrammatic aphasics. Plurals in Arabic involve either suffixation as in the sound plural (e.g., lbas "dress"/lbasat "dresses"), or stem-internal changes as in the broken plurals (e.g., kursi "chair"/krasa "chairs"). Our findings reveal a differential processing of the two forms, indicating whole word access for broken plurals and decomposition into word and suffix for suffixed plurals. Further, the evidence suggests for Algerian Arabic an architecture of the lexicon reflecting a family-like organization which takes into account language-specific features.

Processing articles and pronouns in agrammatic aphasia: evidence from French.

The hypothesis that closed-class items which participate in theta-role assignment are less problematic in agrammatism than items which do not (Rizzi, 1985) is put to an empirical test. Five French-speaking agrammatic patients were tested in a sentence-picture matching paradigm to probe their comprehension of sentences containing articles, which are not involved in theta-role assignment, and of sentences containing pronouns, which in the direct object position are homophonous with articles and are theta-role assignees. Gender was used as a variable to differentiate between target and distractor. The data indicate that pronouns are significantly more difficult to process than articles. This result disconfirms the claim that the availability of grammatical information encoded in closed-class items is a function of their involvement in theta-role assignment. The present study demonstrates that the ability to process gender marked articles is generally well preserved in French-speaking agrammatic patients.

In sensu non in situ: the prodromic cognitivism of Kussmaul.

Kussmaul's model of language functions is presented, together with antecedent models that have influenced his conception of linguistic processes. The particular interest in this model lies in the fact that it anticipates the modern approach to diagram-making. In contrast to most of his contemporaries, Kussmaul understood that a functional model can, indeed ought to, be developed without being constrained by considerations of localization, as long as the neurological foundations of language remain underspecified. He thus deserves recognition as a pioneer of cognitive neuropsychology.

Impairment of inflectional morphology and lexical storage.

The present study investigates the repetition, comprehension, and production abilities of three French-speaking agrammatic aphasics on stimuli that require attention to the inflectional markers of number, gender, and tense. Two sets of experiments were conducted within a Strong Lexicalist framework. The results suggest that morphological deficits can manifest themselves at distinct levels of grammar, the lexical and the postlexical. The internal morphological structure and idiosyncracies of lexical items were found to have an effect on aphasic performance. A proposal of a differentially organized lexical storage reflecting the particularities of the French verbal system is put forth. The storage hypothesis suggested for verbs is extended to other lexical items.

On comprehension of active/passive sentences and language processing in a Polish agrammatic aphasic.

This paper presents the results of a study of active/passive sentence comprehension by a Polish-speaking agrammatic aphasic. The patient showed good performance on canonically ordered active and passive structures, but performed poorly on inverted variants. The systematically normal and deviant comprehension patterns observed are accounted for by normal interpretative strategies applied to syntactic structures built around verbs with reduced inflectional morphology. The differences between our Polish data and the English data discussed in the literature are explained by the fact that Polish possesses a richer derivational verb morphology. The interpretation of inverted sentences demonstrates the importance of S-V-O word order preference. Our analysis draws upon the notion of grammatical functions to explain the data.