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ERIC Number: EJ729827
Record Type: Journal
Publication Date: 2006-Feb
Pages: 12
Abstractor: Author
ISBN: N/A
ISSN: ISSN-0093-934X
EISSN: N/A
A New Empirical Angle on the Variability Debate: Quantitative Neurosyntactic Analyses of a Large Data Set from Broca's Aphasia
Drai, Dan; Grodzinsky, Yosef
Brain and Language, v96 n2 p117-128 Feb 2006
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.
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Publication Type: Journal Articles; Reports - Research
Education Level: N/A
Audience: N/A
Language: English
Sponsor: N/A
Authoring Institution: N/A
Grant or Contract Numbers: N/A