Syntactic accounts of agrammatism in English and Scots Gaelic

Author(s): Diane Nelson, Louise Kelly, Richard Shillcock & Ronnie Cann
E-mail: diane@ling.ed.ac.uk

This paper is based on a recent research grant proposal submitted to ESRC entitled `A cross-linguistic investigation into the impairment of functional categories in agrammatism in English and Scots Gaelic'. We outline a theoretically-motivated approach for characterising agrammatism, an acquired language deficit associated with Broca's aphasia. Based on previous experimental results presented in the psycholinguistic and syntactic literature, we suggest following Ouhalla and Tait & Shillcock that agrammatism is the result of impaired access to functional (closed-class) categories when generating syntactic representations. We predict that Broca's aphasic subjects will show a statistically significant number of errors in production, comprehension, and grammaticality judgements crosslinguistically in experimental tasks designed to test the presence of functional categories in syntactic representations. We present a series of experiments designed to test the hypothesis for both English and Scots Gaelic-speaking subjects.

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