The „Tree Pruning Hypothesis“ for Broca’s Aphasia in Bilingual Individuals

Tissen, Andrea and Weber, Sandra and Günther, Thomas (2006) The „Tree Pruning Hypothesis“ for Broca’s Aphasia in Bilingual Individuals. [Clinical Aphasiology Paper]

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Abstract

This study investigates the „tree pruning hypothesis“(TPH; Friedmann & Grodzinsky, 1997) in a bilingual individual with Broca’s aphasia. In Broca’s aphasia, one of the main symptoms is agrammatism. The TPH suggests that syntactic deficits are highly selective: tense inflection is impaired while agreement inflection is preserved. To explain this obvious performance dissociation, the TPH uses the “phrase marker split inflection tree” (Pollock, 1989). In this phrase marker, the functional category agreement (AgrP) is located below tense (TP). According to the TPH, in persons with moderate agrammatism, the “phrase marker split inflection tree” is pruned between the two categories AgrP and TP, which causes an impairment of TP and all categories above it while AgrP and all nodes below it stay intact.

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