Two aphasic patients speaking Brazilian Portuguese and presenting the characteristics of Broca's aphasics were analyzed in relation to their capacities to express null subjects in two different grammatical persons: 1st and 3rd persons. The analysis consisted of looking at the means obtained from the two aphasic patients and their individual…

Acquired aphasics and dyslexics with even very profound word reading impairments have been shown to perform relatively well on the lexical decision task (e.g., Buchanan, Hildebrandt, & MacKinnon, 1999), but direct contrasts with unimpaired participant's data is often complicated by extremely long reaction times for patient data. The dissociation…

We sought to profile the voice acoustical correlates of simulated, or feigned depression by neurologically and psychiatrically healthy control subjects. We also sought to identify the voice acoustical correlates of feigned sleepiness for these same subjects. Twenty-two participants were asked to speak freely about a cartoon, to count from 1 to 10,…

The research tests the prediction of the inhibitory-interaction hypothesis (Wey, Cook, Landis, Regard, & Graves, 1993) that experience with a task accentuates the functional imbalance between the hemispheres. Right-handed males who were experienced readers were presented a letter string to the centre visual field for lexical decision. The string…

The study presented here investigated the role of memory in normal sentence processing by looking at ERP effects to normal sentences and sentences containing grammatical violations. Sentences where the critical word was in the middle of the sentence were compared to sentences where the critical word always occurred in sentence-final position.…

N400 is an event-related brain potential that indexes operations in semantic memory conceptual space, whether elicited by language or some other representation (e.g., drawings). Language models typically propose three stages: lexical access or orthographic- and phonological-level analysis; lexical selection or word-level meaning and associate…

The present study was designed to investigate the relationship between performance of limb gestures and the severity of Alzheimer's disease (AD). Apraxia tends to occur at later stages of AD, and the severity of apraxia has been shown to vary with the severity of AD dementia. Participants were 19 mild (including 9 with no cognitive impairment and…

Limb apraxia is a common symptom of corticobasal degeneration (CBD). While previous research has shown that individuals with CBD have difficulty imitating transitive (tool-use actions) and intransitive non-representational gestures (nonsense actions), intransitive representational gestures (actions without a tool) have not been examined. In the…

The present study reports on the first case of crossed apraxia of speech (CAS) in a 69-year-old right-handed female (SE). The possibility of occurrence of apraxia of speech (AOS) following right hemisphere lesion is discussed in the context of known occurrences of ideomotor apraxias and acquired neurogenic stuttering in several cases with right…

The paper offers a model of language development, first and second, within a processing perspective. We first sketch a modular view of language, in which competence is embodied in the processing mechanisms. We then propose a novel approach to language acquisition (Acquisition by Processing Theory, or APT), in which development of the module occurs…

As an occasional visitor to the land of SLA, I found myself somewhat mystified by the approach of Truscott and Sharwood Smith (henceforth TSS). Unless I have totally misunderstood them, they are arguing against the separate existence of both a Language Acquisition Device (LAD) and a Universal Grammar (UG). But who ever thought they were two?…

Truscott and Sharwood Smith (henceforth T&SS) propose a novel theory of language acquisition, "Acquisition by Processing Theory" (APT), designed to account for both first and second language acquisition, monolingual and bilingual speech perception and parsing, and speech production. This is a tall order. Like any theoretically ambitious…

This keynote article proposes a new model of language development based on processing, the sole mechanism of acquisition for the Acquisition by Processing Theory (APT). The language module--adapted from Jackendoff's distinction between integration (building complex structures) and interface (facilitating information transfer at the intersections…

This essay by Truscott and Sharwood-Smith is a valiant attempt with a laudable goal. It seeks to show how different perspectives and disciplines can capture what is happening in acquisition and notably in L2 acquisition. Nonetheless, I think that the results are much closer to an elaborated grammatical theory than an elaborated processing theory…

Truscott and Sharwood-Smith's (henceforth T&SS's) paper offers an interesting set of hypotheses about one possible processing perspective in research on language acquisition. What is striking about this exposition of their model is that it ignores almost entirely the context of previous research on this issue. Embedding their exposition in its…